“Leave nothing to the uncertainty of procuring a warlike
apparatus at the moment of public danger.”
George Washington Fifth Annual Message to Congress
Freedom’s Forge by Arthur Herman is a celebration of
people who know how to build things. The book is filled with characters that seemingly
came from Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged
… except these Americans were not fictional. They were real industrialists and
miracle makers. In 1939, the United States possessed only skeletal armed forces, ranking eighth in the world behind
tiny Holland. Production plants in the United States had become obsolete or run
down by depression and harmful tax policies. America was ill-prepared for war
and did not have factories that could change the situation. By 1942, from this
standing start, American industry was producing more war materials than
Germany, Japan, and Italy combined, and by the end of the war the United States
had manufactured two-thirds of all war materials used by the Allies.
The thesis
of Freedom’s Forge is that this unbelievable
accomplishment was made possible by Roosevelt removing the shackles from the
American capitalist system. Roosevelt was reluctant to go against the advice of
most of his New Dealers, but on May 28th, 1940 he telephoned William
Knudsen, President of General Motors, and asked for help. Actually, Roosevelt
had been toning down his anti-business rhetoric since he won the 1938 election.
This did not sit well with his wife or many in his cabinet. Most believed
winning the war required using the central government planning model that had worked
so well for the Axis Powers.
Herman gives
Roosevelt credit for seeing the world situation realistically and changing how
he dealt with businessmen.
President Roosevelt had built his
career on the conviction that government knew best, and on vilifying American
business and businessmen, whom he had blamed for the Great Depression. “I
welcome their hatred,” he told a campaign audience in 1936, and American
business had paid him back with interest.
A couple of
examples illustrate Roosevelt’s initial attitude about defense industries.
Roosevelt had also encouraged
Senator Gerald Nye (a Republican) and his young legal counsel Alger Hiss in
their sensational investigations into the conduct of American armaments
manufacturers in the First World War. The Nye Committee blasted companies like
DuPont, General Electric, General Motors, Colt Arms, Electric Boat (makers of
submarines), Curtiss, Boeing, and Sperry Gyroscope as “merchants of death.” It
even blamed their “lies, deceit, hypocrisy, greed, and graft” for getting the
United States into the war in the first place.
DuPont got the message. The
Wilmington, Delaware, firm had supplied America’s armed forces with gunpowder
since the American Revolution. Now it slashed its munitions-making division to
less than 2 percent of operations. 7 Other companies drew the same lesson:
Supplying America with arms was business you did not want.
Herman also
pointed out that the aerospace industry had been relentlessly attacked by “stripping
away their airmail contracts to divesting them of their civilian airline
routes, and the so-called big breakup of 1934.”
In the early
stages of the war, New Dealers continued to side with unions against business.
During the punishing United Auto
Workers strike, he [Roosevelt] had had Labor Secretary Frances Perkins calling
him up in the middle of the night screaming that he was a scoundrel and a skunk
for not giving in to the union’s demands. “You don’t deserve to be counted among
decent men,” she had ranted. “You’ll go to hell when you die.”
New Dealers
believed the working man was the crucial cog in manufacturing, not management.
Interior
Secretary Harold Ickes denounced the idea of giving business a major role in
organizing for war, calling it an affront to democracy itself … Ickes worried
that Knudsen and his friends would use the rearmament program to get big
business’s nose “under the Administration tent,” as Ickes put it, at the
expense of labor
Still,
Roosevelt knew there had to be a change. Herman writes that if “Britain lost
the war, it might mean that Germany would seize the Royal Navy, the single
greatest armed force in the world.” Nazis would rule the world. It was time for
New Dealers to hold their nose and call upon industrialists to help save the
nation and the world.
Knudsen believed he and his
colleagues could do it. “Industry in the United States does more for the
country in direct, or indirect, contributions to the public wealth than in any
other country on earth,” he had told an audience in Detroit three years
earlier. “And it will continue to do so if given the opportunity without
restrictions.”
Herman
believes the lesson we should learn is that government antagonism toward
business is not good for the economy or employment. On the other hand, if a
strong President sets goals on what he wants to achieve, and then gets out of
the way, nothing can beat a capitalist economy.
It was the most powerful and
flexible system of wartime production ever devised, because in the end no one
devised it. It grew out of the underlying productivity of the American economy,
dampened by a decade of depression but ready to spring to life. Out of what
seemed like chaos and disorder to Washington would come an explosion of
innovation, adaptation, and creativity— not to mention hard work— across the
country.
I found Freedom’s Forge engaging. I started my
career at North American Aviation in defense manufacturing. Although considered
ol’ timers by then, I had the pleasure of meeting and being taught by many of
these men that Herman writes about. They were remarkable for their can-do
attitude. There was a quote by Dutch Kindelberger who founded North American—who is mentioned several times in the book—that epitomized the philosophy of
these WWII industrialists: “Any idiot can design an airplane, but it takes a
genius to design an airplane any idiot can build.” This was from the designer
of the P-51, renown as the best propeller-driven fighter of all time. If you
lived with these men, you knew this quote was not meant to be disrespectful to
labor. It was a message to designers and engineers that manufacturing was as
much art as science and mass production depended on simplicity.
Today we
hear a lot of laments that manufacturing is no longer a strength of the United
States. This is ridiculous. John F. Kennedy called on this same breed of people
to take us to the moon and they delivered. They’re still with us. All we need
is good leadership with a clear vision for the nation.
Freedom’s Forge is a good read for those who study
World War II, love manufacturing, or want some clues as to why we seem stuck in
a stagnant economy today.
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