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FOUR

The Common Experience

SOCIOLOGISTS AND HISTORIANS often point to the equalizing effect that military service had on men in America. It gave them a common experience, a frame of reference for every conversation. It reinforced the appeals to civic duty made by President Roosevelt in his fireside chats and echoed by civic and political leaders across the country. It fortified a fundamental sense of a social contract between the individual and the state that incorporated basic entitlements, including Roosevelt's “freedom from want.” It also heightened awareness of the personal and collective responsibilities of citizens for the preservation of a free society.¹

In the popular imagination, the entitlements flowed especially to soldiers and citizens engaged in the national defense—marines in bunkers on the beaches of Corregidor and Rosie the Riveter attaching the cockpit shell of a B-17 bomber in Seattle. But Howard Ahmanson's military experience hardly fit the popular imagination.

For starters, when most men left for basic training, it didn't make the society pages of the Los Angeles Times. "Instead of waiting to see what his classmates would look like [in uniform],” wrote columnist Lucy Quirk, “he had them over for a preview showing and get-together party.” Most were members of the Beverly Hills social set. Dottie greeted them at the door wearing a Tahitian print with a tropical blossom in her hair, as if they were all bound for a South Sea vacation.²

Charlie Fletcher was no doubt chagrined when he arrived in his navy blues, his broad swimmer's shoulders pushing at the seams. Unlike Ahmanson and Edgerton, who saw the war as an opportunity to escape the glare of official scrutiny of their business activities, Fletcher entered the military from the limelight of public service. Since the attack on Pearl Harbor, he had been elected president of the California Savings and Loan League. True to his vow at the Shoreham Hotel, he had launched a major bond drive to help finance the war. But like Ahmanson, he was not old enough to escape the draft so he had chosen to enlist.³

If Howard reminded him of his emphatic assertion that he would not go to war, the point was lost in a new reality. Since the attack on Pearl Harbor and that morning at the Shoreham, the world had changed. In Europe, the Pacific, and North Africa, men were fighting and dying. At home, families had pulled up stakes and moved to work in factories and shipyards making the airplanes and vessels needed to wage war. More subtly, the relationship between business and government had undergone a profound shift. The tensions between corporate America and Washington that colored the years of the New Deal were giving way to a new partnership that depended on seasoned executives like Fletcher and Ahmanson.

BASIC TRAINING IN QUONSET, RHODE ISLAND

Considered the “birthplace” of the U.S. Navy during the Revolutionary War, Quonset, Rhode Island, was teeming with activity when Howard arrived in 1943. Land- and carrier-based antisubmarine squadrons trained offshore while British, Canadian, and American pilots roared into the air. Arriving roughly a year after another Southern Californian, Richard Nixon, had completed his training at Quonset, Howard and Charlie joined a class full of lawyers, business executives, and other professionals on the fast track to become officers.⁴

Despite the flip attitude that his send-off party might suggest, Howard seemed to revel in the eight-week basic training experience. He wrote Dottie that he couldn't sleep for the first few days in the barracks but felt “swell.” His bunkmates ranged from “excited kids to old time blasé naval officers.” Although he did well on his written exams (memorizing aircraft and naval vessels), his fellow swabbies kidded him “about being the worst driller in the place.” “My mind wanders,” he confessed, “and I have a strong tendency to look at the scenery. I drill about like I drive a car, half conscious I guess.” He didn't mind the running or physical fitness program and enjoyed playing baseball, basketball, and touch football, though he was “lousy” at sports. On the one occasion when he snagged a high fly ball to win a baseball game, he reported the details to Dottie like a schoolboy crowing to his mother.⁵ He even looked forward to going to church—a rare event for him—on his first Sunday in Rhode Island because it would give him the opportunity to wear his dress blues and not have to walk in formation.⁶

Dottie wrote him frequently and grew exasperated when he didn't write back soon enough. She worried that he was having too good a time without her, that he would be unfaithful. He tried to reassure her. Meanwhile, Gould Eddy, who had been rejected by the draft board, kept Howard posted on business issues—a major fire in Malibu that had destroyed a number of homes, unrest among the women in the accounting office who were lobbying for raises, and the latest gossip among the company's main clients in the savings and loan industry.⁷ Armed with Eddy's news, Ahmanson sent a stream of chatty letters to his clients and customers.

Howard worried about where the navy would send him. He was told he would serve either as an administrative officer at a naval air station or as a materials expediter. Since most of the rest of his class was headed to “fighter direction” or “air combat intelligence,” Howard was happy with his possibilities, but he also hoped that an old friend might be able to land him a position in Southern California.⁸

Never one to enter unknown waters without a chart, Howard showed rare vulnerability when he wrote to a longtime mentor for advice and influence. Robert Frank Gross worked as a vice president of Mortgage Guarantee in Los Angeles. A generation older, Gross had graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1907 and served on active duty through the end of World War I, retiring as a lieutenant commander. After the war, he entered the mortgage business in Los Angeles and helped finance new suburbs in the 1920s. Throughout these years, Gross maintained his navy connections, serving as an officer in the Naval Reserve and retiring in 1941 with the rank of commander.⁹ The thin correspondence that survives between Ahmanson and Gross suggests the complexity of the relationship and highlights the close personal ties between the defense industries in Southern California and local financial institutions.

With Gross's help, Ahmanson was assigned to the Bureau of Aeronautics in Washington as a lieutenant junior grade (JG). As chief expediter for the Aircraft Products Division, he worked with parts manufacturing companies to ensure a steady supply of components to the aircraft manufacturers—most of which were located in Southern California. “As you might well guess,” he wrote to a friend, “for the first thirty days I was completely baffled, never having been inside an airplane.” By January 1944, however, he reported that “I now find myself building them with the greatest of ease.”¹⁰ With characteristic humor, Ahmanson wrote to a friend in Beverly Hills:

I came down here expecting to be a nice kind-faced file boy for some guy in the Production Division, find out at the beginning of work the first day that I'm in a whole new end of the work known as the Modification Program, and am the assistant to the head man, and at the end of the day find that the head man is being moved, so I'm it. . . . It has turned out to be more fun than I could imagine a Navy job to be. I have no superiors to read the multitudinous instructions I send out hither and yon. . . . If you could see the reckless abandon with which I am spending your money, you would probably start a tax fight. . . . I find myself surrounded by quite a bevy of near and not-so-near tycoons like young Rockefeller, Firestone, Van Eck, the ex-president of Pontiac Motors, the president of a Boston bank, a guy who owns a bunch of New England knitting mills—along with a Ford dealer from Punk Center, Oregon and a guy who ran a general store in Pine Bluffs, Arkansas. They're all heads or assistants of various sub-sections in the Production Division and truly a swell, patient and hard-working bunch of guys.¹¹

Howard's initial enthusiasm for his work in Washington did not last. By January 1944, he was complaining that it was “a little wearisome being a glorified file boy in Washington.” Eighty percent of the things he did could be managed by his trusted secretary, Barty. For the other 20 percent, “no one but a fool would have the courage.” Meanwhile, his friends Charlie Fletcher and Thurston Ross were flying around the world on secret missions and organizing invasions.¹²

Ahmanson's perspective changed when it seemed he might get a position in the office of the undersecretary of the navy, but he was torn between ambition and a deep desire to return to California. Gross wrote to say that with the growth of aircraft manufacturing in Southern California, the navy was going to open a new procurement facility in Van Nuys. Ahmanson could hope for a senior management position at this facility.¹³

FOXHOLE AT THE SHOREHAM

With housing in short supply and Dottie coming to live with him in Washington, Ahmanson secured a room at his old haunt—the Shoreham Hotel. Missing their usual Christmas festivities in California, he and Dottie bought a “two for a nickel” eighteen-inch tree for their hotel parlor and piled presents around it.¹⁴ Howard wrote to the staff at National American back in Omaha that he was sorry to miss the annual Christmas extravaganza. He said he had started to feel a little sorry for himself, but “all of a sudden I thought of ten million other guys spread all over creation wondering what goes on when the fracas is over, and I decided that I'm the luckiest guy in the world—as usual.”¹⁵

Indeed, midshipmen in the Pacific avoiding the gunfire of Japanese Zeros would hardly have recognized the sailor's life that Ahmanson led. Tongue in cheek, Howard wrote his college classmate Joe Crail, the head of Coast Federal Savings and Loan, “I know that my discomfiture and self-sacrifice at fighting the war from my foxhole in the Shoreham would wring from you deep expressions of sympathy.” Then he jokingly chastised Crail for growing his business “while I'm not around to keep track” or “defend myself.”¹⁶

In Washington, Howard and Dottie bonded with other Southern Californians. Charlie Fletcher and his wife, Jeannette, had moved their family from San Diego to Chevy Chase, Maryland. Jeannette managed a house full of kids while Charlie flew to Europe and the Pacific organizing logistics to support the invasions of North Africa and later Saipan.¹⁷ The Californians often gathered together. In May 1944, Howard attended a dinner party hosted by Colonel and Mrs. Ed Shattuck. A longtime Republican activist in California, Shattuck served as general counsel to the Selective Service System. After the war, Shattuck would become deputy city attorney in Los Angeles and run for attorney general of California. That night, the Shattucks’ guests included Major General Lewis Hershey, the head of the Selective Service; Harold Judson, an attorney from Los Angeles who had joined the Solicitor General's Office and would soon be promoted to chief counsel to the president; as well as Howard's longtime business mentor Morgan Adams, the head of Mortgage Guarantee. (After Ahmanson had told Adams to “jump in a lake” rather than allow him to buy out H. F. Ahmanson in the late 1920s, the two men had become friends again and Adams had returned to the occasional role of mentor.) Adams was in Washington to serve as an advisor to Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, who oversaw shipyards across the country that were furiously producing vessels for the war.¹⁸ Lieutenant Harrison Chandler, son of Los Angeles Times publisher Harry Chandler, also joined the party. Charlie Fletcher should have been there but he was overseas on a special mission.

From the company at this dinner table, as well as his day-to-day work at the Aeronautics Bureau, Ahmanson gained considerable insight into the growing military-industrial complex. This perspective helped him understand that aviation and aeronautics would be important in the postwar economy. These social interactions also deepened his connections with a group of Southern Californians in Washington who would play a pivotal role in the region's postwar development.

Howard moved out of the Shoreham after Dottie returned to Los Angeles. He rented a large house, brought in a piano, and told Dottie that he had been spending “99.44 percent” of his waking moments playing music. To complete his life of Riley, he had his butler, Marshall, come from Los Angeles to live with him.

Howard wrote to Dottie multiple times a week and cajoled her to write him more. Although both of them consumed prodigious amounts of alcohol, Howard never seemed outwardly drunk. Dottie, however, seemed increasingly dependent. He worried about her state of mind and encouraged her over and over not to live alone.

New responsibilities in May 1944 kept him working late and skipping lunches. In June, he visited the radar school at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.¹⁹ The work sparked ideas, which were resisted all too often by his superiors and his subordinates. He tried to suppress his own entrepreneurial bent and his growing commitment to the collective war effort. His own “gremlins,” he told Dottie, were buzzing around 10 percent too fast in his head. “Each night I resolve—no more of this monkey business. . . . [H]undreds of guys are sitting on their fanny—you're a [lieutenant] j.g.—the war effort was doing dandy without you et cetera, et cetera—and damn it the next morning at 0805 something comes up that looks kind of important to me and we're off.”²⁰

At night in his splendid rented home near Rock Creek Park, he played the piano and the organ. He listened to his favorite radio show—Amos ‘n’ Andy. He drank and he smoked. He socialized and flirted with college girls.²¹ His wife and his mother worried about his “morals.” Florence accused him of dragging the Ahmanson name through the mud with his drinking. Dottie was sure he was having too good a time in Washington with other women, despite his constant assurances to the contrary. They argued on the phone and then wrote contrite letters apologizing. Often these tensions were rooted in Howard's larger ambitions.

HONOR THY FATHER

Florence may have accused him of abandoning the morals she and Will had tried to impart to their two sons, but Howard had not forgotten his father's lessons or legacy. Howard remembered the pain his father experienced when he discovered in 1919 that National American's stock promoters had oversold the company and when farmers and merchants who had purchased the company's stock for one hundred dollars discovered that it was worth only one-fifth of that price. He remembered how his father had worked to redeem his good name and had sought to deliver high-quality service to insurance customers and earnings to stockholders. At the time of Will's death, National American had only just begun this process of redemption.

Seventeen years later, National American was in trouble. The men who were running the company were the same executives, led by James Foster, who had taken control after Will's death in 1925. From 1921 to 1937, they paid dividends to shareholders in all but one year—1933. From 1938 to 1943, the company paid a dividend only once. When the state of Nebraska's Department of Insurance examined the company's records in October 1943, it found that the total amount of dividends paid had “consumed the earnings of the company together with a considerable portion of the original contributed surplus.”²² The company was still growing, but not by much. Total net assets increased only 4.4 percent between 1940 and 1943 to just under two million dollars.²³ Attempting to adjust to declining circumstances, the company had slashed executive pay beginning in 1939. Hayden's salary was cut nearly 20 percent.²⁴ But cost cutting was not turning the company around.

For years, Howard had worked to secure control of his father's company. National American's stock was not traded on any exchange. Local brokers in Omaha handled sales and purchases privately. All through the 1930s, Ahmanson had purchased stock from farmers and merchants scattered across Nebraska and Iowa. By 1943, he had accumulated 33 percent of the outstanding shares, but there were still approximately six hundred shareholders who held various blocks of the company's twenty thousand outstanding shares.²⁵

Before entering the navy, Howard had traveled to Omaha to investigate the situation. “Everyone has a different idea” about what needed to be done, he reported to Dottie. Top management wanted to sell out.²⁶ Howard thought this was crazy. Loss ratios on the business he wrote in California averaged only 24.3 percent from 1940 to 1942, compared to loss ratios well over 50 percent in Colorado, Nebraska, and Minnesota.²⁷ Meanwhile, administrative overhead in Nebraska was high because the home office supervised approximately 475 separate agencies in just two states—Nebraska and Iowa. In California, Howard worked with only 55 different agencies and wrote insurance for a very limited number of risks: fire, earthquake, and marine.²⁸ In fact, his business accounted for a large percentage of National American's total volume and profits.

There were other management problems that also must have troubled Howard. The Nebraska Department of Insurance found that real estate assets were on the books for values far above their actual market value.²⁹ In 1942 the company caught its real estate mortgage loan manager pocketing rent and other collections from clients that should have been paid to the company. The loan manager was fired and the company was reimbursed by the fidelity bond insurer, but the incident provided evidence that Hayden and others in Omaha were not at the top of their game.³⁰

Howard was confident that he could turn the company around. Unfortunately, the stock was still scattered “from hell to breakfast.” Hayden encouraged Howard to be patient.³¹ But with the longtime executives of the company talking about selling out, Howard decided to be more aggressive.³² Fearing that if word got out the price of the shares would rise or the company's senior executives would sabotage his efforts, he kept his plans secret. “The pals . . . are determined to sell out,” he wrote Dottie, “and equally determined that I don't get control.”

The fight was complicated by a family crisis. Hayden was not in good shape “mentally, morally, spiritually and financially.” Three or more times a week, he drank too much and stayed in bed to recover. His wife, Aimee, struggled to keep her household together with one son graduated from high school and the other about to graduate. Meanwhile, Florence was beside herself and ready to “jump out a window.”³³ Howard empowered Ray Stryker, a junior executive at National American who was loyal to the Ahmansons, to look after the family's interest in the business while Howard worked to find a way to ameliorate the situation.³⁴

Howard was determined, as he wrote Gould Eddy, “that the best seventeen years’ work I've ever done” should not be ruined by either his adversaries or a few anxious stockholders.³⁵ He recruited Ted Crane from H.F. Ahmanson & Co.’s office in Los Angeles to travel to Iowa and Nebraska to track down stockholders and buy them out. In June 1943, Crane went to eastern Iowa on the train and spent three days talking to stockholders.³⁶ Pointing to recent reports from state insurance departments in Nebraska, Iowa, and California, he told potential sellers that the regulators “not only took issue with some of the values at which assets had been carried, but also went on record as stating that several of the later dividends paid by the company were illegal in that the company hadn't earned them.” All of this was true. Crane even told at least one stockholder that he didn't see how the company “could pay another dividend for ten years.”³⁷ Having bad-mouthed the stock, he offered to pay $20 a share (a fifth the stock's initial value) if they were willing to sell.

Finally, a week before he was scheduled to enter the navy, Howard learned that James Foster, the man who had succeeded his father as president, was ready to retire. Foster had rivals who wanted to take over the company, but he felt this would hurt the many longtime farmer shareholders who had patiently stayed with the business since the 1920s. Foster and another executive agreed to sell their 20 percent stake to Howard if Ahmanson would protect the interests of these shareholders.³⁸

Still “beautifully liquid,” Ahmanson was able to move quickly. When the transaction was complete, his equity in National American topped 51 percent, a stake worth $733,540 ($9.4 million in 2011 dollars). He would later say his decision to pay top dollar (about three times the market value of the shares) was “my silliest business venture.”³⁹ He did it out of respect and affection for his father.

With majority control, Ahmanson planned to reconfigure the board of directors.⁴⁰ Unable to leave Washington, he let Gould Eddy and Hayden orchestrate the fight with two remaining dissident shareholders.⁴¹ Certain that he had the shares and proxies to be successful, he focused on arranging the company's balance sheet so that results under his management would be almost guaranteed to be positive. As he bragged to a friend in Southern California, he had been “cutting the gizzard out of everything, to the point where they're carrying Government bonds at under par, real estate at half of what it's worth, unpaid losses about double of what really should have been, etc. etc. I am going to have the unusual pleasure of taking over officially with a few sprinters tucked away in the barn instead of the usual process of having to pay for dead horses.”⁴²

Howard's financial strategy made the former management look even worse. Hayden constantly reminded him that the men in Omaha resented these moves. Howard didn't care.⁴³ “What we're trying to sell,” he wrote, “is the fact that the new regime is different from the old.”⁴⁴ The new regime would practice more conservative bookkeeping and money management and give Howard more capital to work with.⁴⁵

Ahmanson wanted the world to know of his success. He asked Gould Eddy and his associates to “dream up some idea of publicizing in a big way the advent of H. F. Ahmanson as president of the National American Fire Insurance Company. The National American isn't very important and neither am I, but inasmuch as the two of us are only going to get together once, I believe this is an opportunity which should make us both better known.”⁴⁶

Behind this desire for publicity lay a deeper motivation. Howard had partially redeemed his father's memory. As president of National American, he would now have the opportunity to fulfill the promise with which the promoters had saddled his father: he would make the company profitable. Those who stuck with him and the company would reap their reward. For those who wanted to sell out, he was more than happy to buy their shares—at the cheapest price possible.

GOING HOME

Bored with his work in Washington, Howard reported to Dottie in the summer of 1944 that he struggled to get up in the mornings. Charlie Fletcher had moved in with him after Jeannette and the children moved back to San Diego. The two men often had breakfast with other friends at the office. One time, after a mad dash to get Fletcher to a plane, he wrote: “Good old Charlie—he is the most delightful roommate a guy could imagine—but a little energetic for me.”⁴⁷

“Getting out is the sole subject of conversation around here,” Howard wrote to Dottie at the end of August.⁴⁸ While American forces in Europe and the Pacific were fighting some of the heaviest battles of the war in the fall of 1944, Howard and Charlie, like others in Washington whose lives were caught up in planning, sensed victory and began to make plans for their own futures. By the end of July, the government had begun to cut back on aircraft production and Howard and his crew found themselves with less and less to do.⁴⁹ Howard wrote Dottie that men who were over the age of thirty-eight (he was thirty-eight) were getting approved to go on inactive duty, especially if they had “something special to do on the outside.”⁵⁰

At first, Howard didn't think he would be able to get out until the war with Germany was over, but he was convinced that Germany's surrender would come before Thanksgiving. In fact, he was so sure that he sold all of his stock on the assumption that the market would plunge when the war ended.⁵¹

He complained about the heat, the humidity, and the rain in Washington and “perspiring buckets all night.” He was jealous of Charlie, who could fall asleep instantly, standing or lying down. Howard often lay awake much of the night planning. Longing for relaxation, he fantasized about going to Mexico with Dottie. “It's the only place in the world that's not all this war business.”⁵² At one point he proclaimed that he was going to stop visiting folks from California. “They are all homesick by nature—and it is contagious.”⁵³

Fletcher and Ahmanson were each driven by more than just the desire to return to private life. Charlie had been infected by his time in Washington and was considering a run for Congress. Meanwhile Howard, aware that the reconversion of the economy was already under way, wanted to get back to business.

Howard's desire to go home was made urgent by the other member of the threesome, Howard Edgerton. Still in Southern California and keeping an eye on business, Edgerton had appealed to the federal circuit court after being sentenced to prison for his role in the Railway Mutual scheme. On September 26, 1944, the circuit court reversed the judgment of the lower court and ordered the entire indictment dismissed.⁵⁴ With the specter of incarceration removed and the end of the war in sight, Edgerton was understandably excited about the future and anxious for his good friends and business associates to return to California.

“Edgie” hounded Gould Eddy for information about Howard and Charlie's plans. On October 31, 1944, he wrote to both men to let them know that a looming fight in the legislature and the industry association needed their attention. Mixing the ribald character of their friendship with hard news about business, he chided Ahmanson and Fletcher for their lack of communication—not even a postcard from a nightclub. He needed to know their plans, he said, so that he could “guard my company against any shock it might receive from the public reaction. Bringing Stillwell home from Burma or replacing Roosevelt with Dewey will create only slight public diversion compared to Ahmanson and Fletcher pulling out of Washington at the same time.”⁵⁵

“On the home front,” Edgerton continued, “we are carrying on as good stooges should. From a business standpoint we are continuing to shove National American fire policies down the throats of both willing and unwilling borrowers, and on the political horizon we are letting the public get a bellyful of the present group of candidates waiting for Fletcher to come home and run for something really serious.”

Edgerton went on to highlight the news from the savings and loan industry. After describing the petty arguments and displays of bravado at a recent meeting of the California Savings and Loan League, Edgerton noted that “it was my first group meeting since returning to civilian life,” and he was appalled by the lack of discipline and focus. “It just goes to show, Charlie, that you have got to come back and start running this damned league again so that we can worry more about defeating our business competitors and less about sticking a knife in each other's backs.”⁵⁶

Edgerton followed his letter with a trip to Washington several weeks later. He socialized with Fletcher and Ahmanson and talked about his own postwar plans. He had served as part-time president and CEO of California Federal Savings & Loan since 1939, but with the boom that all three men expected in the housing market in Southern California, he knew that he needed “to decide whether to continue practicing law and hire a chief executive for the Association, or take over full-time management responsibilities and hire lawyers.” Ahmanson and Fletcher encouraged him to become a full-time corporate executive.⁵⁷

COOPERATING FRIENDS

Working in different markets, with Home Federal based in San Diego and California Federal in Los Angeles, Fletcher and Edgerton could strategize together on their investment strategies. They could also collaborate on regulatory issues. Shortly after he returned to California, for example, Edgerton found out that there was a move afoot in the legislature to restrict one of their main sources of profit—the tie between lender and property insurer.

Once again, independent insurance agents were trying to pass a law forbidding lenders from engaging in exclusive contracts with an insurance agent and forcing borrowers to buy fire and property insurance from only one agency. Although Howard and his best clients in the mortgage industry had been able to kill this proposal in previous years, Gould Eddy told Edgerton that it looked as though they were in for a “tougher scrap” in 1945. The mortgage bankers were lining up to support the bill, along with the independent insurance agents. Even their longtime allies at Mortgage Guarantee, including Morgan Adams and Frank Gross, would provide only “behind-the-scenes support after the matter got into committee.” Edgerton bemoaned the fact that Ahmanson and Fletcher were not on the scene to help with lobbying. He complained about the lack of support from other mortgage lenders. “They are the ones who will yell the loudest if this bill ever passes,” he wrote, “and every damn insurance agent representing the large mortgage companies loses thousands a year in commissions as a result of this legislation.”⁵⁸

Fortunately, Ahmanson already had one foot out the door of the navy. He was waiting only for a resolution from the board of National American attesting that the company needed to have him on the job. Hayden was working on this paperwork. Morgan Adams had agreed to help push the paperwork through—"my first and only request for influence,” Howard wrote home to Dottie.⁵⁹

LOOKING FORWARD

Much has been made of the effect of the Depression and World War II on the lives of what some have called the “Greatest Generation.” The Depression taught them to be conservative about money, to avoid debt and favor savings, and to take care of one another in hard times. The war brought the nation together, smoothed some of the edges of social, racial, and ethnic boundaries, and conditioned a generation to think of the common good. Howard Ahmanson's experiences during this era ran counter to the usual story. The Depression made him rich. Managing the home front from a desk in Washington, D.C., was at times fascinating and at other times boring and frustrating. Still, the defining era of his generation changed him as it did so many others.

Ahmanson's experiences shaped his perspective on government. Like many Americans, he saw it as necessary and well intentioned, though not always efficient. In one letter he marveled at “the way that American industry has produced all the big and little items that we require.”⁶⁰ Yet he was genuinely proud of his department's ability to aid the war effort. In January 1944, when James Foster, the president of National American, wanted to send a circular to the company's agents criticizing Roosevelt and his administration, Howard reacted strongly: “Being personally sympathetic to many Administration reforms and agencies,” he wired Hayden, “I for one would resent capricious literature on subject from any public corporation.”⁶¹

Historian James Sparrow has described the transformation of the relationship between business and government during World War II as a “new iteration” of the associational state that Herbert Hoover had championed in the 1920s. Corporate interests gained powerful positions in what Dwight Eisenhower would later describe as the military-industrial complex, and corporate influence extended to the administrative offices of virtually every regulatory body as well. But the government was not simply “captured” by this process, as Sparrow points out: “If federal power became critically dependent on business in the war the reverse was also true, making those business figures who entered public service at least as much creatures of the state as they were servants of capital.”⁶²

By the end of the war, Howard, Charlie Fletcher, and Howard Edgerton had tired of the military bureaucracy but had gained greater respect for government and the stronger sense of public purpose that Sparrow describes. This doesn't mean they were any less self-involved, ambitious, or eager to continue building their fortunes, but in the years ahead these experiences shaped their approaches to business, politics, and philanthropy.