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Chapter 3

War Stories

As American companies produced munitions to defeat the Axis, their executives worked to take advantage of what they saw as an important political opportunity. “The defense production job is the greatest news story of our generation,” J. Howard Pew, the Sun Oil Company president, explained to his fellow industrialists in early 1941. “All the citizenry is watching. With a vigorous public relations program, competitive enterprise can dramatize its strength more successfully today than its enemies have ever been able to dramatize its occasional temporary mistakes.”¹

For Pew and many of his fellow business leaders, the stakes in this public-relations struggle seemed sky-high. Success would mean convincing Americans that victory in World War II should be attributed to the accomplishments of private enterprise. Failing to do so might result in challenges to the private sector that could go well beyond those that had emerged during the Great War and the New Deal. “Whether the free enterprise system prevails in America after the war,” explained the public-relations department of the Automotive Council for War Production (ACWP) in early 1942, “may depend on the extent to which the American people associate this system with industry’s wartime record.”²

Although many American business leaders worked long hours during the war making weapons, they also gave careful consideration to politics and public relations. By 1940, energetic conservatives in the business community had already spent years decrying the evils of big government. During World War II, they flooded the public sphere with descriptions of the mobilization effort in which for-profit companies figured as the heroic engineers of a production “miracle.” As business leaders explained it, World War II served as a natural experiment in comparative political economy, in which free American enterprise was pitted against the supposedly more planned regimes of the Axis. In this pro-business story, government was given no credit for success—or else characterized as an actual hindrance. If the American economy succeeded in delivering the goods, Pew and his fellow executives claimed, it would be only private enterprise that deserved the credit.

This business story about the war economy was at once self-evident and audacious. It was true that in most sectors of the war economy, private firms managed the production of munitions. The wartime American state relied heavily on the production and management expertise of for-profit firms. This was the case in the dozens of large new government-owned, contractor-operated (GOCO) plants, as well as in older facilities that converted to war production. Business leaders also occupied many of the top offices in emergency mobilization organizations, including the War Production Board (WPB) and its predecessors. But for all the truths it captured, the business story also engaged in serious distortions. It had no room for the substantial contributions of public actors, such as the Defense Plant Corporation and the military’s technical bureaus. The role of public finance, as well as governmental coordination, was almost entirely absent from the business story.

No less bold than these omissions was the message’s tone, which portrayed businessmen as underappreciated, beleaguered victims of tyrannical state regulation. Executives and their organizations worked hard during the war to promote the idea that the private business sector, continually abused by government, stood as the nation’s only viable defender against the growing threat to liberty. Their success in managing war production despite the problems created by labor unions and the government, business leaders argued, showed that they were qualified to lead the country into a postwar period of greater prosperity and freedom.

Business propaganda distorted the realities of mobilization, concealing the substantial contributions of public actors. But its portrayal of the American war economy proved remarkably influential. Naturally, it contended with rival narratives, some of which assigned greater credit to ordinary workers, or even to the government. But these rivals were outflanked. By 1943, business leaders were satisfied that the American public had come to accept the idea that private enterprise—and not organized labor or the wartime government—deserved the lion’s share of the credit for what some were calling a war production miracle. No less important, the pro-business story about the war economy was increasingly taken up by politically moderate public officials and legislators, including some prominent New Dealers. This was merely one successful battle in a broader political war that would last for decades; but it was a significant victory, which would influence the direction of future campaigns.

Free Enterprise Versus the Axis

Starting in 1940, conservative business leaders launched a coordinated public-relations effort designed to persuade audiences to associate the successes of American war production with free-market capitalism. Although this campaign built on anti–New Deal public-relations work of the 1930s, it tackled an important new problem. The World War II crisis brought with it the potential for new developments in domestic politics, including the rise of a new wave of regulation and public enterprise that might go well beyond anything that was accomplished by the New Deal. For business leaders, it was critical that the public—and, more specifically, legislators and policymakers—learn the correct political lessons from the record of the nation’s massive military-industrial mobilization. This meant, above all, that dramatic successes in munitions output needed to be attributed to the special creativity and efficiency of for-profit enterprise.

After they failed to unseat Roosevelt in 1936, conservative business leaders continued to broadcast their message to the public. The National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) and the Chamber of Commerce of the United States, the two biggest national business associations, spent hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on public relations. By the late 1930s, the NAM and the Chamber were running campaigns that connected “free enterprise” with traditional American liberties such as political democracy and religious liberty. These business associations, along with individual companies like Du Pont and General Motors, used print advertising, film, and radio programming to emphasize an American past dominated by self-reliant pioneers and entrepreneurs, as well as a present in which social harmony should be the rule. Business associations, companies, and executives also sponsored conservative newspaper columnists and radio commentators.³

During World War II, one thing that conservative business leaders did in the field of public relations was simply to reiterate old messages. “Let us tell the story of free enterprise anywhere and wherever we can,” General Electric chairman Philip D. Reed urged his fellow executives in 1940, “and let us oppose any project or program that will weaken or destroy it.” Throughout the war, this basic task of educating the public about the virtues of private enterprise continued to be a priority for many of the more politically active leaders of the business community, including H. W. Prentis, Jr., of the Armstrong Cork Company, and Frederick C. Crawford, of the Thompson Products Company.⁴

Prentis and Crawford both served as top officers in the NAM, which functioned during the war years—as it had in the late 1930s—as one of the business community’s most important national-level organizations. By 1944, the NAM had eleven thousand members, about 50 percent more than it had had at the start of the war. By war’s end, NAM annual budgets were approaching $4 million a year, more than double what they had been in the later 1930s. Within the NAM, the National Industrial Information Committee—a dedicated public-relations division that used print, film, and radio—saw its annual budget rise to an average of $1.5 million for 1943–45; its staff grew to nearly two hundred people.⁵

The NAM was hardly the only organization that expanded its activities in wartime. The family of J. Howard Pew, the Sun Oil president, continued to invest in conservative initiatives. The American Economic Foundation, which Pew helped launch in 1939, continued during the war to work on its mission of “changing public opinion toward business,” via a radio program broadcast on the NBC network. Meanwhile, the Pew family expanded its ownership of magazines aimed at rural America; they also helped underwrite the wartime rise of George S. Benson, a conservative columnist and radio commentator (and college president) based in Arkansas.⁶ Other conservative groups that expanded their efforts during World War II included the National Committee to Uphold Constitutional Government and the American Enterprise Association. Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce stepped up its efforts to promote “free competitive enterprise,” by offering economic education for business executives and promoting the work of antistatist intellectuals such as Ludwig von Mises, Ayn Rand, and Rose Wilder Lane.⁷

Although there were plenty of continuities in the business community’s public-relations efforts from the 1930s through the Cold War, the World War II emergency brought new challenges and opportunities. Clearly, a massive war mobilization might alter government-business relations and the public understanding of them, perhaps for the worse. However, many business leaders hoped that the war mobilization could offer them a chance to cast off much of the negative public opinion about business that had accumulated over the course of the previous decade.

To some extent, the task of boosting the reputation of business in wartime was simply a matter of sustaining the momentum of the late 1930s. By the time World War II broke out in Europe in autumn 1939, the American business community had already been enjoying a revival of its political fortunes. On the eve of the 1938 midterm elections, B. C. Forbes, the veteran business magazine editor, already sensed that that a new day for business’s public image was dawning. “Torrents of abuse of business leaders, perpetual bespattering of men of affairs with mud mixed with vitriol,” Forbes wrote, “are ceasing to win nationwide applause.”⁸ The election results in November 1938 seemed to confirm Forbes’s assessment. As Roosevelt headed into the second half of his second term, the New Deal had stalled, as had much of the recent expansion of the organized labor movement.

When military conflict did break out in Europe, the American business community emphasized that it was not eager for war. This attitude was driven by careful economic calculation, as well as memories of the “merchants of death” accusations of the mid-1930s. Some business leaders were devoted isolationists, whose disagreements with President Roosevelt over foreign policy matched their disdain for his domestic programs. But even those more sympathetic to intervention claimed that business wanted to avoid war, which inevitably brought disruptions to markets, high taxes, increased regulation, inflation, the overexpansion of capacity, and the likelihood of postwar recessions. As we have seen in Chapter 1, many executives believed that the Roosevelt administration’s hostility to business made the prospect of converting to war work even less appealing than it might otherwise have been.⁹

Despite these looming dangers, the business community took great satisfaction from one aspect of the early war mobilization: the transformation of the businessman from villain into national savior. Immediately after the start of war in Europe, NAM-sponsored speakers were telling audiences across the country, “American business is getting out of the dog-house.”¹⁰ At once aspirational and descriptive, this theme was reinforced by the president’s moves in mid-1940 to bring William Knudsen, Edward Stettinius, Jr., and other business executives to Washington to help direct the war economy. As a writer for the journal Sales Management noted, there seemed now to be “a universal trend towards putting faith and reliance in private enterprise.”¹¹

For the business community, this revival of faith was a transformation to be savored. “For ten years our business system and business men have been under attack,” the Chamber of Commerce’s official magazine, Nation’s Business, reminded readers in the summer of 1940. But as soon as the nation faced a real security threat, “business leaders were whistled out of the doghouse and put in charge. What irony!”¹² Alfred P. Sloan, Jr., the GM chairman, had a similar message for the convention of political scientists he addressed in November 1940. “Ironically the very individuals, the very industrial organizations, which, during the past few years, have been under political attack and held up to public scorn as enemies of the public interest,” Sloan observed, “have now become vital instrumentalities of national defense.”¹³