"“An Emergency Improvisation of National Defense”: How the Largest U.S. Industrial Manufacturers Responded to the Uncertainties of WWII Mobilization"

This paper considers how large-scale industrial manufacturers in the United States responded to the economic disruption caused by WWII mobilization. While scholars have written extensively about the role that American business played in forging an “arsenal of democracy,” less attention has been paid to the manner in which private enterprise resisted government directives throughout the war. Because industrial manufacturers were expected to make sacrifices and “do their part” for the war effort, they faced a public relations dilemma: how could they appear to be patriotic contributors to mobilization while communicating—both to the federal government and private investors—their frustrations with the uncertainties posed by the wartime economy? As early as 1941, executives at dozens of the nation’s largest corporations began to express their concerns with mobilization in public interviews and annual reports, citing the suffocating paperwork demands placed on private enterprise, overlapping directives from multiple government agencies staffed with inexperienced administrators, congressional investigations into war profiteering, the threat of antitrust prosecution, shortages of critical materials, and competitive threats posed by patent pools and price controls. To hedge against fears that such forms of government intervention would reduce barriers to entry and increase competition in the marketplace, most of the nation’s 200 largest industrial manufacturers began to strategically plan for demobilization and the postwar economic environment almost immediately after the attack on Pearl Harbor. As they were fulfilling wartime contracts for the armed forces, these large-scale firms announced plans to implement product diversification strategies, break ground on modern research facilities, and hire teams of scientists who, in the years following the war, would pursue technological innovations in emerging industrial sectors like chemicals, plastics, electronics, and aerospace engineering.