Abstract
Military strategists and historians warn of the danger of fighting the last war. Tactics and strategies developed to counter one era’s weaponry are likely to fail when confronted with new capabilities and circumstances. But this warning is based on a strong assumption—that the previous war is accurately understood and remembered. What, we should wonder, are the consequences of preparing for new wars based on a partial and problematic understanding of the wars that have come before?
In Creative Destruction, historian Mark R. Wilson asks just this question of one of the most celebrated military accomplishments in American history: the massive mobilization of military production during World War II that established the United States as the “arsenal of democracy” even before it had formally entered the war. In retrospect, those efforts have been portrayed as a triumph of free enterprise and the capacity of capitalism to overcome the threat of fascism. But, as Wilson powerfully documents, this narrative is marked by a major omission: the role of the government itself in winning the war, not only on the battlefield but also in the factories and procurement offices across the nation. Although often remembered as a victory of citizen-soldiers and patriotic businessmen, World War II was equally a demonstration of the role of the national government in enabling and regulating an unprecedented mobilization of the economy in the service of war.
This account begins not with fighting the last war, but with the memories of the fraught relationships between private business and government that persisted from World War I through the 1920s and into the New Deal response to the Great Depression of the 1930s. In contrast to the profoundly “voluntarist” accounts of that earlier war, in which private business fulfilled military contracts and businessmen volunteered for government service, Wilson excavates the tensions in this co-production of war. These tensions broke open at times, producing a number of government seizures of private production facilities, particularly when labor unrest threatened to undercut the military effort. During that earlier war, the federal government also invested directly in public production, notably in relation to the nitrate plant and related hydropower capacity at Muscle Shoals, Alabama. For the next two decades, the Muscle Shoals facility captured the tense politics around government-owned production in a debate swayed by the potential for corruption represented by the selling off of government-owned oil reserves at Teapot Dome, the promises of a privately organized take-off of industrialization in the American South, and finally as the cornerstone of the Tennessee Valley Authority, a strikingly ambitious and integrated project of government-led social and economic change.
Against this historical background, the mobilization for the next great war continued the complex combinations of public and private efforts that had characterized the mobilization for World War I. In Wilson’s richly documented and effectively argued account, government’s role in the mobilization for the war centered on the financing, regulation, and management of relations between labor and employers. The first of these interventions stemmed from the federal government’s unmatched ability to raise revenues (whether through taxation, borrowing, or other means). Thus, the acceleration of military production was made possible by government investment and initiative, which included the creation of government-owned, government-operated (GOGO) and government-owned, contractor-operated (GOCO) factories that produced unprecedented numbers of tanks, ships, aircraft, and weapons, along with all the other materiel required to fight a modern war. In great detail, Wilson has reconstructed the cast of major participants in these efforts, including a roster of leading firms in the pre-war economy and a second list of those firms that grew large through their role in military production. Recognizing that existing firms made great contributions to win the war, he provides a convincing account of how government’s role in the great expansion of military production transformed important sectors of the American economy.
But there were high stakes in that transformation and in the telling of its history. For businessmen, government investment in war production was an opportunity but one that came with definite risks. The first concerned labor. The combination of the New Deal legislation protecting unionization with government’s enhanced powers during wartime created a situation in which the federal government might—and occasionally did—intervene in labor disputes by seizing factories until some agreement on wages, union maintenance dues, or other issues could be achieved. At times, a determined government met fiercely conservative businessmen, producing scenes such as that involving the president of Montgomery Ward, Sewell Avery, being carried out of his office by two military policemen (p. 223). But even more moderately, anti-statist businessmen feared that one legacy of the war would be a major strengthening of organized labor’s position within the American economy.
The second risk concerned government itself. Although complaints proliferated with respect to red tape and bureaucracy, businessmen also saw a threat in the possibility that federal officials would develop greater capacities to govern the economy, capacities that would not be surrendered at the end of the conflict. This risk was recognized from the start, primed by the hostility of conservative businessmen to the New Deal of the 1930s. With the aid of strong ties to the public relations industry that had developed out of the earlier war, business leaders organized a coordinated press strategy that made use of radio, print advertisements, and press coverage to hammer home the narrative that private business and management skills were responsible for the “miracle” of war production. Roosevelt’s White House, by comparison, failed to counter with a case for the role of government in these efforts. Elaborated over the course of the war, this narrative then sustained calls for thorough-going privatization of government war production facilities in the decade after World War II and the turn to what President Eisenhower would identify as the threat of the “military-industrial complex” by the end of the 1950s. By the time that mobilization for the Vietnam War began in earnest in the 1960s, the US government had effectively dismantled its capacity to make war on its own and was dependent on complex systems of contracting with private firms to enact its identity as a military power.
In Destructive Creation, Mark Wilson presents the experience of World War II as a puzzle for that slogan so often recited by political sociologists: States make war and war makes states. Although the military power of the federal government unquestionably expanded over the course of the war, those capacities simultaneously became less autonomous and more dependent on contracts and collaborations with private firms. This mixed outcome was enabled by the successful effort of private business to shape shared understandings of the triumphs of war production. For comparative sociologists and political historians alike, Destructive Creation should provoke a rethinking of the many ways in which states are more or less statist as well as the important relationships that form at the intersection of markets, national governments, and international conflicts.