Corporate Conservatives Go to War: How the National Association of Manufacturers Planned to Restore American Free Enterprise, 1939–1948 [1st ed.] 9783030439071, 9783030439088

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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN AMERICAN ECONOMIC HISTORY

Corporate Conservatives Go to War How the National Association of Manufacturers Planned to Restore American Free Enterprise, 1939–1948 Charlie Whitham

Palgrave Studies in American Economic History Series Editor Barbara Alexander Department of Economics Babson College Babson Park, MA, USA

Since the social upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s and the free-market resurgence of the 1980s, American society has been enmeshed in a continuing process of profound change. Economic change has been oriented around the regulation of business, the information and telecommunication revolutions, and widening roles played by women and minority groups. Authors in the innovation area will assess how America arrived at its current position of technological dominance that is nonetheless under pressure from institutions that arguably are not well-configured for the future. Regulatory and legal historians will evaluate the reasons for concurrent regulatory breakdown and overreach in industries ranging from finance and health care to energy and land use. Finally, researchers working at the intersection of society and economic history will explore continuing struggles around issues of gender, ethnicity, and family structure, and the distribution of income, wealth, and political power. The series will address topics of interest to scholars, undergraduate and graduate students, and general readers drawn to the interplay of economics and cultural issues. Series contributors will be economics and business historians, or economists working with historians. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14650

Charlie Whitham

Corporate Conservatives Go to War How the National Association of Manufacturers Planned to Restore American Free Enterprise, 1939–1948

Charlie Whitham Edge Hill University Ormskirk, UK

ISSN 2662-3900 ISSN 2662-3919  (electronic) Palgrave Studies in American Economic History ISBN 978-3-030-43907-1 ISBN 978-3-030-43908-8  (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43908-8 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Image 1  Dinner at the NAM War Congress of Industry, December 1942 (Crawford Family Photographs, Western Reserve Historical Society)

For my dear friend Mike, A great listener sadly missed

Preface

‘Hymn to Free Enterprise’ by ‘J.D.K.’: For victory we’re giving all – at scarcely more than cost; But how will victory help us if Free Enterprise be lost? The war’s demands for well-laid plans most loyally we’ve heeded, But peace is quite a different thing – no planning then is needed; So, while today the state’s controls have stretched us on the rack, The moment victory comes in sight we want our freedom back! Chorus Then hail we now Free Enterprise, Extol and give it praise! In armed revolt we’ll all arise If any post-war party tries To undermine Free Enterprise – The Enterprise that PAYS!1

This unsophisticated ditty very much epitomizes the historical perception of the National Association of Manufacturers during World War II. In the slender historiography of the oldest and perhaps largest employers’

1This is a portion of a six-verse poem/hymn excerpted from The Nation of 18 March 1944 and reproduced in Saturday Review of Literature, 1 April 1944, Box 7, Folder 202, The Papers of Frederick C. Crawford, Western Reserve Historical Society, Cleveland, Ohio, USA.

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association in the US, the NAM is cast as a vulgar cheerleader for the interests of big business thrown onto the defensive after the Wall Street Crash and feeling threatened by the power of organized labor. The task of this organization of die-hard conservatives was to forcefully champion the virtues of private capital through a graphic propaganda campaign designed to sway the minds of the American public against federal patronage and in favor of business leadership after the war. Its methods, like the hymn above, were crude and its goals transparently ­self-interested. It is a version of the NAM that may well be accurate, certainly regarding its propaganda output. It is a version, however, based upon scant primary evidence and scholarly research of the entire spectrum of the wartime activities of the NAM, or any thorough assessment of the impact that World War II had upon the outlook, policies and structure of the preeminent conservative business organization in the country. Did the experience of waging all-out war, like the rest of America, force the organization to change? What else did it get up to? Was it in any way successful in achieving its aims? Finding answers to questions such as these are behind a decade-long search by the author to understand the role of organized business in framing US post-war domestic and foreign economic policy. After 1945, and especially since the creation of what is loosely described as the ‘military-industrial complex’, studies which traced the influence of America’s largest corporations in the political direction of the country both at home and overseas have abounded. It is now commonplace to attribute responsibility for this or that government policy to the indirect meddling of interested corporations. Yet the scientific study of the social and political role of corporations and their broader structural function in articulating class interests, especially those which are organized into like-minded groups, is relatively recent and under-researched. This is especially true of the pre-Cold War era, a notable failing given that most scholars in the field of business history denote World War II as the springboard for organized corporate influence on the US body politic. Accounts that explore the responsibility of the federal state, on the other hand, especially in framing post-war foreign economic policy, dominate the scholarship on this matter. It was this gap in our knowledge of the origins of modern-day organized corporate power in the war and immediately post-war periods which inspired my first book on this topic, Post-war Business Planners in the United States, 1939–1948: The Rise of the Corporate Moderates. It was dedicated to understanding

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the rise of that section of the US business community which responded positively to new developments in American political economy after almost two decades of depression and war, namely an activist state armed with Keynesian fiscal interventionism and the incorporation of organized labor. Corporate moderates devoted huge resources to crafting a vision of post-war America and to planning its implementation. They came to occupy leading positions in the policy process and their outlook became the mainstream in business thought for decades to follow. The book showed that business elites played a very active part in shaping the national discourse about post-war America. But what of those in the business community that vehemently resisted any accommodation of labor interests in the economic processes of the nation, and stoutly opposed the creeping intervention of the federal government in the affairs of business or the domestic economy? What happened to the apparent ‘losers’ in the fight to dictate the business voice and to occupy the high ground in the policy process? Did they, too, conceive an alternative vision of peacetime America and craft a thorough plan for its realization? Even less scholarship has been devoted to the body of business activists—known loosely as the corporate conservatives—associated with that school of thought. In wartime America, the bulk of corporate conservative activists gravitated towards the NAM, and it is to documenting the war history of this organization that this book is dedicated. By locating the NAM within the wider framework of business activism during World War II we can better appreciate what drove and shaped its strategy and policies. We may also begin to answer to what extent the NAM was responsible for the well-documented rightward drift of the US during and immediately after the war, and to assess the effectiveness of its ­better-known propaganda methods for disseminating the business message. Though its achievements may have fallen short of expectations, especially when compared to its rival corporate moderates, this study will show that the efforts of the NAM registered significantly in framing the wider socio-political backcloth of war and post-war America. Fortunately for researchers, since the early 1970s the NAM has dedicated all its papers to the business archive housed at the Hagley Museum and Library, Delaware, creating a single site for all investigations into the history of the organization. The only other site of any significance is at the Western Reserve Historical Association in Cleveland, Ohio, which houses the family records of the long-time member and wartime president of the NAM, Frederick C. Crawford. Together, these repositories

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comprise a rich store of hitherto unpublished primary matter for the period of this study and constituted the foremost source of material evidence for this book. In the collection and research of material over the past decade or so the author has relied on the expertise and patience of numerous personnel, but for this latest book it is the staff at the Hagley Museum and Library and at the Western Reserve Historical Association to which I am especially grateful. Of them all, Lucas Clawson at Hagley deserves a special mention for his generous and invaluable assistance in leading me through the vast records of the NAM. The plundering of those records was made infinitely easier thanks to the generosity of the Hagley Museum and Library in granting me two Henry Belin du Pont Fellowship awards, alongside grants from the Herbert Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the Harry S. Truman Presidential Libraries and the Edge Hill University Research Investment Fund.

Chapter Outline The book begins with two small chapters that provide vital information and context for the study. The opening chapter, or ‘introduction’, presents a summary of the political and economic impact of World War II on the US which provides both a guiding historical narrative for the ensuing discussion and introduces the main themes which arose from the national war experience that are important to understanding the arguments raised in the book. The chapter also briefly explains the history of business activism in the US and analyzes the historiography of corporate elites and of the NAM. The second chapter traces the origins of the NAM and establishes its basic posture just as World War II visited the US. It follows the development of the organization from the turn of the century as the first major employer’s association in an America of rising corporate strength to the foremost champion of the country’s largest manufacturing concerns in their fight against the rising strength of organized labor. After the Wall Street Crash and the ensuing Great Depression the NAM, and corporations generally, suffered accordingly, but the organization rallied in opposition to the threat of government intrusion in the freedoms of private enterprise posed by the reformist aspirations of Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal program. As the ‘guardian of free enterprise’, the NAM dedicated its resources and developed the techniques of propaganda in

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the new science of ‘public relations’ in a war against the New Deal aimed at destroying the pro-labor aspects of the liberal program and extolling the virtues of private enterprise. By the end of the 1930s, the inability of Roosevelt to substantially restore economic health to the nation encouraged the NAM and conservatives nationwide that the reformist wave had passed and the primacy of free enterprise would be soon returned. The main study of the wartime record of the NAM begins in Chapter 3, and shows how the NAM tried to navigate the turbulent political and economic waters of ‘preparedness’ America as Europe descended into war. Uppermost for the NAM was finding how best to manage the mobilization for defense without adding fresh stimulus to New Deal reformists eager to expand government control over a ‘command economy’. Ultimately, despite conservative alarm, the organization of military production afforded opportunities for the advancement of business as much as for the social planners. After Pearl Harbor, however, the NAM quickly found that its traditional ‘oppositionist’ stance of the Depression era was inappropriate for the unique circumstances of total war mobilization. Chapter 4 deals with the attempts by the NAM to improve the appeal of ‘free enterprise’, largely as a response to the rising challenge of the corporate liberals, who were quick to undertake advanced studies of the war and peace aims of the US and disseminate their findings in more appealing packaging. The NAM, which had been slow to recognize the unparalleled opportunity for American advancement on the world stage that the war offered, eventually embraced in 1942 the need to urgently begin post-war studies. By 1943, the NAM had reached high gear in its post-war planning, which is the subject of Chapter 5. The first results of its policy planning apparatus, which bore traces of the internationalist philosophy of the liberals, were quickly disseminated just as the liberal planners flooded the nation with their own, government-led versions of a post-war America. To combat this, the momentum of 1943 is carried over into 1944 as the NAM embarked on its most expensive, widespread and daring policy and publicity offensive to date. This is the topic of Chapter 6. The political mood as the war neared its end appeared to favor the conservatives. Chapter 7 reveals the NAM in strident mood, with Congress shredding vestiges of the New Deal and favoring the interests of business in the dismantling of the apparatus of war, and with a public increasingly weary of government regulation. In 1945, the NAM moved

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onto the offensive in its war against the liberals, especially over the wiping out of the gains made by labor since the Depression. The rising sap of conservatives nationally was registered in the NAM by the retrenchment of the Old Guard which moved to quieten its moderate wing through a wholesale reorganization and rationalization of its priorities. Chapter 8 traces the impact of the immediately post-war offensive of the NAM on the edifice of New Deal reformism as the conservative resurgence reached its zenith. Conservatives scored their first major policy success in limiting the post-war rights of labor in the Taft-Hartley Act of 1946 and in rejecting the International Trade Organization in 1948. Despite this, the NAM embraced a measure of internationalism on the matter of aid in the Marshall Plan (1948) and over membership of the United Nations. The concluding chapter places the wartime record of the NAM in analytical perspective and addresses key questions as to the organization’s effectiveness in elevating the power and reputation of business and in restoring a political economy of ‘free enterprise’ capitalism. Ormskirk, UK

Charlie Whitham

Contents

1 Introduction 1 2 The War Before the War, 1933–1939 23 3 Managing the Mobilization, 1938–1941 41 4 Coming in from the Cold: The Start of Post-war Planning, 1942 61 5 The Peak of Post-War Planning, 1943 111 6 Out of the Shadows, 1944 165 7 On the Offensive, 1945 217 8 Winning the Peace, 1946–1948 271 9 Conclusion: Not Quite ‘Free’ Enterprise 301 Appendix 321

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Bibliography 369 Index 395

Abbreviations

AFL American Federation of Labor BAC Business Advisory Council CED Committee for Economic Development CIO Congress of Industrial Organizations CWT Committee on World Trade (NAM) ECA Economic Cooperation Act ESC Economic and Social Council (UN) IBRD International Bank for Reconstruction and Development IMF International Monetary Fund ITO International Trade Organization NAM National Association of Manufacturers NFTC National Foreign Trade Council NIC National Industrial Council NIIC National Industrial Information Committee NLRB National Labor Relations Board NPA National Planning Association NRPB National Resources Planning Board NWLB National War Labor Board OPA Office of Price Administration PWA Post-War Committee (NAM) RTAA Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act TCF Twentieth Century Fund UN United Nations Organization USCC United States Chamber of Commerce WPB War Production Board

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

We businessmen seldom make political speeches – or any other kind for that matter. We have had little dealings in world diplomacy. However, under the lash of war we have developed more than new techniques and processes, new metals and synthetics that will make the world of the future a better place in which to live. We have created as well, under the stimulus of good industrial management, a far-seeing, statesman-like industrial leadership that intends to make peace its business too, and help to create a future world that’s safe to live in. (Frederick Crawford, NAM President, June 1943)

The American experience of World War II was truly unique: a ‘peculiar blend’, as one historian wrote, ‘of profits and patriotism, of sacrifice amid unprecedented prosperity’.1 Spared from the damages incurred by so many others, the United States emerged from humanity’s most destructive war infinitely stronger and richer than when it entered, transformed into the world’s first ‘superpower’. Its political and military strength was underpinned by an economy of unparalleled size and diversity. In the five years since 1940, the US doubled the size of its economy to enable just 6 percent of the world’s population to produce 50 percent of the world’s goods, and American manufacturers dominated the world’s markets for staple finished products. The foundation for that unprecedented p ­ ost-war economic supremacy was laid during the war itself. The US enlisted minds, muscle and machines in a vast productive effort that © The Author(s) 2020 C. Whitham, Corporate Conservatives Go to War, Palgrave Studies in American Economic History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43908-8_1

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would empower the Allies and overwhelm the Axis. That was achieved through a special arrangement between government and business that showered America’s largest corporations with huge federal contracts, guaranteed profits and an array of material incentives to produce for war. The US was quickly lifted from the doldrums of the 1930s in an extravaganza of government spending that dwarfed the miniscule ventures of the New Deal program then devised by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to rescue the economy from the Great Depression.2 What is more, that dazzling resurrection was achieved using a smaller proportion of the nation’s economic capacity than those it eventually out-produced in Germany, Japan, Britain and the Soviet Union.3 This meant that on the home front, Americans were not only spared direct physical attack but endured fewer privations than their foreign counterparts. The war economy eradicated unemployment, raised the standard of living, increased farm incomes and even narrowed the gap between rich and poor. The average American collected double the annual income of their British counterpart and twenty-eight times that of a worker in India. Mean household income in the US rose 25 percent between 1941 and 1944. The demand for labor strengthened trades unions which, with membership at new heights, secured better working conditions and benefits for its members. Social reformers, or New Deal liberals as they were commonly known, saw in the ‘command economy’ of the war an example of an idealized planned society which, with the help of government supervision and careful injections of federal spending, could wipe out forever the scourge of unemployment and poverty that accompanied the ‘boom and bust’ economics of the past. In the US, ‘the wartime mood’, as Winkler claimed, ‘was buoyant and upbeat’.4 The impact of the war on the American home front, however, was a complicated affair. In many ways, it was a true watershed moment in the history of the young nation. Despite the raised hopes of the New Dealers, the net result was a general shift toward political and social conservatism as the war progressed. While aspects of the war economy realized many of the objectives not met by the New Deal and seemed to loudly vindicate the indispensable role of government in running the economy; in other respects, the wartime experience of the US weakened the advocates of social and economic reform and strengthened their ideological rivals. In fact, the involvement of the nation in total war accentuated and exacerbated a multitude of tensions and unresolved issues born of the Great Depression about the political and

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economic direction of the country. Years of New Deal liberalism had failed to inspire large sections of American society and generated permanent resistance from significant sections of US business that refused to accept as the price for national recovery any federal tampering in their affairs or the expansion of labor rights, the extension of social security or what was, in their view, unwarranted regulation of the economy. The apparent failure of Roosevelt to improve the performance of the economy as the 1930s progressed, despite his belated employment of the ‘deficit spending’ method advanced by British economist John Maynard Keynes, inspired his critics who longed for a return to a romanticized past of passive government and market-based ‘free enterprise’. Business and political conservatives who held these views re-doubled their efforts at mobilizing against the New Deal after the recession of 1937–1938, and by 1939, a ‘conservative coalition’ of Congressional Republicans and southern Democrats was formed to stifle any further reformist tendencies of the Roosevelt administration. The New Deal agenda was subsequently narrowed and the coalition continued to hamper Roosevelt throughout the war period. The conservative coalition failed to win the White House but managed to secure effective control over the legislative agenda in successive victories in the Congressional mid-term elections. This remarkable feat of political consistency was achieved thanks to a wider national trend of public antipathy toward government intrusion that was perceived, rightly or wrongly, as detrimental to the wartime improvement of living standards and generalized prosperity of most Americans. After years of Depression, there were jobs with decent wages and money to spend on conveniences, recreation, amenities and for some even luxuries. As Blum wrote: ‘By stimulating the economy, the war did wonderful things for the American people’.5 One of those things was to foster a taste for mounting prosperity which blinded the public to the true contribution of federal spending in delivering that upturn. In fact, vast public funds on a scale unknown in American history were engaged to fuel the production ‘miracle’ that lifted the economy out of the doldrums and carried the Allies to victory.6 However, the facts of the recovery were obscured by a generalized mood of disquiet over ‘big government’ and of the apparent redundancy of New Deal reformism now the ‘good times’ were back. That presented a fertile setting for conservatives who enjoyed newfound success in labeling federal difficulties in managing the economy in war as proof of its inability to manage it in peace. A repeat during the war

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period of the same difficulties of bureaucratic overlap, duplication and confusion which had plagued the Roosevelt administration in the 1930s further undermined public confidence in government. What is more, the decision by Roosevelt to tread carefully with business and entice, rather than compel, the captains of industry to mobilize for war only sped the consolidation of the largest US corporations and greatly improved the standing of American business generally in the eyes of the public. Praise for winning the war attached almost as strongly to business as it did to Roosevelt.7 The failure of the administration to construct a clear sense of purpose for which Americans were fighting created what Leff described as ‘a vacuum that would be filled by private desires and conservative trends’.8 America stood as the most conservative nation among the Western democracies as it prepared to assume leadership of a new world order in 1945. Yet the result was that Americans, faced with an uncertain post-war future, did not entirely abandon the social reforms and economic regulation born of the New Deal and wartime eras. Ultimately, despite a relentless campaign to persuade them otherwise, conservatives failed to convince Americans that unfettered ‘private enterprise’ could deliver the economic security for which they longed and many had recently savored, a desire which overrode public objections to a degree of post-war government regulation of the economy and federal welfare protections. After more than a decade of ‘big government’, Americans had grown slowly accustomed to the presence of federal regulation in their lives, and, it seemed, expected it to continue in some form or another when the war emergency was over. Organized labor, too, after years of growth and the right to collectively bargain, had become an established part of the industrial marketplace. The mild incorporation of the trades unions into the machinery of mobilization during the war sped the bureaucratization of a labor leadership which learned to favor accommodation over militancy.9 The war experience also produced what Sherry described as a ‘reconciliation’ between liberals and conservatives over their conflicting visions of how the post-war economy should work. Wartime prosperity, corporate influence in the mobilization and negative foreign examples of state-controlled planning (most prominently Germany and the Soviet Union) led to the abandonment by many New Deal liberals of their calls for greater federal control of the economy and closer regulation of business than what had been achieved in the pre-war years. Corporations, for their part, accepted that government, and not only the market, had a key

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role in the fiscal management of the economy to avoid slumps which, coupled with a modicum of social welfare and labor rights, was the ­middle-ground in political economy that business, government and labor were content to accept in their post-war world.10 The onset of a Cold War settled the case for a ‘strong state’. Although conservatives had failed to vanquish completely all traces of the New Deal and were saddled with the consolidation of organized labor within a hybrid version of liberal political economy for some time to come, their wartime exploits brought huge dividends. The combined strength of corporate and Congressional conservatives had stalled the New Deal experiment, minimized the expansion of executive authority during the war and help set the limits of regulatory participation in American life for some years thereafter. As Winkler concluded, after 1945 ‘the basic patterns forged during the war endured’.11 Thanks to its exceptional wartime record, there was no denying that the reputation of business had been greatly restored after the inglorious retreat of the Great Depression, and as a class would continue to build on that success for decades to follow. American corporations basked in the glow of their wartime exploits for years with few correctives about the equally signifi­ cant role of federal action in delivering the production miracle, in academia or elsewhere. That distortion in the historical account, as Wilson has recently stressed, left corporate conservatives ‘well positioned, after 1945, to continue to reverse the setbacks that they had experienced in the 1930s’.12 And it is to this factor, the rise in stature of American business—what Workman called the ‘postwar business ascendancy’—that this book is dedicated to exploring through the wartime exploits of the National Association of Manufacturers.13 Business in America The mobilization of industry for war made the 1940s a decade of unprecedented growth not just in the size of American business but also its importance in shaping society and politics. The close association of the business community with the national ‘body politic’ has a long and storied tradition in the US. The academic study of the relationship between business, society and the state in the US dates back to the early twentieth century.14 The so-called Progressive School characterized business as uniformly and constantly antipathetic to political or social reform, a theory reinforced by the experience of the Great Depression. Indeed, employers’ associations in the US are of a unique character, being larger and more influential than those of any other country. Their strength has

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been attributed to the peculiar conditions of American capitalism, which from the very founding of the Republic has fostered the rapid advance of an excessively wealthy, powerful and relatively homogenous business class that was more able—unlike the European business class for example—to minimize the encroachments of government on its freedom and withstand the myriad challenges of organized labor. American capitalists were unhindered by a strong military caste or landed aristocracy, and the US Constitution itself was actually ‘tailored’ to meet the needs of emerging mercantile and industrial interests, with many government services and economic controls established at the behest of private capitalists.15 The expansion of the national economy after the Civil War greatly accelerated the number and significance of employers’ associations which were responsible for the vast majority of attacks on organized labor in the late 1800s as compared to individual firms. As US capitalism evolved the trend of employers to form combinations gathered pace, reaching a peak of 137 associations representing some fifteen thousand firms by the 1930s.16 The dual crises of economic collapse and world war transformed the landscape of business activism. Under the New Deal, the tendency of US business to amalgamate into ideological blocs accelerated and during World War II reached a new level of maturity. The sheer scale of corporate involvement in the running of the war production drive and the extent of business penetration in the organs of national policy designated the 1940s as a unique period in the transformation of the relationship between business and government in the US that remains to this day—the progenitors of the post-war explosion of corporate policy activism that gave rise to the many foundations, think tanks, public relations groups, university institutes and discussion fora that now populate the world of business. Just as the civilian branches of government had undergone unprecedented expansion in the years prior to the war, the corporate community was larger and better organized to deal with the mighty task of production which lay ahead. Scores of executives from the most powerful business concerns in the nation—lawyers, accountants, bankers and corporate directors—flocked to Washington to manage the kaleidoscope of agencies that were created to administer the war effort. Some volunteered for the first time, while others entered service from a variety of preexisting organized business groups from across the country. Most importantly, the consciousness of the US business community was heightened and the sophistication of its responses to the revolutionary

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forces of total war was raised. Alongside the ‘traditional’ employers’ associations composed of entire firms born of the Progressive Era, during the 1930s and 1940s a layer of like-minded corporate activists formed a number of policy planning groups to formulate and advance the wider interests of US capitalism. These elite organizations represented a highly energetic network of the most motivated and ‘sophisticated’ a­ctivists, often from a broad slice of the American business class, who gathered together with sympathetic economists and other academics to first examine and then to impress upon government what they perceived as the best interests of American capitalism as a whole, not necessarily for one particular sector. The wartime mobilization thus served as a battleground between federal, corporate and labor forces over control of the economy and, just as importantly, the post-war direction of American society. As Koistinen observed in his extensive study, the trials of the US mobilization were not about harnessing the economy for war but resolving the ‘struggles for power and position among interest groups and classes’, the net result of which was the ‘bending’ of government to its will and the ‘neutralization’ of New Deal reformism.17 The result was a post-war consensus that was not derived naturally but, as Wall described, was ‘strongly shaped by the conscious activities of multiple groups’.18 It is toward a clearer understanding of that wider process of corporate involvement in the framing of the national discourse on the political and economic future of the US during the turbulent 1940s that this book is chiefly devoted. The explosion of business activism during World War II led to a reassessment of the ‘Progressive School’ orthodoxy regarding the inflexibility of the American business class toward reform. The challenge had its origins in the ‘revisionist’ movement of the 1960s, when the political and economic motives of the US during the war and Cold War, including the role of corporations, were first scrutinized.19 This pioneering group of scholars were motivated in confronting the post-war orthodoxy about the selflessness of US power in prosecuting the Cold War and henceforth set the parameters of the debate about the underlying political influence of corporations for decades. The field, which was more fully developed in the 1980s with the release of primary sources and revived again in recent years, alleged that corporate interests, as expressed through their representative groups, exercised a significant influence over the p ­ ost-war domestic and foreign economic policy of the US. Further, it was asserted that this group of forward-thinking business leaders supported, rather

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than opposed, the erection of a ‘liberal’ political economy of state responsibility for economic affairs and the permanent input of organized labor.20 These non-state actors, or ‘corporate liberals’, served as embodiments of the wider interests of the American business class and have been recently charged with demonstrating what Waddell described as ‘the statebuilding influence of class forces’.21 ‘Corporate liberal’ became a highly contested term, not least because it implied that capitalists were willing to significantly temper their primary instincts in the interests of the wider stability of the system. As mentioned above, the phrase was originally used by the revisionist scholars of the 1960s to describe business elites who identified with large elements of the social and welfare reform agenda of the New Deal liberals, which included permanent rights for labor and an activist role for government in stabilizing an economy that could no longer be left in the hands of private interests. Hence, corporate liberals subscribed to the model of political economy outlined by the British economist John Maynard Keynes who advocated government fiscal intervention through borrowing to restore stability to a crisis economy. Understandably, the lack of ‘liberalism’, certainly in the social sphere, of many of these business advocates—most of whom on reflection are more accurately described as ‘corporate moderates’—has discredited that term.22 Also, the notion that the modern corporate executive, who was not obliged to hold stock or have any direct managerial role in the corporation, represented a new breed of progressive capitalist freed of the profit motive—a theory developed by many New Deal reformists—has been roundly debunked. Corporate executives, liberal or otherwise, operate much like any other business leader, that is entirely in the interests of their corporation or their class.23 Still, what these post-war scholars revealed was that any financial or ideological ‘sacrifices’ endured by the US business community in the short term ensured the progress and supremacy of American economic power for decades to follow. In this book, analysis of the motives and actions of the corporate community in the US during World War II has been undertaken using similarly short-hand distinctions between business activists.24 Hence, the term ‘corporate liberal’ is employed but only in a very historically specific manner. It is used to denote any business activist who accepted that government should replace private interests as the principal manager of the economy, such as through some variant of Keynesianism, and that legal protections for labor and the underprivileged were in the best

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interests of American capitalism. Here, and in my earlier book Post-War Business Planners in the United States, 1939–48: The Rise of the Corporate Moderates, the term corporate liberal has been resurrected as it better described the highly specific political and ideological spectrum of corporate activists then operating in wartime America and is therefore a more accurate method for charting their journey, and that of the corporate conservatives, toward a post-war consensus. Alongside using the term ‘corporate liberals’, as defined above, as one reference point, the label ‘corporate conservatives’ refers to those business activists at the other end of the spectrum who, much like the uncompromising businesses referred to by the ‘Progressive School’, resented any invasion by the government in the workings of the ‘free market’ in goods, capital and labor and any infringement on the employer’s freedom to manage. For them, leadership of the national economy fell almost wholly to private enterprise with government limited to the role of ‘umpire’ in a market-led system of low taxes and no federal debt. ‘Corporate moderates’ sat somewhere in between these two camps in advocating a public–private partnership of low taxes alongside fiscal intervention by government and federally protected labor and welfare rights.25 That compromise solution ultimately defined the contours of US political economy after 1945. While understandably limited and conditional, the application of these distinctions within the active business community for the period of this study allows us to unravel and comprehend a small yet indispensable strand of the complex narrative that was wartime America. Given the post-war adoption by the US of a ‘mixed’ economy like that advocated by the corporate moderates, most treatments of US business activism during the war have concentrated on the business organizations that were considered most responsible for crafting that agreeable middle-ground between business and state, namely the corporate liberal organizations established prior to World War II like the Twentieth Century Fund and the National Planning Association, the moderate Business Advisory Council and especially the war-inspired moderate Committee for Economic Development. Together these groups represented those in business who preferred an accommodation with the New Deal agenda rather than its annihilation. They embodied a highly active ‘business planning community’ during the war that constructed advanced plans for delivering a business ‘vision’ of a prosperous peacetime America. Over time they coalesced to form a significant lodgment

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in the federal policy process during the war, and many have attributed the work of these groups to the assumption by the US of a ‘conservative’ or ‘business’ Keynesian methodology after 1945, as symbolized in the post-war ascendancy of the moderate Committee for Economic Development, the most high-profile and studied of the wartime business groups. Their acknowledgment and advocacy of a narrowly defined role for government in the expansion of post-war US capitalism that still preserved the interests of private capital, both at home and abroad, and a ‘cooperative’ attitude toward labor granted corporate moderates a central role in defining business–government relations for several years after the war.26 Absent from this narrative of the rise of the corporate moderates in war and post-war America is the role of those groups dedicated to representing the more ‘conservative’ wing of the US business community that resisted any encroachments of government upon the workings of their idealized laissez-faire economy. The lack of detailed analysis of these corporate actors is remarkable given the widely held understanding that there was a broad revival of conservatism in the US during the 1940s in which the business community was instrumental. One of the main reasons why the role of corporate conservatives in that process has been overlooked is because the principal beneficiaries of the rightward wartime shift in the broad American populace were the corporate moderates, not the conservatives. Another is that the renowned, widely distributed and blatant propaganda campaigns of the conservatives in favor of private interests permitted the easy labeling of these groups after the war as partisan extremists who operated on the fringes of national discourse and were unrepresentative of ‘mainstream’ America. Hence there is common agreement that, in a highly one-sided story about the production ‘miracle’ that ignored the vital contribution of government, the war effort was seized upon by corporate conservatives as an opportunity to advance the merits of private enterprise and rejoin their historic battle against federal regulation and social reform. Their answer to New Deal liberalism, which sought to equalize economic and political rights through the agency of the state, was to conflate individual freedom with the freedom of the marketplace—a re-labeled ‘free enterprise’—without which they claimed American liberties of all types would vanish. ‘Conservatism’ is a broad, catch-all term, especially in the American context. It is generally agreed that American conservatism as a movement did not exist prior to World War II and did not achieve

1 INTRODUCTION 

11

cogency until years afterward.27 Mainstream assumptions about the US political landscape were transformed by the devastating economic crisis that followed the Wall Street Crash of 1929. The Republican Party, which reigned supreme during the ‘Roaring Twenties’, suffered much of the blame for the Depression which followed and struggled for answers to a resurgent Democratic Party. Opposition to the New Deal became what Patterson called the single ‘unifying factor’ for American conservatives, whatever their background.28 For the next twenty years, most Republicans, and anyone who called themselves ‘conservative’ (which included some southern Democrats), identified with a basic set of principles as they rallied themselves against New Deal liberalism. They called for small government, federalism over centralized planning and a foreign policy which placed US interests above any international commitments.29 That broad philosophy and its chief political exponent, Senator Robert Taft, dominated the Republican Party as the ‘Old Guard’ until the end of the war when, after years of impotency, moderate challengers under New York governor Thomas E. Dewey dragged the party to the center and finally won the presidency in 1952 with Dwight D. Eisenhower’s ‘Modern Republicanism’. Conservativism in the US would not reach maturity until the 1960s, but most commentators identified the war period as a turning point in its origins.30 As will be seen, in very similar ways the struggle to define American conservatism in the 1940s was dramatized in the committee rooms of the nation’s corporate elite. The broad credo of ‘Old Guard’ conservatism was followed by the two principal employers’ associations of the period, namely the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) and the United States Chamber of Commerce (USCC). They were joined on the fringes by a clutch of small, right-wing business and intellectual groups formed at the end of the 1930s heartened by the exhaustion of the New Deal agenda. These included the National Committee to Uphold Constitutional Government (1937), the American Economic Foundation (1939) and the American Enterprise Association (1943).31 Their relentless attacks on the New Deal, however, were dwarfed by those of the NAM and the USCC. Of the two, the wartime activities of the USCC, which under its sprawling federal structure was the larger association, were on a smaller scale than that of the NAM and its records are unfortunately too incomplete to adequately chart its impact.32 Having originated differently, the NAM and the USCC, unlike their corporate liberal counterparts, were very distinct entities which valued their independence. They did not

12  C. WHITHAM

share membership and rarely communicated on policy matters, meeting only now and again at public functions. Furthermore, the USCC broke temporarily from the conservative fold when it entertained a moderate stance toward labor in 1943. As the oldest, richest, busiest and certainly the loudest corporate conservative organization during the war, it is safe to say that no other business group better stood for the conservative voice of American business than the NAM.33 During World War II, the NAM swelled to over 14,000 members representing some of the most powerful corporations in the land contributing millions of dollars annually—far greater sums than were available to the corporate liberals—in spreading the conservative credo to Americans at work, in their homes and even at the movies. Beyond that broad-brush narrative of the actions of conservatives during the war, very little is known about the wartime voyage of the NAM. For instance, how did the war impact the organization? Did it inspire any changes? We know of its propaganda efforts, but did the NAM develop any plans for a peacetime America like its liberal rivals? What was its ‘vision’ for post-war USA? Scholarship that deals exclusively with the NAM for any period is in short supply. At the time of writing, the only two book-length treatments of the NAM that have been published are very dated and refer only to the pre-World War II era. Taylor’s 1927 survey of the labor policies of the NAM was naturally limited by the availability of sources, but as the first attempt at an academic analysis of the organization offered a frank judgment of what he described as a ­class-based organization devoted primarily at limiting the advances of labor.34 A larger study by Steigerwalt, undertaken in 1964, tried to locate the origins of the NAM and its anti-union policies within the context of economic and social change in early twentieth-century America. He utilized a wide range of government documents and newspapers but covered only the first twenty years of the organization and was similarly restricted in his access to NAM records beyond its published articles and reports.35 The impact on the NAM of the Great Depression and World War II, two critical and tumultuous periods in US and world history, is relatively understudied. Those that do exist, namely the articles by Cleveland, Gable and Burch have the benefit of access to a range of primary sources that included minutes and internal memoranda, but are limited by the paucity of secondary material on the history and role of organized business (as per above) and by concentrating on important yet narrow issues concerning the structure and representational function of

1 INTRODUCTION 

13

the NAM.36 Gable’s unpublished dissertation of 1950 by scope stands as the largest single study of the NAM so far. In a dense narrative based on a limited assortment of NAM documents from its origins to the late 1940s, Gable, supported later by Burch, depicted the organization as slow to recognize the shifting national consensus on the relationship between labor, business and the federal government which the organization belatedly acknowledged after 1945.37 Gable’s assertion that the NAM underwent a ‘moderate turn’ toward labor and government regulation of the economy in the immediate aftermath of the war is affirmed by Workman’s later study.38 Beyond that handful of works that deal specifically with the history of the NAM, there are several other studies which have incorporated aspects of the NAM’s wartime activities within a broader discussion of the social and economic experience of war and Cold War America. Overall, these treatments are younger and have enjoyed wider appeal and are the scholarship where ‘first contact’ with the NAM is likeliest given their circulation. One of the earliest general treatments to mention the NAM was The Business Response to Keynes by the business historian Collins. The NAM featured as a dogmatic opponent of the Keynesian method in a book that mainly focused on the embrace of Keynesianism by the corporate liberal/moderate community in the US.39 Others have featured the NAM in an examination of the impact of the war on American culture and ideology, such as FonesWolf in her excellent appraisal of Cold War business strategy Selling Free Enterprise, which unfortunately for this study begins after 1945. FonesWolf attributed the re-packaging of ‘free enterprise’ by the NAM with helping business to ‘recover the initiative’ in labor relations after the war. Beder’s Free Market Missionaries, Henthorn’s From Submarines to Suburbs, and Wall’s fascinating Inventing the “American Way” traced the public relations strategies of the NAM to their origins in the Great Depression and credited the organization with helping to develop a national consensus on America’s post-war political culture. Similarly, Wilson’s recent updating of the role of US business in mobilizing for war, Creative Destruction, referenced the wartime publicity campaigns of the NAM. Its success in ‘framing the lessons’ of the mobilization, Wilson argued, contributed to a long-standing American political narrative which ‘disparaged governmental actors, condemned labor unions, and celebrated private enterprise’.40

14  C. WHITHAM

Therefore, based on this limited historiography there is general agreement that the NAM very quickly became a vehicle for the advancement of business interests against the forces of organized labor. During the Great Depression, the NAM rallied in defense of employers and later used the wartime mobilization of industry to influence American perceptions of private capitalism by waging a relentless publicity campaign against New Deal liberalism and for ‘free enterprise’. The NAM emerged as a major force behind what Fones-Wolf described as a key wartime business objective ‘not only to recast the political economy of post-war America, but also to reshape the ideas, images, and attitudes through which Americans understood their world’.41 That act of ‘re-branding’ private capitalism is widely viewed as highly significant in framing a national political and ideological consensus after the war. We also know that after 1945 the NAM undertook a major alteration in its traditional negative attitude toward labor and the economic responsibilities of government. Beyond that, our knowledge of the organization’s wartime journey is patchy. The progression of its stance of rigid opposition toward organized labor and liberal reformism from the Depression to wartime eras is portrayed as seamless, predicable and unsophisticated, and its loud and colorful advocacy of free enterprise its only legacy of the war. Consequently, beyond a few memorable posters and clumsy slogans in support of business interests, there exists no proper account of the impact of the war on the NAM, the preeminent corporate conservative organization in the US—what research it undertook or how it arrived at its policies—that would allow a fuller appreciation of the part it played in shaping wartime and post-war America. There is no thorough examination of the wider political, social and economic processes that informed its decision-making and which led to its modified outlook after the war or fuller knowledge of the NAM’s relationship to other business organizations and political and public actors. In particular, we know next to nothing about its substantial commitment to the field of post-war planning which has received no scholarly attention whatsoever compared to its other activities. As will be clear, the leading echelons of the NAM were very conscious of the wider network, or ­post-war planning ‘community’, of elite business activists in the US during World War II—to such a degree that the entire orientation of the NAM was affected. As Workman detected: ‘NAM’s actions were conditioned by a complex interplay of intra-organizational forces and competition with other groups’.42 The broader task is therefore to place the wartime

1 INTRODUCTION 

15

activities of the NAM in their rightful context as part of the response by the wider business community to the raging processes of total war, and particularly that community’s efforts to plan for the post-war era, a task that to date has not been undertaken. Only then, when the full range of the NAM’s wartime activities have been weighed, can an accurate assessment be made of the NAM’s responsibility for shaping the national discourse over the future of US capitalism. It is an examination that reveals the NAM was more than a noisy propaganda machine for private enterprise. This author has charted, using the vast quantity of unpublished material running to thousands of pages related to the NAM’s investigation of post-war matters, the intense level of interest and energy that this traditionally skeptical, slow-moving and highly conservative employers’ association attached to influencing the country’s future.43 A substantial research and policy advocacy apparatus, which at its peak incorporated well over one hundred personnel and involved more than five hundred over the course of the war, was assembled to investigate post-war questions across the entire spectrum of economic, social and political themes (see Appendix). The NAM’s engagement with post-war questions, inspired by the designs of the liberals and calculated to compete with them, was such that the organization was drawn for the first time in its history into the realms of scheming and preparation for the longer-term with an eye on the potential for boundless US prosperity after the war in ways normally associated with the ‘planning’ enthusiasts of the New Deal. The ‘doomsayers’ of the past became eager heralds of a better, brighter future. In short, the better-known wartime contribution of the NAM to the craft of propaganda was but the noisiest and brashest element in a larger effort by the organization to regain credibility, formulate policy and influence the post-war direction of the country in the national and international realms. Furthermore, it is the contention of this study that exposure of the organization’s post-war investigators to the growing and increasingly vibrant community of liberal business post-war planners had the effect of waking the NAM from its pre-war, negativistic slumber and informed the ‘moderate turn’ of the organization which took place at the end of World War II. The post-war studies of the NAM therefore act as a useful chart of the organization’s struggle to effectively navigate—and to find a role with which it was comfortable—the rare and unpredictable terrain of wartime America. Thus, in a wider sense the travails of the NAM provide a window onto the unique economic, political and social transformation that was being experienced by the entire US in that watershed moment for the nation.

16  C. WHITHAM

Notes







1. Mark H. Leff, ‘The Politics of Sacrifice on the American Home Front in World War II’, Journal of American History, Vol. 77 (March 1991), p. 1296. 2. Total annual federal outlays went from $8.9 billion in 1939 to $98.4 billion in 1945, see Allan M. Winkler, Home Front USA: America during World War II (New York: Harlan Davison, 2012 edition), p. 25. 3. Arthur Herman, Freedom’s Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II (New York: Random House, 2012), p. 336. The US employed 47 percent of its productive capacity compared to 60 percent or more for the remaining belligerents. 4. Winkler, Home Front USA, p. 30. Other works that describe the relative comfort and other ambiguities of the American home front experience include Richard Polenberg, War and Society: The United States, 1941–1945 (New York: J.B. Lippincott, 1972); Geoffrey Perrett, Days of Sadness, Years of Triumph: The American People, 1939–1945 (New York: University of Wisconsin Press, 1973); John Morton Blum, V was for Victory: Politics and American Culture during World War Two (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), p. 146; Paul D. Casdorph, ‘Let the Good Times Roll’: Life at Home in America during World War Two (New York: Paragon House, 1989); several essays in Kenneth Paul O’Brien and Lynn Hudson Parsons (eds), The Home-front War: World War II and American Society (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1995) including pp. 2–3; John W. Jeffries, Wartime America: The World War II Home Front (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996), p. 187; and Maury Klein, A Call to Arms: Mobilizing America for World War II (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013). 5. Blum, V was for Victory, p. 92. 6. For example, just one war program (Lend-Lease) spent more in six years ($50 billion) than all the New Deal emergency programs had spent over ten ($40 billion); detailed by James T. Sparrow, Warfare State: World War II Americans and the Age of Big Government (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 6. 7. As Leff wrote: ‘When combined with public resentment at wartime government regulations, the rise of business in popular estimation signaled a growing privatization of aspirations as the war progressed’; Leff, ‘The Politics of Sacrifice on the American Home Front in World War II’, p. 1306. For a comprehensive analysis of the retreat of the New Deal, see Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (New York: Vintage, 1996) and his Liberalism and Its Discontents (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998); Steve Fraser and Gary

1 INTRODUCTION 

17

Gerstle (eds), The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930–1980 (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1989); and Brian Waddell, The War against the New Deal: World War II and American Democracy (Illinois: Northern Illinois University Press, 2001). As Sherry put it: ‘When military spending produced abundance, few Americans were inclined to quarrel over the relationships of power that resulted’, see Michael S. Sherry, In the Shadow of War: The United States since the 1930s (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 73. 8. Leff, ‘The Politics of Sacrifice on the American Home Front in World War II’, p. 1313. 9. Explained by Winkler, Home Front USA, p. 23; 112 and p. 115. A discussion of some of the paradigms facing Americans about the nature of the state immediately after the war is offered by Sparrow, Warfare State, pp. 243–258. 10. That process is succinctly explained by Sherry, In the Shadow of War, p. 75. Also Waddell, who argued that ‘the experience of war mobilization convinced key corporate leaders to value the compensatory role played by the state and to appreciate a national state apparatus tamed by the wartime influx of corporate executives’; Brian Waddell, ‘Corporate Influence and World War II: Resolving the New Deal Political Stalemate’, Journal of Policy History, Vol. 11, No. 3 (1999), p. 241. The post-war political economy has been copiously studied. Treatments include Alvin H. Hansen, The Postwar American Economy: Performance and Problems (New York: W. W. Norton, 1964); Harold G. Vatter, The US Economy in World War II (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), pp. 148– 157; Robert M. Collins, More: The Politics of Economic Growth in Postwar America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Robert Higgs, Depression, War and Cold War: Studies in Political Economy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); and Sparrow, Warfare State, on the ‘mixed economy’. 11. Winkler, Home Front USA, p. 113. What Waddell described as the New Deal ‘stalemate’ was resolved ‘by granting various segments of the corporate community the opportunity to influence the shape of US national state power’; Waddell, ‘Corporate Influence and World War II: Resolving the New Deal Political Stalemate’, p. 223. 12.  Mark R. Wilson, Creative Destruction: American Business and the Winning of World War II (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), p. 5. Wilson has tried to redress the ‘pro-business’ narrative of the war by highlighting the substantial role played by federal government in the mobilization that he argued was obscured by bureaucratic ‘heavy-handedness’ and an effective wartime anti-statist movement by ­ conservatives.

18  C. WHITHAM









13. Andrew A. Workman, ‘Manufacturing Power: The Organizational Revival of the National Association of Manufacturers, 1941–1945’, Business History Review, Vol. 72, No. 2 (Summer 1998), p. 283. 14. Perhaps the earliest is Charles A. Beard, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1913). A useful historiographical essay on this branch of business history is provided in Richard John and Kim Phillips-Fein (eds), Capital Gains: Business and Politics in Twentieth Century America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), pp. 1–13. 15. From David McLellan and Charles Woodhouse, ‘The Business Elite and Foreign Policy’, The Western Political Quarterly, Vol. 13, No. 1 (March 1960), p. 172. The mercantilist origins of the Constitution are summarized by William Appleman Williams in The Contours of American History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988 edition), pp. 157–162. 16. The ‘peculiar institution’ of US capitalism is outlined in Patricia Cayo Sexton, The War on Labor and the Left: Understanding America’s Unique Conservatism (Boulder: Westview Press, 1991), Chapter 15. Figures from p. 253. 17.  Paul A. Koistinen, Arsenal of World War II: The Political Economy of American Warfare, 1940–1945 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004), p. 10. 18. Wendy Wall, Inventing the “American Way”: The Politics of Consensus from the New Deal to the Civil Rights Movement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 5. 19. Also known as the ‘New Left’, key early texts include David Horowitz (ed), Corporations and the Cold War (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1969); William G. Domhoff, The Higher Circles (New York: Vintage, 1965); Gabriel Kolko, The Politics of War: Allied Diplomacy and the World Crisis of 1943–1945 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1968); and William Appleman Williams, The Contours of American History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1961). 20.  Kim McQuaid, ‘Corporate Liberalism in the American Business Community, 1920–1940’, Business History Review, Vol. 52 (Autumn 1978), pp. 342–368; Ellis W. Hawley, ‘The Discovery and Study of a “Corporate Liberalism”’, Business History Review 52 (Autumn 1978), pp. 309–320; Robert M. Collins, The Business Response to Keynes, 1929–1964 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981); Howell John Harris, The Right to Manage: Industrial Relations Policies of American Business in the 1940s (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982); Michael Useem, The Inner Circle: Large Corporations and the Rise of Business Political Activity in the US and UK (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984); Michael J. Hogan, ‘Corporatism: A Positive Appraisal’, Diplomatic History, Vol. 10, No. 4 (1986), pp. 363–372;

1 INTRODUCTION 

19

Martin J. Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction of Capitalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988); G. William Domhoff, The Power Elite and the State: How Policy Is Made in America (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1990); Val Burris and James Salt, ‘The Politics of Capitalist Class Segments: A Test of Corporate Liberalism Theory’, Social Problems, Vol. 37, No. 3 (August 1990), pp. 341–359; Kim McQuaid, Uneasy Partners: Big Business in American Politics, 1945–1990 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994); Richard E. Holl, From the Boardroom to the War Room: America’s Corporate Liberals and FDR’s Preparedness Program (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2005); G. William Domhoff, Who Rules America?: The Triumph of the Corporate Rich (New York: McGraw Hill, 2013); Kim Phillips-Fein and Julian Zelizer (eds), What’s Good for Business: Business and American Politics since World War Two (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Charlie Whitham, Post-War Business Planners in the United States, 1939–48: The Rise of the Corporate Moderates (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016); and John and Phillips-Fein, Capital Gains. 21. Waddell, ‘Corporate Influence and World War II: Resolving the New Deal Political Stalemate’, p. 223. 22.  The corporate ‘liberals’ were thoroughly discredited by G. William Domhoff in The Myth of Liberal Ascendancy: Corporate Dominance from the Great Depression to the Great Recession (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2013). 23. One of the first to empirically discredit that myth, born of the 1930s, was Gabriel Kolko in Wealth and Power in America: An Analysis of Social Class and Income Distribution (London: Thames and Hudson, 1962), pp. 55–69. Later texts include Martin J. Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction of Capitalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 24. Also in the interests of clarity, here the term ‘corporate’ is used to denote any business activist whether or not they were strictly members of a ‘corporation’. In that sense, the term ‘corporate’ is interchangeable with that of ‘business’, but as the great majority of business activists in the NAM and elsewhere in the US during the 1940s were members of corporations, the former term is used. 25. Fones-Wolf offered a similar division of the post-war business community. Her ‘traditional or practical conservatives’ and ‘sophisticated conservatives or moderates’ accurately depicted the narrowness of the American post-war setting, but neglected the corporate liberal wing which was so important in crafting the post-war compromise; Elizabeth Fones-Wolf, Selling Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism, 1945–60 (Urbana: University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 22–23. For a discussion of ‘corporate moderates’ in the 1930s, see G. William

20  C. WHITHAM











Domhoff and Michael J. Webber, Class and Power in the New Deal: Corporate Moderates, Southern Democrats and the Liberal-Labor Coalition (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2011). 26. That conclusion is developed in the various texts listed above. For a comprehensive updating and analysis of the wartime activities of the TCF, NPA and the CED and their contribution to post-war ‘moderation’, see Whitham, Rise of the Corporate Moderates (various chapters). 27.  For a general summary, see Sara Diamond, Roads to Dominion: ­Right-Wing Movements and Political Power in the United States (New York: Guilford, 1995), p. 27; 29 and p. 35; Gregory L. Schneider (ed), Conservatism in America Since 1930 (New York: New York University Press, 2003), pp. 5–8; Michael Bowen, The Roots of Modern Conservatism: Dewey, Taft, and the Soul of the Republican Party (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), pp. 1–14; and Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets since the Depression (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012). For Burgin, the Depression triggered a period of ‘reconsideration and retrenchment’ for free market advocates (p. 4). 28. James T. Patterson, Congressional Conservatives and the New Deal: The Growth of the Conservative Coalition in Congress, 1933–1939 (Frankfurt: University Press of Kentucky, 2015 edition), p. vii. 29. From Bowen, The Roots of Modern Conservatism, p. 6. 30. The wartime origins are most clearly traced in Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009), Chapters 1–4. 31.  The National Committee to Uphold Constitutional Government was originally formed to stop Roosevelt’s ‘court-packing’ bill, see Richard Polenberg, ‘The National Committee to Uphold Constitutional Government, 1937–1941’, Journal of American History, Vol. 52, No. 3, pp. 582–598. The American Economic Foundation was launched with money from the NAM’s Howard Pew. The American Enterprise Association, which grew after 1945, is discussed in Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands, pp. 58–67. 32. Due to its federal structure of associated branches, the USCC was technically the largest employers’ association and embraced a wider range of business concerns, see Workman, ‘Manufacturing Power’, p. 294. The documents of the USCC are held in the Hagley Museum and Library and for the 1940s are limited to a batch of pamphlets and speeches with no minutes or policy discussion recorded. The author decided that a meaningful treatment of the role and influence of the USCC during the war, as compared to the quantity available for the NAM, was not possible on the strength of that material alone.

1 INTRODUCTION 

21

33. As a leading historian of conservatism said, the NAM ‘emerged as the leading organization of anti-New Deal industrialists’, see Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands, p. 13. 34. See Albion Guilford Taylor, Labor Policies of the National Association of Manufacturers (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1927). The original was reprinted in a business history series by Arno Press in 1973. 35. Albert Steigerwalt, The National Association of Manufacturers, 1895– 1914: A Study in Business Leadership (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1964). 36. Alfred S. Cleveland, ‘NAM: Spokesman for Industry?’, Harvard Business Review, Vol. 26 (1948), pp. 353–371; Richard W. Gable, ‘NAM: Influential Lobby or Kiss of Death?’, Journal of Politics, Vol. 15 (May 1953), pp. 254–273; and Philip Burch, ‘The NAM as an Interest Group’, Politics & Society, Vol. 4 (1973), pp. 97–130. 37. Richard W. Gable, ‘A Political Analysis of an Employers Association: The National Association of Manufacturers’ (PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, 1950). A copy is in 115/I. Burch argued that NAM’s ‘rigid adherence to an extremist outlook’ had ‘significantly reduced its relative power and political effectiveness’; see p. 130. 38. See Workman’s 1998 article ‘Manufacturing Power’. 39. Collins believed there was some softening, but generally the organization maintained throughout the war its rigid association of Keynesianism with high government spending and pro-labor New Deal liberalism; see Collins, The Business Response to Keynes, p. 87. 40.  See Andrew A. Workman, ‘Manufacturing Power: The Organizational Revival of the National Association of Manufacturers, 1941–1945’, Business History Review, Vol. 72, No. 2 (Summer 1998), pp. 279–317; Fones-Wolf, Selling Free Enterprise, quotations from p. 41; Sharon Beder, Free Market Missionaries: The Corporate Manipulation of Community Values (London: Earthscan, 2006); Cynthia Lee Henthorn, From Submarines to Suburbs: Selling a Better America, 1939–1959 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006); Wall, Inventing the “American Way”, pp. 5–6; and Wilson, Creative Destruction, p. 5. 41.  Elizabeth Fones-Wolf, ‘Beneath Consensus: Business, Labor and the ­Post-War Order’ (PhD Dissertation, University of Massachusetts, 1990), p. 422. 42. Workman, ‘Manufacturing Power’, p. 317. 43. The bulk of that material is in the Hagley Museum and Library, Delaware, USA. The only significant source of primary material on the NAM outside of Hagley is that contained in the papers of former NAM president Frederick C. Crawford at the Western Reserve Historical Society, Cleveland, USA. The NAM barely made an imprint in government or presidential archives.

CHAPTER 2

The War Before the War, 1933–1939

In opposing unsound economic and social measures, it is unnecessary to propose alternatives. (from the NAM ‘Platform for Industry’, 1935)

The behavior of the NAM during World War II is rooted in its assumption during the inter-war years of the role of standard bearer, then ‘guardian’, of free, private enterprise capitalism. As such, the title ‘corporate conservatives go to war’ refers as much to the continuation of the organization’s ideological struggle against New Deal liberalism and the use of the wartime mobilization to advance the interests of private enterprise as it does to the common defeat of the Axis. No study of the wartime performance of the NAM can be understood without a survey of the key developments that framed the structure, membership, ideology and tactics of the organization in the preceding period. The history of the NAM prior to the outbreak of World War II can be divided into three phases: 1895–1903, 1903–1933, and 1933–1939. These phases denote alterations in the structure, leadership and orientation of the organization. The NAM was born out of the depression of 1893–1894 and employer opposition to the revenue-raising plans of President Grover Cleveland. Manufacturing industry in the US was no longer in its infancy but was far below that of even France. If industry was to grow in the US it would require greater access to foreign markets together with organizational support and leadership from within, the only reliable source available.1 The call by a Southern trade paper © The Author(s) 2020 C. Whitham, Corporate Conservatives Go to War, Palgrave Studies in American Economic History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43908-8_2

23

24  C. WHITHAM

in 1894 for a ‘national association of manufacturers’ struck a chord, and within four months Governor of Ohio (later President) William McKinley addressed a convention in Cincinnati on 22–24 January 1895 of almost six hundred representatives of companies from the ten top manufacturing states in the country. The new association adopted six objectives which included fostering domestic and foreign commerce, improving relations between employer and employee, and protecting individual liberty and ownership of property.2 Initially, however, the NAM was more concerned with expanding trade overseas to improve its members’ profitability than with defending liberty or improving labor relations. According to a list published in its first official newsletter of June 1896, alongside the ‘conservation’ of the home market and the creation of a federal Commerce Department, the NAM stood for the extension of foreign trade, expansion of the merchant marine, improvement of the consular service, the placing of ‘expert’ commercial agents abroad, the construction of the Nicaragua (later Panama) canal and the re-establishment of reciprocity treaties.3 The NAM organized international expositions in Venezuela and China to promote US goods, maintained ‘commercial attaches’ in major cities abroad, established working committees on questions of tariff and trade, and lobbied aggressively for the creation of a cabinet-rank Department of Commerce (established 1903).4 Yet there existed a tension between the two apparently conflicting aims of the early NAM, which was to promote increased trade abroad but also to protect its members from foreign competition with goods produced by cheap labor. So, alongside its demands for trade expansion, the NAM advocated at home higher tariffs and bilateral reciprocal trade agreements. That ambiguity—what one historian labeled a ‘fundamental dichotomy’—to sponsor liberalized trade yet uphold protectionism would surface again in heightened form during the 1940s.5 For a while it seemed that this new grouping would break with the traditional hostility to organized labor of previous employers’ associations in the US. Because safeguarding workers was viewed as a rational way to improve the efficiency of private enterprise capitalism, the NAM supported industrial accident prevention, worker’s compensation insurance, industrial education and employee representation. Eventually, however, the outward-looking and somewhat lofty aims of the NAM were gradually pushed aside during the cycle of prosperity and mounting labor agitation that marked the next seven years. In 1903, after the Great Coal

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Strike, the conciliatory spell between manufacturers and trades unions was finally over when NAM, responding to internal pressure from members and external pressure from other associations, became the national spokesperson against organized labor.6 Foremost among the range of grievances employers had against labor, such as strikes, picketing and boycotts, was the policy of the ‘closed shop’, a popular tactic used by trades unions to contractually oblige employers to hire only members of their union in a given workplace. That approach struck at the heart of notions of individual freedom of choice and competitive employment, and what employers saw as their unalienable right to manage the workplace. Above all, it strengthened the hand of labor. At its annual convention of April that year, the NAM enshrined its anti-union stance in its ten ‘principles’, declaring that opposition to the union closed-shop and defense of the ‘open-shop’ was ‘the sine qua non of our industrial safety, advancement, and supremacy’.7 In what an early chronicler of the NAM described as a ‘parallel’ process of association to match that of organized labor, the NAM’s declaration of war on the trades unions unified the many unorganized employers’ associations across the country and effectively rallied a capitalist class alarmed by the demands of labor in the workplace and the reformist pressure of the Progressive movement.8 Its Charter statement of 1905 expressed the basic philosophy of the NAM that exists to this day: the virtues of individualism over collectivism, the right to own and use private property and the indivisibility of free competitive enterprise with all other democratic freedoms. The transformation of the NAM into a vigorous champion of anti-unionism potentially saved the organization and shaped its philosophy and priorities for decades to follow. It also marked the second period in its development. Membership, which had begun to decline, nearly doubled and contributions rose by over a third within the first year of adopting the Declaration of Principles. By the time of its tenth birthday the NAM was the largest, richest and most dynamic employers’ association in the country. The NAM rapidly created subsidiary associations to unite all employers’ groups against organized labor. At the local level, the Citizen’s Industrial Association was launched in 1903 to be joined in 1907 by the state-wide National Council for Industrial Defense (later called the National Industrial Council). The National Industrial Council was run directly by leading officials of the NAM and served as the liaison between the NAM and the hundreds of local, state and national trades associations across the country. In 1916 the National Industrial Conference

26  C. WHITHAM

Board was established to provide research support for these groups and to provide a note of ‘objectivity’ to their proposals.9 The NAM also helped to form another corporate conservative association, the United States Chamber of Commerce (USCC). The USCC was born in 1912 out of very different circumstances from those which spawned the NAM. Indeed, its creation owed as much to the energies of federal bureaucrats as it did from the needs of the business community. Successive administrations since the 1890s had tried to establish a national body that would provide a two-way link between government and as wide a section of American business as possible, especially in the realm of US foreign trade which was perceived to lag behind that of its better-organized European competitors. Still, poor judgment by officials and enduring business suspicion of federal agencies stymied early attempts by the Commerce Department to bring together the myriad trade associations from across the nation. That included the NAM, which by then was the country’s preeminent business group and was viewed as an indispensable member of any meaningful umbrella organization. The NAM was part of an inner core of five business associations that drafted the nationwide ‘letter of invitation’ to the founding convention of the USCC in Washington on 22 April 1912.10 The USCC worked independently of the NAM and focused almost exclusively on the promotion of foreign trade, remaining an ideological bedfellow rather than a partner of the NAM for much of the twentieth century. Through its wide network of institutions, the NAM was able to propagate its message and broaden its appeal. During World War I the NAM advised US military preparedness and was energetic in its backing of munitions production and solving problems of the post-war conversion. National leadership of anti-union business continued for the NAM into the 1920s, helped by a highly profitable World War I, a post-war conservative revival and a succession of pro-business Republican administrations. Membership in 1921 was over five thousand, an increase of 47 percent over that of 1918, while the anti-union crusade of the NAM played its part in halving union membership over the course of the decade in what was a dark spell for labor.11 American world trade was strong enough to keep the NAM focused on home affairs, and protectionist Republican economic policies helpfully obscured the ambiguities of the NAM’s international trade position. Business was crowned ‘king’ and NAM became the darling of mainly small- and medium-sized manufacturers. In the presidential election of 1920, the ‘non-partisan’ NAM

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started its tradition of presenting ‘industry’s views’ to the major parties, and spent most of its energy on industrial relations issues and less on matters of international trade. Even as membership numbers leveled off from their post-war peak to between three and four thousand, there was no concomitant weakening in the influence of the NAM.12 That was until the biggest crisis capitalism had faced was unleashed upon the nation after the Wall Street Crash of 1929. The ensuing Great Depression damaged NAM’s membership rolls as well as the reputation of business. By 1932 members were leaving the NAM at the rate of ­sixty-five a month.13 A year later membership hit an historic low at less than fifteen hundred.14 Once again, the organization faced a critical turning point and was again helped by an outside force—this time in the shape of Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The new leader excited many when he scolded the wealthy few as ‘economic royalists’ bent on establishing a ‘new industrial dictatorship’ in which ‘privileged enterprise had replaced free enterprise’. In the complete absence of business leadership, all eyes were directed upon the White House to steer the nation out of the crisis. Even the NAM, wincing from Roosevelt’s blast against a good many of its members, supported the president’s initial steps at rescuing the US economy, such as bank regulation and the erection of his flagship agency, the National Recovery Administration.15 Yet as soon as the pro-labor implications of the NRA became clear, such as guaranteeing the right to organize and bargain collectively, Roosevelt’s federal program became the bête noire of the nation’s conservatives, and to its fabled opposition toward the rights of organized labor the NAM added unbridled opposition to all aspects of the New Deal.16 The NAM’s opposition to the Roosevelt strategy stemmed not only from a knee-jerk defense of a capitalist’s ‘right to manage’, but out of an acute divergence over the character of the US political economy. Since its founding, the NAM stood for those with unstinting belief in the principles of laissez-faire or market-based economics. That was the basis of its passionate opposition since 1903 to what it considered were the twin evils of modern industrial capitalism: unbridled labor and undue federal interference in the working of the economy. It was a devotion to an ideal that by the late nineteenth century was already unworkable as evidenced in the proliferation of trusts, trade agreements and cartels that industrialists erected to mitigate the redundancy of the so-called free market. Nevertheless, the demise of the free market delusion was postponed by the stimulus of expansion caused by World War I, and for all

28  C. WHITHAM

its imperfections the free-market philosophy, with weak unions and small government, enjoyed mainstream adherence in the US from its government as well as its business class during the Roaring Twenties. After the Wall Street Crash exposed the underlying weaknesses of the US economy in 1929, adherents of the free market system faced their toughest challenge in the uncharted waters of the Great Depression. Roosevelt’s New Deal program inaugurated unprecedented government intervention in the economy, such as in banking, housing, farm prices and utilities, areas where private enterprise and the free market had failed. It also sought to protect labor and provide welfare for the vulnerable. However, although the New Deal was devised not to replace private enterprise capitalism but to rescue it, significantly the program and its sponsors were progressively informed by a new and increasingly fashionable theory espoused by the British economist John Maynard Keynes. Keynes argued that, during crises, central government could provide a fiscal stimulus that would maintain productivity and employment at sufficient levels to restore equilibrium to the economy. However, such a method required the breaking of a cardinal fiscal rule of mainstream political economy: abandoning the ‘balanced budget’ and creating a government deficit. Though Roosevelt himself resisted employing ‘deficit spending’ until the recession of 1938 and was highly reserved in his opinion of Keynes,17 many in his administration viewed in Keynesianism a mechanism for correcting a capitalist system that had finally ‘stagnated’ and would require permanent—not just emergency—government intervention to sustain it. Keynesianism, and by association the New Deal, therefore, posed for the NAM and other devout free-market enterprisers a profound and long-term political and ideological threat. Notwithstanding their hatred for any upgrading of the rights of labor or federal underwriting of social welfare, conservative obsession with the executive management of federal coffers, the maintenance of a balanced budget and non-interference in the market place ultimately set the NAM in near-constant, rigid opposition throughout the New Deal era to all economic innovation or anything which smacked of Keynesianism or liberal interventionism.18 The decision to wage all-out war on the New Deal led to the NAM’s first major reorganization and the start of its third round of development as a conservative business champion. As in 1903, those changes had profound implications for the future of the organization. It was recognized that to revive and sustain itself the NAM would have to raise more funds. The NAM had relied for its financing on a flat-rate member subscription,

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but in 1933 introduced a graduated scheme of dues based on corporate net worth ranging from $50 to $10,000 per member. There was also begun a campaign to raise further contributions from both inside and outside the organization.19 Between 1932 and 1937, NAM’s income from dues went from $137,928 to a staggering $1,367,638, a feat all the more notable given that the Depression was far from over.20 What is more, almost 50 percent of that income was drawn from two hundred or so of the country’s largest firms.21 Powerful backers were now present in the upper echelons of an already highly centralized and elitist organization, and big business came to occupy a disproportionately strong position in the organization. That process was helped by the structure of the NAM, which closely followed that of a modern corporation, with commensurate limits on the participation of its regular members in decision-making. The governing body of the NAM was its Board of Directors, headed by a new president each year. The Board was elected in proportion to the number of NAM companies in each state (to a maximum of three directors per state). The number of directors therefore varied, but before 1933 rarely totaled more than thirty. The Board elected the president and all the senior positions in the organization, including the Executive Committee and its Vice President, who oversaw all operations. Meeting ten times a year, the Board handed considerable authority over day-today matters to the Executive Committee, which in turn was run by a small, full-time secretariat. The Board, its President and the Executive Committee together formed the primary ­ decision-making organs of the NAM. Any standing committees were mostly staffed by Executive Committee members appointed by the president of the Board. According to its constitution, a ballot of all members or a majority vote at the NAM Annual Convention (later the Congress of American Industry) could also decide policy, but that facility was largely by-passed after the reorganization of 1933.22 By the 1940s, members were rarely polled for their opinions and the annual Congress became little more than a means for communicating and ratifying policy already formulated by the leadership, composed mostly of persons not elected by the members.23 The Board was expanded to well over one hundred directors by the 1940s and the Executive Committee stood between 20 to 30, 65 to 70 percent of which was drawn from big business. That set-up fostered the dominance of an ‘active minority’ over NAM affairs from 1935 until after the war which represented one hundred and ­twenty-five of the largest manufacturing corporations, a group

30  C. WHITHAM

which never accounted for higher than 4 percent of the general membership.24 The NAM was still able to claim that the bulk of its number consisted of small- and medium-sized industrial firms, but this fact obscured the reality of organization’s domination by big business. Serving as the flagship for private enterprise, after 1933 a hardcore conservative leadership—called the ‘Brass Hats’—turned the NAM into the chief spokesperson for business opposition to the Roosevelt administration. Top manufacturers such as Robert Lund of Lambert Pharmaceutical (new NAM president), Charles Hook of the American Rolling Mill, Tom M. Gilder of Republic Steel (a leading figure in the ‘Little Steel’ strikes), Robert B. Henderson of Pacific Portland Cement, Ernest T. Weir of National Steel and John L. Lovett of the Michigan Manufacturers Association sought to turn the organization around. An examination by Burch pointed to the affiliations of core members of the NAM with ultra-conservative, far-right groups of the 1920s–1930s— such as the Crusaders for Economic Liberty, the Sentinels of the Republic, the Liberty League and the Committee for Constitutional Government—as an ideological explanation for the organization’s ­hard-line stance against the liberal reformism associated with the New Deal and espoused by many of its followers. Some of these figures, such as Alfred Sloan, Harold Pew and Lammot Pont, remained at the center of the NAM in the 1940s.25 With big business backing and broad appeal, the NAM filled its coffers and was able to reverse the decline in its membership which rose steadily upward as trades unions flourished and the travails of the New Deal persisted for the remainder of the decade.26 As the self-proclaimed ‘guardian’ of private enterprise, the NAM registered early victories in limiting the effectiveness of the first National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) in extending the right of labor to organize and to use collective bargaining. The NLRB was the agency most despised by the NAM when it was introduced by Roosevelt in his first raft of New Deal legislation to bring industry, agriculture and labor together to revive the economy. The NAM was less successful in nullifying the NLRB’s second incarnation in 1935. Proposed by liberal Senator Robert F. Wagner, his version of the NLRB proposed a more robust scheme that granted workers the ‘statutory right’ to join a union and obliged employers to bargain collectively with their employees’ chosen representatives. A wave of unionization in the largest industries followed with which employers were legally bound to negotiate. That constituted for the NAM an illegal infringement upon the rights of managers to

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31

settle disputes independently or oppose the closed shop. Inability to stop the passage of what was known as the Wagner Act—‘the most unconstitutional law ever made constitutional’—thanks to a swell of popular support for Roosevelt’s second wave of legislation designed to placate a long-suffering electorate, marked a new low in the history of the NAM, and the elimination or revision of the Act became an obsession for the organization for the next ten years.27 By the time of the recession of 1938, the NAM had benefited from the slow attrition of the wave of New Deal idealism which had apparently done little to repair the fundamental ills of the US economy. By now, the NAM was a far larger, richer and wiser opponent of the Roosevelt administration, and immediately used the recession to launch a second assault on the NLRB which, despite failing to destroy it, was far more successful than the first. After heavy business lobbying the Congress reduced the NLRB’s funding and Roosevelt was obliged to fill the agency with more business-friendly personnel. The curbing of the NLRB showed that the opponents of Roosevelt, in the boardroom and in Congress, were gaining in strength just as organized labor grew increasingly divided.28 By the end of 1938 the NAM had almost doubled its membership.29 And as 1939 dawned, there had developed a substantial ‘conservative coalition’ of Republicans and mainly southern Democrats in Congress which aimed to thwart any further efforts by Roosevelt to interfere in the marketplace.30 The tactics used to achieve the objectives of private capitalism also went through an evolution. They flowed from a powerful assertion made early on of the task which lay before the organization. ‘The chief work of this Association’, stated NAM president David M. Parry in 1903, ‘is an educational one – the molding of public opinion’.31 Still, despite that lofty aim, the approach initially favored most by the NAM in pressing the interests of industry was political lobbying. That reflected the balance of power between employers, unions and government that prevailed in the first two decades of the century. Confident it had the ear of Washington, the NAM directly financed the campaigns of sympathetic politicians and even supplied foot soldiers on the campaign trail, such as in the election of President McKinley in 1896. During the 1890s, the NAM successfully opposed the implementation of the eight-hour day bill for government workers and the exemption of labor disputes from federal injunctions, and also helped to secure passage of the Gold Standard Act in 1900.32 However, after a public scandal in 1913 (when a Congressman provided a room and facilities in the Capitol building

32  C. WHITHAM

for the NAM to canvass politicians),33 the lobbying techniques of the organization became subtler. The NAM refrained from publicly endorsing or condemning candidates for Congress or participating in election campaigns, but used methods such as writing letters, appearing before Congress, visiting politicians or encouraging the political intervention of its members to bring about the desired outcome. The NAM also recognized that blanket opposition to organized labor was not working, and the adoption of techniques that sought to limit the spread of unionism were preferable, such as through emphasizing the benign intentions of employers in raising working conditions, safety standards and educational facilities.34 That change in tactics in no way diluted the organization’s commitment to fight organized labor, but energized the search for alternative methods to propagate its anti-union message. For example, the NAM fully recognized the power of the radio and the press, placing advertisements in sympathetic publications, running a news-plate service, and distributing its own newsletter called American Industries. By 1918 the NAM had organized a speaker’s bureau and was quick to enlist a new medium with its very own motion picture.35 During the 1920s the NAM honed its propaganda techniques to sell the ‘American Plan’ which sought to contain labor by framing the closed shop and collective bargaining as ‘un-American’, and urged its members to win support for business practices in their workforces by introducing welfare schemes, stock ownership, company unions and employee magazines.36 Its approach was based on a paternalism born of its class outlook. As Taylor observed as early as 1927, the NAM was ‘essentially a class movement, built upon the concept that the employers’ interests are those of society, including its ­working-class members’.37 It was not until the White House decided to intervene to rescue the sinking US economy from the Great Depression that the tactics of the NAM were next tested. The popular groundswell for reform and the tainted reputation of American business combined with an antipathetic Democratic president made the search for friends in Congress and elsewhere very challenging for the NAM during the Depression years. After its failure to curb labor rights under the New Deal with the Wagner Act, the NAM, forced onto the defensive, devoted most of its resources after 1935 to publicity campaigns highlighting the negatives of trade unionism and the positives of the free enterprise system. Nevertheless, during that period the stance of the NAM was almost entirely negativistic, as its 1935 ‘Platform for Industry’ neatly demonstrated: ‘In opposing

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unsound economic and social measures, it is unnecessary to propose alternatives’.38 Between 1933 and 1941 the NAM opposed thirty-one out of the thirty-eight major legislative proposals enacted, mostly on the basis of their perceived negative bearing on the material interests of its members.39 With such a single-minded emphasis on labor and federal regulation, it is unsurprising that during the 1930s the NAM’s interest in international affairs diminished almost to vanishing point. Its ‘service’ activities to individual members (matching them with foreign customers) were abandoned, and publication of its ‘American Trade Index’ (a list of exporting manufacturers printed in several languages) and the monthly ‘Export American Industries’ was stopped. The NAM was also unable to identify with the ‘free trade’ philosophy of Secretary of State Cordell Hull, whose unswerving commitment to building a world devoid of all tariffs and discriminatory trade practices—an aim that would favor many NAM members—was, for then at least, too extreme a position for the NAM leadership to accept. Many of its members bitterly opposed lowering tariffs that protected their industries, instilling a decidedly ‘protectionist’ mindset among the NAM faithful. Hull passionately believed that world peace was possible only through the multilateral lowering of obstacles to international trade, a philosophy which directed US foreign economic policy and later permeated wartime diplomacy with its allies, especially the British with their control of a vast territorial Empire. Many New Deal and corporate liberals embraced ‘multilateralism’ during the war and were eventually joined by conservatives who belatedly saw the value in that brand of internationalism as a means for extending US economic power and ideals in the post-war era.40 As with much of America, it was not until the outbreak of war in Europe in 1939, and US entry into the war in 1941, that the NAM began to take a greater interest in world affairs. The turn in the fortunes of the corporate conservatives during the 1938 recession crisis was, in the estimation of NAM President Robert Lund, at least partly due to NAM’s public relations exercise which had inaugurated a ‘new era and new formula of public contact by industry’.41 The ‘new formula’ that Lund identified was part of a major turn in the way the NAM pursued its objectives as the 1940s dawned. The takeover of big business in the major reorganization of the early 1930s injected a measure of professionalism into the hierarchy of the NAM and, more importantly, a renewed emphasis on the devices of ‘public relations’, at the time a relatively new concept in the sphere of business, to convey

34  C. WHITHAM

its message. New staff members came with training in economics or law and experience in the growing fields of public relations or advertising. Though it was not alone in utilizing these modern techniques to promote its message, according to one historian the NAM ‘should be credited with promoting the concept that the cultivation of favorable public opinion was a matter of such importance that it should be delegated to a specific department staffed by experts’.42 That early attachment to the new ‘science’ of public relations conditioned much of the NAM’s tactics for decades to come.43 Under the leadership of chief ‘Brass Hat’ Lund and his specialist appointee as Executive Vice President, the ­ex-newspaper man Walter W. Weisenburger, the NAM devoted increasing sums on ‘public information’ campaigns during the 1930s to counter the negative image of market-based capitalism—re-branded as ‘free enterprise’ to elicit associations with ‘traditional’ American values of individualism and self-help. As Tedlow put it, ‘the new NAM sought to sell free enterprise the way Proctor and Gamble sold soap’.44 Gable argued that this approach had both strategic and tactical value. Strategically the objective was to foster a climate of general acceptance of NAM’s faith in the fundamental righteousness of free enterprise capitalism and American individualism, and tactically to generate support for, or rejection of, a specific policy or initiative depending on its relationship to NAM’s core beliefs.45 A weekly organ, NAM News, was launched in 1935 to report ‘up-to-date happenings on the international scene’.46 Appeals to the ‘public’ were also a rational choice given the isolation of the NAM from the corridors of power during the 1930s and early 1940s. Between 1934 and 1937, the amount spent on public relations rocketed from $36,000 to $793,043, some 55 percent of the NAM’s total revenue.47 Much of these funds were generated and spent by a newly created arm of Weisenburger’s public relations initiative, the National Industrial Information Committee (NIIC). Created in 1934 by Alfred P. Sloan of General Motors with the general aim to ‘preserve private enterprise in all its forms’, the NIIC was a ‘component part’ of the NAM. It reported to the NAM Board (with several NAM Board members on its own governing body), but held a quasi-independent status by raising its own finances and drawing input from a wider membership of manufacturers and non-manufacturers alike, such as insurance firms, banks and retail stores. At least in the area of funding, the NAM enjoyed a significant advantage over its liberal business counterparts of the period, such as the Twentieth Century Fund and the National Planning Association,

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who had no membership dues and relied on money from donations and subscriptions to their weekly publications. The NIIC became a highly important vehicle for the NAM in widening the anti-New Deal message to include non-manufacturers and in its efforts to ‘sell’ free enterprise to the nation until it was disbanded after the war. The NIIC employed a variety of methods to convey NAM’s message alongside regular paid advertising, such as radio programs, displays for schools and factories, direct mail, a speakers’ bureau, an industrial press service which supplied releases for several thousand small newspapers, and film strips. Between 1934–1938, the NIIC had distributed four, ten-minute ‘industrial shorts’ for local showings on request, which NAM claimed had been viewed by as many as fifteen million Americans in movie theatres, schools, colleges, universities and New Deal Civilian Conservation Corps camps.48 The multiplying public relations activities of the NAM soon became a target of the besieged liberal forces in Washington. A committee led by arch-liberal Wisconsin Senator Robert La Follette investigated the NAM public relations activities in 1938 and was highly critical of the so-called educational qualities of its products and condemned them as pure propaganda. The investigation condemned the NAM for spending millions in propaganda to fight organized labor and achieve its political objective ‘to tell the public that nothing was wrong and that grave dangers lurked in the proposed remedies’.49 During World War II especially, the NIIC embraced, and the NAM became increasingly influenced by, the technique of regular polling to accurately measure the temper of ‘public opinion’ toward business. As will be seen, the NAM’s public relations team, which consisted of Clifford E. Harrison for the NIIC and Walter Weisenburger for the NAM, was directly exposed to ‘grass roots’ America, an experience which drew them inexorably toward a softer, less abrasive approach to the packaging of the ‘free enterprise’ message. As will be seen, Harrison and Weisenburger came to exert a moderating influence on the upper echelons of the NAM.50 The exploitation of scientific methods in advancement of its aims, of which public relations was one of the most important, was a critical feature in the pre-war organization of the NAM. The need to present a powerful, cogent ‘free enterprise’ alternative to the New Dealers as the 1940 presidential election approached energized not only its publicity agenda but also the policy research arm of the NAM. In 1939, the NAM established the Committee on Economic Policy to assist in mounting a scientific

36  C. WHITHAM

fight-back against an administration bent on ‘implementing the principle of national economic planning’. The Committee, which became the foundation for the NAM’s broader wartime assault on the ‘statist’ liberal post-war planners, was originally devised to closely monitor government regimentation of the economy and to develop the ‘principles of private enterprise’ through various studies of the economy. These steps were necessary, NAM stated, because that was ‘the first time in the history of the United States that the private enterprise system has been thus threatened’.51 As the war clouds gathered over Europe, and the first major electoral test of the New Dealers beckoned in the US, the NAM was as strong and prepared as it had been for years to serve as the country’s ‘guardian’ of free enterprise in the battle to come.

Notes







1. The economic context for manufacturers is summarized in Steigerwalt, The National Association of Manufacturers, pp. 1–15. 2.  Detailed in ‘The National Association of Manufacturers: Historical Highlights’ (circa 1978), Box 225, Series XVI, Records of the National Association of Manufacturers: Accession 1411, The Hagley Museum and Library, Delaware, USA. Henceforth, for simplicity references to this collection will comprise only the box number and series number (in Roman numerals) separated by a forward-slash. A more contextual account of the founding is supplied in Steigerwalt, The National Association of Manufacturers, Chapter 2. 3. Listed in Richard W. Gable, ‘Birth of an Employers’ Association’, Business History Review, Vol. 33, No. 4 (Winter 1959), pp. 536–537. 4.  See ‘Significant Highlights of the Organization and History of the National Association of Manufacturers, 1895–1948’, 1 April 1948, Box 7, Folder 206, p. 4, in MS4856, Frederick C. Crawford Family Papers, Western Reserve Historical Society, Cleveland, Ohio (henceforth Crawford Papers, WRHS). The NAM also helped to create the National Safety Council and pushed for a Federal Reserve System. 5. Steigerwalt, The National Association of Manufacturers, p. 167. 6. That process of transformation is described in Taylor, Labor Policies of the NAM, pp. 13–15; Gable, ‘Birth of an Employers’ Association’, pp. 540– 541; and Steigerwalt, The National Association of Manufacturers, pp. 103–117, outlines the employers’ ‘counter-offensive’. Also Domhoff and Webber, Class and Power in the New Deal, p. 38. Hitherto, the NAM had taken no position on labor.

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37

7. From a 1926 reflection by NAM President Edgerton in Gable, ‘Birth of an Employers’ Association’, p. 544. 8. Taylor, Labor Policies of the NAM, p. 11; and pp. 35–40. See also Larry Griffin et al., ‘Capitalist Resistance to the Organization of Labor Before the New Deal: Why? How? Success?’, American Sociological Review, Vol. 51, No. 2 (April 1986), pp. 155–156. They described NAM as a ‘peak capitalist organization’ out of as many as 80 employers’ associations formed between 1897 and 1932 that were ‘belligerent’ toward organized labor. ‘No other organization’, they claimed, ‘appeared so central to the anti-union “crusade” as did the NAM’ (p. 163). On the need to ‘combat’ Progressivism see the short history by Thomas Cochran and William Miller, The Age of Enterprise: A Social History of Industrial America (New York: Harper & Row, 1961 edition), pp. 281–282. 9. Described by Taylor, Labor Policies of the NAM, pp. 29–30. Taylor characterized the National Industrial Council as ‘the legislative and political department’ of the NAM. The creation and scope of the National Industrial Conference Board is described on pp. 75–76. 10. Seven hundred delegates from nearly every state representing 392 business associations were addressed by President Taft and Commerce Department officials. For the only academic treatment of the formation of the USCC see Richard Hume Werking, ‘Bureaucrats, Businessmen, and Foreign Trade: The Origins of the United States Chamber of Commerce’, Business History Review, Vol. 52, No. 3 (Autumn 1978), pp. 321–341. 11. From Taylor, Labor Policies of the NAM, p.17. Union membership dropped from five million in 1919 to under three million in 1933; in Domhoff and Webber, Class and Power in the New Deal, p. 75. The NAM even formed an ‘Open Shop Department’ in the 1920s; see Irving Bernstein, The Lean Years: A History of the American Worker, 1920–1933 (New York: Haymarket Books, 2010 edition), p. 156. 12. That was from a 1920 high of 5,567; see ‘NAM Membership—Number and Dues’, 1910–1969, 225/XVI. Also ‘Significant Highlights’, pp. 7–8, Crawford Papers, WRHS. On retaining influence see Steigerwalt, The National Association of Manufacturers, p. 172. 13. See Collins, The Business Response to Keynes, p. 48. 14. It was actually 1469, the lowest figure of the Depression; figures from ‘NAM Membership—Number and Dues’, 225/XVI. The newsletter was stopped in 1930. 15. For NAM President Lund arguing in support in 1933 see Jason Taylor, Deconstructing the Monolith: The Microeconomics of the National Industrial Recovery Act (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), p. 30. 16. See Gable, ‘NAM: Influential Lobby or Kiss of Death?’, p. 264. This included social security, unemployment compensation and the graduated income tax.



38  C. WHITHAM 17. See Collins, Business Response to Keynes, p. 25. 18. For a comprehensive treatment of Keynesianism in the US see Collins, The Business Response to Keynes. Later studies include Ellis W. Hawley, The New Deal and the Problems of Monopoly: A Study in Economic Ambivalence (New York: Fordham University Press, 1995 edition); Jim Couch and William Shughart II, The Political Economy of the New Deal (Massachusetts: Edward Elgar, 1998); and Mark Wheeler (ed), The Economics of the Great Depression (Michigan: Upjohn Press, 1998). 19. Detailed in Cleveland, ‘NAM: Spokesman for Industry?’, p. 365. 20. Figures from ‘NAM Membership—Number and Dues’, 225/XVI. 21.  See Gable, ‘NAM: Influential Lobby or Kiss of Death?’, p. 260. Contributions to the NAM from the giant steel, auto, chemical, tobacco and domestic oil firms rose from 20 to 40 percent between 1933 and 1936; see Colin Gordon, New Deals: Business, Labor, and Politics in America, 1920–1935 (London: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 143. 22. Explanation in ‘Significant Highlights’, p. 2, Crawford Papers, WRHS. 23. Detailed in Cleveland, ‘NAM: Spokesman for Industry?’, pp. 362–364; and Gable, ‘NAM: Influential Lobby or Kiss of Death’, p. 258. 24.  See Cleveland, ‘NAM: Spokesman for Industry?’, pp. 364–365. ­Ninety-percent of that group had assets over $10 million, and 44 percent exceeded $50 million. Gable confirms the big business ‘minority’ analysis in ‘NAM: Influential Lobby or Kiss of Death’, p. 259. A later article by Burch, which consolidated much of the early scholarship on the NAM, agreed with the ‘big business takeover’ thesis and dated their dominance from 1935; see Burch, ‘The NAM as an Interest Group’, pp. 97–100; 102–103; 105. 25.  See Burch, ‘The NAM as an Interest Group’, pp. 110–114. The ‘Crusaders’ was formed in 1935; see Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands, pp. 10–13 and p. 22. The American Liberty League was set-up in 1934 from a coalition of conservative Democrats, Republicans and business leaders in opposition to the labor aspects of the New Deal and folded in 1940. The Committee for Constitutional Government was originally founded in 1937 to oppose Roosevelt’s appointments to the Supreme Court, but became a post-war beacon for corporate conservatives who opposed social liberal policies; see Diamond, Roads to Dominion, p. 23. The ‘Sentinels’ lasted from 1922 to 1944. NAM seniors Sloan, Harold Pew and the du Ponts were members of the League and the Sentinels. For detail on the du Pont family in the 1930s see Domhoff and Webber, Class and Power in the New Deal, pp. 120–121. 26.  Membership lifted from 1469 in 1933 to 3155 by 1937; see ‘NAM Membership—Number and Dues’, 225/XVI. These included larger firms; see Collins, The Business Response to Keynes, p. 48.

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27.  A summary of the fight over the Wagner Act and the NLRB is in Domhoff and Webber, Class and Power in the New Deal, Chapter 4. Between 1937 and 1947 the NAM proposed or supported 230 bills to amend the Wagner Act; see Gable, ‘A Political Analysis of an Employers Association’, p. 114. Quotation from p. 115. 28. The main trades unions, the AFL and the CIO, clashed bitterly during the 1930s, with the AFL actually siding with the conservative coalition to alter what it believed were the ‘pro-CIO’ aspects of the NLRB; see Domhoff and Webber, Class and Power in the New Deal, pp. 202–203. 29.  From 3155 in 1937 to 5,561 in 1938; from ‘NAM Membership— Number and Dues’, 225/XVI. 30. For an in-depth look at the coalition in 1939 see Patterson, Congressional Conservatism and the New Deal, Chapter 9. In fact, such was the lodgment of anti-New Deal Southern Democrats in Congress through the 1930s and 1940s that liberal initiatives ‘could not pass’ without their support; see Ira Katznelson, Kim Geiger and Daniel Kryder, ‘Limiting Liberalism: The Southern Veto in Congress, 1933–1950’, Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 108, No. 2 (Summer 1993), p. 285. 31. Taylor, Labor Policies of the NAM, p. 63. 32. Ibid., p. 96. 33. Detailed in Gable, ‘NAM: Influential Lobby or Kiss of Death?’, p. 266. The so-called ‘Mulhall investigation’ is critiqued in Karl Schriftgiesser, The Lobbyist (New York: Little, Brown & Little, 1951); and Steigerwalt, The National Association of Manufacturers, pp. 138–149. 34. These elements were part of the NAM’s 1913 campaign for ‘industrial betterment’; see Steigerwalt, The National Association of Manufacturers, pp. 170–171. 35. See Richard S. Tedlow, ‘The National Association of Manufacturers and Public Relations during the New Deal’, Business History Review, Vol. 50, No. 1 (Spring 1976), p. 28. 36. Detailed in Cochran and Miller, The Age of Enterprise, pp. 333–338. 37. Taylor, Labor Policies of the NAM, p. 62. 38.  Quoted in Gable, ‘A Political Analysis of an Employers Association’, p. 114. In 1936 alone, the NAM opposed the Welsh-Healy Bill, the Ellenbogen Bill, the Wheeler-Rayburn Bill and the Guffy-Vinson Coal Bill; see ‘Significant Highlights’, p. 12, Crawford Papers, WRHS. 39.  The exact legislation is listed in Cleveland, ‘NAM: Spokesman for Industry?’, p. 357. Collins characterized the pre-war NAM as holding positions on economic policy which were so negative and inflexible that no ‘middle ground’ could be explored; see Collins, The Business Response to Keynes, pp. 49–50.

40  C. WHITHAM 40. Hull’s vision, considered as articulating the economic principles necessary for the long-term prosperity of the US and ‘the keystone of United States war aims and relations with Britain’, is best explained in the works of Gabriel and Joyce Kolko, such as The Politics of War: Allied Diplomacy and the World Crisis of 1943–1945 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1968), pp. 243–245 (on importance of Hull), and pp. 242–254 (for a general summary of US post-war aims); also The Limits of Power: The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1945–1954 (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), p. 12; and Main Currents in Modern American History (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984 edition), pp. 221–225 (quotation from p. 224). 41. Lund quote from 1938 in Tedlow, ‘The NAM and Public Relations during the New Deal’, p. 40. 42. Ibid., pp. 27–28. 43. See ‘Significant Highlights’, p. 9, Crawford Papers, WRHS. A sketch of that early period in NAM’s embrace of publicity devices can be found in Beder, Free Market Missionaries, pp. 14–22. 44. Tedlow, ‘The NAM and Public Relations during the New Deal’, p. 33. 45.  Outlined by Gable in ‘NAM: Influential Lobby or Kiss of Death?’, p. 262. The phrase ‘free enterprise’ was hardly used before 1935; see Wall, Inventing the “American Way”, pp. 48–49; and for a discussion of that first publicity turn, see pp. 48–57. 46. ‘Significant Highlights’, p. 11, Crawford Papers, WRHS. 47. Noted in Fones-Wolf, Selling Free Enterprise, p. 25. 48. From ‘Telling Industry’s Story: A Report of 4 Years Work by the NAM’, circa 1938, 845/III. The shorts were ‘America—Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow’, ‘Men and Machines’, ‘America Marching On’, and Frontiers of the Future’. Over 20,000 billboards carried NAM posters in 1937 alone; see ‘Significant Highlights’, p. 13, Crawford Papers, WRHS. 49.  Quoted in Tedlow, ‘The NAM and Public Relations during the New Deal’, p. 43. The La Follette Committee on Violations of Free Speech and the Rights of Labor findings are analyzed in Schriftgiesser’s The Lobbyist. 50. See ‘What is the Relation of the NIIC to the NAM?’, circa 1944, 845/ III; and ‘Origins and Objectives of NAM’ in ‘Digest of NIIC Activities’ leaflet, 1944, same box. Also Tedlow, ‘The NAM and Public Relations during the New Deal’, p. 32; Workman, ‘Manufacturing Power’, p. 288; and Fones-Wolf, Selling Free Enterprise, p. 25. 51. ‘Committee on Economic Policy: Purpose and Plan’, 27 January 1939, 273/I. The Committee followed closely the hearings of the Temporary National Economic Committee set-up by Congress; see ‘Significant Highlights’, p. 14, Crawford Papers, WRHS.

CHAPTER 3

Managing the Mobilization, 1938–1941

Our entrance into war would in all likelihood result – unless we are extremely alert – in the emergence of economic controls on a national scale which would gradually undermine and ultimately destroy the precious values of freedom which our forefathers fought for and established 160 years ago…let us be on guard constantly lest we be left ultimately with only the empty shell of what we are now arming to defend. (Henning W. Prentis, Jr., NAM President, December 1940)

The stimulation of industrial activity arising from the European war was of obvious relief to US manufacturers starved of orders for much of the Depression. British, French and American rearmament purchases for 1938–1940 massively invigorated the shipbuilding and aircraft industries of the US, and investment in civilian inventory experienced a spike in anticipation of a ‘preparedness boom’.1 Even so, the welcome improvement in the national economy brought increased profits but also additional headaches for corporate conservatives. It was the nature of the upturn that worried them the most. With it came the expectancy that, even if the US remained outside of the European imbroglio, some kind of national program for defense production was likely to follow. Up until that point, most US corporations were content with developing the civilian market and were reticent to become involved in defense work as that sector would inevitably invite heavy federal regulation as in the last war. The prospect of a rise in government involvement in the economy © The Author(s) 2020 C. Whitham, Corporate Conservatives Go to War, Palgrave Studies in American Economic History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43908-8_3

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naturally alarmed conservatives. It could distract them, primed as they were in the NAM and in Congress, from their full-scale assault on the edifice of the New Deal. Worse still, it could revive the fortunes of the New Dealers who were at last beginning to falter. Liberal demoralization was voiced in 1939 by loyalist Harold L. Ickes, Secretary for the Interior, who worried that conservatives might ‘destroy both American democracy and the social reforms of the New Deal’. Even the public blamed Roosevelt for the recent recession and wanted a ‘more conservative’ government.2 Hence there was considerable trepidation on both sides of the ideological spectrum when war eventually broke in Europe in September 1939. To begin with, it ended the political ‘stalemate’ forced by conservatives in industry and Congress that had arrested the New Deal experiment toward the end of the 1930s. The slow, two-year build-up to full American entry—the ‘defense’ or ‘preparedness’ period—exposed the US mobilization process to intense deliberation and public scrutiny which led to confusion and political hesitation.3 Just who would manage the mobilization? Certainly, Roosevelt had to move cautiously in his defense planning. It was not only dangerous to rile his political opponents in a forthcoming election year, but it was critical that Roosevelt did not undermine his future chances of winning the electorate to joining the war against the Axis by upsetting an economy that was—thanks to rising European purchases—steadily lurching out of recession toward recovery.4 And it is in that period, well before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor brought the US fully into the conflict, that the basic decisions over how the mobilization would be managed were taken and the main contours of the ‘war economy’, including the relationship between business, labor and government, would be drawn. For its part, the NAM was fast on the defensive to protect its interests. To monitor what the government was doing, and as part of its increasing use of scientific methods to inform policy, the NAM created in 1938 a Committee on National Defense and Industrial Mobilization.5 In the public sphere, once war had been declared in Europe in September 1939, the NAM was quick to issue a ‘no profiteering pledge’. This was expressly designed to counter the damning image of American industrialists that followed their involvement in the First World War, when they were labeled along with their friends in Wall Street as the ‘merchants of death’. Accusations of profiteering during 1914–1918 cast a long shadow that would diminish only slightly in 1939–1945.6 Industry’s ‘pledge’ was therefore intended to deny the enemies of industry old ammunition

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to throw at conservatives. In fact, the NAM was at pains to register that industry was in no way supportive of war, that domestic woes should take precedence, and that danger lurked in the federal control over industry that war would bring. In his radio broadcast titled ‘Industry Wants Peace’, on 21 September 1939, NAM President William B. Warner pronounced: ‘We must not be blinded by the thoughts of a quick boom in business; by a temporary answer to depression…Our first and foremost job is on the home front…Industry has no stomach for war…Industry opposes profiteering!’. His message to government was just as clear: The war situation must not be misused by anyone to attain objectives which the American people oppose under ordinary circumstances. Eternal vigilance must be exercised to assure us that the war emergency is not perverted into a trend towards altering the American way of life politically or economically. There will be those who, in the dark days which inevitably will arise out of the European situation, will advocate the abolition of the private enterprise system.7

Industrial caution toward entering the fight, therefore, had a peculiarly American twist born of recent experience. Even though it might be good for profits, open business support for intervention in the war would appear unseemly, and politically it was viewed as helping the New Dealers. The debate surrounding the ‘cash-and-carry’ compromise of late September 1939 over repealing the arms embargo on belligerents in order to help Britain, which would have benefited countless manufacturers but undermined US neutrality, was proof that American business as a whole appeared torn over whether a war was beneficial to them or not, either economically or politically.8 Besides, the priority for some manufacturers was the fast expanding domestic market after years of sluggishness.9 These considerations fostered the ‘isolationist’ line of most American conservatives, in the Republican Party and the NAM, who opposed any initiatives by an avowedly interventionist White House that might bring the US closer to direct participation in the European war, including aid to lonely Britain. Non-intervention remained the official policy of the Republican Party as it entered the race for the White House in November 1940, even as the war in Europe grew in menace. With the shocking collapse of continental Western Europe to the Wehrmacht in June 1940, the war came a good deal closer to the shores of the US, and the case for boosting American defenses was even harder to refute. Roosevelt began immediately to instigate basic measures to

44  C. WHITHAM

improve national defense in a production drive that would establish the pattern of government-business relations for the remainder of the war. Crucially, his actions were influenced by the fragile political climate. In June 1940, he appointed two prominent Republicans, lawyer Henry L. Stimson and newspaper editor Frank Knox, to lead his mobilization effort in the War and Navy departments respectively. In a general election year, this was as much a political move as it was practical. But for Roosevelt, the decision to enlist characters from outside the New Deal ranks, and in the case of Stimson a powerfully connected corporate lawyer, had a lasting impact on the course of the nation’s defense, then war, mobilization. The need for expediency, and the desire to secure the cooperation of suspicious industrialists in the fretful months before Pearl Harbor, led the military procurement departments—run by a stratum of pro-business figures—to award the bulk of defense contracts to the country’s largest business concerns.10 The lure of risk-free profits aided by subsidies, low-interest loans, tax right-offs and generous contracts assured for Roosevelt that enormous government funds would provide the facilities necessary for defense and for war. ‘If you are going to try to go to war’, as Stimson famously wrote, ‘you have got to let business make money out of the process or business won’t work’.11 The apocalyptic scenario depicted by NAM President Warner had not come to pass. The unique circumstances, foreign and domestic, of 1940 had granted business a reprieve from the regulatory grip of Washington as the nation slowly transitioned away from a peacetime economy. Instead of applying rigid control of the nation’s productive resources from a single, central body, Roosevelt had allowed US corporations to run comparatively freely as independent contractors working for a lone, highly benevolent customer represented by temporary agencies that were staffed, not by New Dealers, but by allies of big business.12 Defense boom notwithstanding, the guardian of free enterprise maintained its steely focus on combating any advance of those who sought the ‘abolition’ of corporate freedoms. Up until the US directly entered the war, the NAM pursued its campaign to defend private enterprise as energetically as it had before 1939. Indeed, the outbreak of war in Europe prompted NAM public relations officials to underscore the ‘inseparability’ of free enterprise with democratic freedoms currently being taken from Europeans in the hope that popular enthusiasm for the latter would lift public esteem for the former.13 In addition, in 1940 the NAM involved 8008 businessmen in 1494 communities across the

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US in its campaign ‘Mobilization for the Understanding of Private Enterprise’.14 The NAM also released in 1940 its Primer for Americans, a 73-page book which detailed all aspects of the ‘American Way’ for the ‘women of America’ because of the ‘influence their thought and action’ would have upon the events to come.15 On labor-management relations, in 1940 the NAM held its first two-week ‘Industrial Relations Institute’ at the University of Vermont for managers to improve their knowledge and perfect their systems regarding labor matters. The Institutes ran throughout the war period and into the 1950s.16 The NAM already had a strong track record in utilizing the country’s most popular medium, the radio. During the 1930s, its fifteen-minute show ‘The American Family Robinson’ regularly cast the New Deal as idealistic and was broadcast to 207 stations within six months, with almost 300 small networks still carrying the show by the end of the decade.17 Even by late 1940, these small radio stations were granting 7960 free hours of air time to the series. Non-network stations were easier for businesses to exploit, as being more desperate for programming they were less fearful of public outcry and were more likely to ignore federal restrictions on selling time for ‘controversial’ political or economic topics.18 But in 1941 the NAM received its first break into the major network radio stations when Mutual ran ‘Your Defense Reporter’ on Thursdays and NBC aired ‘Defense for America’ on Saturday nights. Both shows featured NAM reporters with stories from the principal manufacturing centers that highlighted business contribution to the war effort and revealed the ‘American spirit of free enterprise’.19 More than fifty thousand letters were mailed to NAM ‘friends’ and over twenty-two thousand posters were attached to bulletin boards ‘in every effective public place’ (mainly factories and schools) to promote ‘Defense for America’.20 The NAM also sponsored one of the most conservative commentators of the era, Fulton Lewis, Jr., who from 1937 until the late 1950s regularly championed free enterprise and condemned government intervention in the economy as ‘un-American’. At the height of his popularity in 1943 Lewis was ranked as the nation’s fourth most popular radio commentator and reached approximately ten million listeners.21 The aggressiveness of the NAM in maintaining its assault on New Deal liberalism in the early ‘emergency’ period was best illustrated by what became known as the ‘textbook controversy’. In the spring of 1940, the NAM began what it described as ‘Mobilization Activities’ to ‘sell free enterprise’ across the country. By August 1940 there

46  C. WHITHAM

were more than 6830 ‘sentinels’—persons active in promoting free enterprise—engaged in over sixteen thousand ‘assignments’ in 1338 communities. The program was so successful that the NAM decided it needed to develop a fuller appreciation of the free enterprise system in school educators as, according to NAM President Henning Prentis, Jr., ‘creeping collectivism’ was finding its way into schools through social science textbooks.22 On 10 December 1940, the NAM unveiled its program regarding education which asked employers to become familiar with the ‘problems’ of education in their localities, to motivate local businessmen to approach educational authorities, and to ‘encourage’ educators to seek a better understanding of private enterprise so that this system could be taught more effectively ‘as an indispensable concept of the American way of life’.23 The NAM hired Liberty Leaguer Ralph W. Robey, Assistant Professor of Banking at Columbia University (later Associate Editor of Newsweek), to write abstracts of textbooks in ‘general use’ in American schools in the areas of history, sociology and economics which could be used by NAM members to identify any of ‘questionable merit’ that were being used in their communities. In three months, Robey had completed twelve hundred pages containing 563 abstracts, each one consisting of an outline of the book, a summary of its contents and a selection of quotations. From March 1941, the NAM began disseminating the abstracts.24 However, soon the entire scheme was hit by a controversy so fierce that one contemporary historian claimed it was ‘doubtful if NAM had ever before been subjected to such bitter condemnation’.25 In an impromptu interview with the New York Times in February 1941, Robey complained that the textbooks currently being read in public schools were ‘scholarly incompetent’ and held ‘in derision or contempt’ the free enterprise system. The New York Times placed the interview on its front page and sparked a series of outcries not only from the liberal press but also the editors of The Christian Century. The NAM, mindful of its recent censure by the La Follette investigation for its political lobbying, publicly distanced itself from Robey’s comments. NAM stated that it neither shared nor disapproved of his views and warned its members to exercise ‘extreme care’ in using the abstracts. Yet, the 1941 NAM President Walter D. Fuller (Curtis Publishing Company) unapologetically countered that American manufacturers ‘functioning in a private enterprise system, have a justifiable interest in what is being taught to the nation’s youth about that system’. Robey joined the permanent staff and later became NAM’s Chief Economist.26

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Elsewhere, caution about the broader consequences of drifting toward a centralized, defense economy was expressed in several NAM publications throughout 1940, especially as American industry was well underway producing materials for defense by the fall.27 In the summer, Congress approved billions of dollars for ship and aircraft construction and Roosevelt signed the ‘Two-Ocean Naval Expansion Act’ to massively increase American sea and air defenses. There was cautious relief that so far the mobilization had brought with it none of the horrors of government regimentation and control that many conservatives had anticipated. At least not yet. Republicans were naturally disappointed, and corporate conservatives not a little alarmed, by the loss of their presidential candidate to Roosevelt for a third time in a row in the election of November 1940. The economic recovery undermined Republican candidate Wendell Willkie’s claim that federal restrictions on business weakened the defense effort in a campaign which grew increasingly extreme in its hyperbole toward Roosevelt’s ‘dictatorship’ and his desire to lead America into war. Still, the incumbent’s margin of victory was less than half that of 1936, and there were Democratic losses in the Senate; but overall control of Congress still eluded the Republicans.28 A NAM report noted that, despite the loss, Willkie had polled better in the 1940 election than all previous Republicans against Roosevelt, and that Americans now ‘favor’ the private enterprise system rather than despise it, boasting ‘that phase of our job has been well done’.29 Notwithstanding the positive spin, it was clear to conservatives that, freed of electoral constraints, Roosevelt would expand the federal hold on the mobilization effort as he inched the nation closer to the Allied cause. For certain, Roosevelt moved swiftly to exploit American productive capacity, a large proportion of which was already being used to keep the British afloat as they stood alone against the Axis. Proclaiming the US the ‘arsenal of democracy’, in December 1940 Roosevelt embarked on a three-month battle to win Congressional support for his Lend-Lease program of aid to all those fighting the Axis, but especially the overwhelmed British. The scheme replaced the ‘cash-and-carry’ arrangement with a US commitment to supply materiel ‘up-front’ with payment to be arranged after the war and on the condition that recipients agreed to extend favorable treatment to American goods and services in any post-war international settlement. Although the Lend-Lease proposals contained a large degree of business hard-headedness, many Americans viewed the scheme as bringing the US disturbingly close to

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joining the war, and it would take some months for Roosevelt’s formula to complete its passage through Congress. For the NAM, any enlargement of America’s role in the war raised more intensely questions about the scope, direction and impact of the mounting defense effort not only upon industry but, more crucially, the outlook for private enterprise. These concerns were directly addressed in three keynote speeches made by the NAM leadership at the Annual Congress of American Industry in December 1940. The meeting was given the flag-waving tag ‘safe-guarding America’s future through production for defense’, but the underlying theme evidenced in the major speeches was the danger of government encroachment on the economy arising from the mobilization, a preoccupation which for the first time replaced the New Deal at the annual get-together as the primary target of the NAM’s ire.30 Purveyors of hate on both sides of the political spectrum were inclined to tone-down their rhetoric out of fear of being classed as Nazi agents.31 That did not, however, soften the addresses at the Congress, which were as alarmist and wholly negative as those enunciated at previous national gatherings. That was evidenced in the opening speech on ‘total preparedness for America’s future’ by NAM President Henning Prentis, Jr. He began with a stout warning of the rising perils to the ‘free’ American way of life, both from without and from within. He railed against ‘state socialism’ and branded any whiff of rising government control over American lives as akin to despotism: ‘All of the collectivists – socialists, communists, Nazis, fascists, new liberals – whether they recognize that fact or not, are blood brothers under the skin’. Prentis warned of the menacing clouds looming over America: ‘our entrance into war would in all likelihood result – unless we are extremely alert – in the emergence of economic controls on a national scale which would gradually undermine and ultimately destroy the precious values of freedom which our forefathers fought for and established 160 years ago’. Prentis acknowledged that, if ‘endangered’, the US should defend itself, but emphasized that Americans must be ‘on guard constantly lest we be left ultimately with only the empty shell of what we are now arming to defend’. And although industry had pledged its support to the government’s defense program, Prentis worried that Roosevelt would ‘reach out beyond those physical areas in which our national interests are directly at stake?’ In all Prentis bemoaned the government’s lack of general coordination, delegated authority and long-range planning to avoid a post-defense slump. Such measures, he argued, would include restrictions on ‘ordinary’

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government spending, new revenue found for defense purposes, simplification of the tax laws, the development of ‘new enterprises that serve peacetime needs’ where the defense program permits, and ‘every feasible step be taken to encourage the use of private capital in defense industries’. Prentis also called for managers to ‘get to know’ their employees to demonstrate that ‘we are human beings too’. For Prentis, however, the ‘ultimate issue’ was, regardless of meeting the defense effort, whether ‘we are going to be able to maintain permanently the free institutions of our American republic’.32 The address by NAM Vice President J. Howard Pew (Sun Oil), titled ‘Preserving the Private Enterprise System’, lacked the sophistication of Prentis and was little more than a meandering diatribe against government economic planning that would not have been out of place if delivered at the height of the New Deal. Unlike Prentis, Pew offered no qualifying context, such as the defense emergency, to explain government policy, nor did he offer any suggestions for how private enterprise might be ‘preserved’. He began by likening liberal economists to ‘quack doctors’, who would ‘have us believe that the Government ought to plan everything for us and control all our activities’.33 The opinion of the NAM on international matters was no less negativistic, or surprising. That area was dealt with by NAM Director Brigadier-General Robert E. Wood (Chairman Sears, Roebuck & Co.) who in his examination of the pros and cons for the US entering directly into the European war epitomized the profoundly isolationist reasoning of most conservatives. Wood, an ultra-conservative who chaired the arch-isolationist group America First Committee, owed his celebrity status to being the first executive from the retail industry to join the NAM Executive in over a decade.34 Wood rejected as ‘fallacious’ what he considered were the three main arguments for US entry, namely that Britain was the first line of defense for America, that without Britain it would be ‘impossible’ for a free competitive industrial system in the US to defeat the totalitarians, and that the war should be entered because fascist ideology is ‘repugnant’ to American ideals. Beyond supplying aid to the British in their stand against the Germans—a conflict which he believed would most likely end in a negotiated peace—Wood was convinced that to enter the war ‘our political and economic systems must necessarily undergo profound transformations’, meaning that the sacrifices the American people would have to make to eradicate the Nazis would be too great: ‘I would unhesitantly urge my country to make every

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sacrifice to defend the United States or North America and part if not all of South America, but I am opposed to the American people making these tremendous sacrifices, risking their very system to interfere in the quarrels of Europe and Asia, old, sick and overpopulated continents with ancient wounds that cannot be healed. It is up to the American people to decide whether they want to make those sacrifices to preserve, not England, but the British Empire, and to help regulate Europe and Asia’.35 The general mood of corporate conservatives prior to December 1941 was therefore a cautious one, based on practical as well as ideological considerations, regarding the palpable drift toward war. They were largely preoccupied with defending against the old demons of federal regulation and as weapons utilized the same language of fear and confrontation that had characterized their previous battles. But now the terrain was different. The NAM was in an ambiguous position of opposing war because it would strengthen government, but not wanting to appear ‘unpatriotic’ in objecting to military preparedness or missing out on directing the economic benefits of the mobilization. At the end of 1940, public relations executives from the NAM’s publicity wing, the NIIC, proposed a solution. They suggested that industry might be able to have its cake and eat it by ‘encouraging industry to publicize its opposition to war, and at the same time publicize industry’s fullest contribution to physical defense’.36 The NAM could maintain its hostility to US intervention in the European war even while it advertised where its members could bid for war contracts.37 In January 1941, the NAM began its ‘Preparedness through Production’ drive which culminated in a nationwide inventory of plant facilities ready for immediate defense production, including 18,000 previously un-surveyed factories. On 1 May 1941, the NAM passed the inventory to the government’s Office of Production Management shortly before Roosevelt ordered that production for defense be conducted on a full-time, non-stop basis.38 Extolling the positive material contribution of industry to the defense mobilization was also a way of balancing the negative political campaign by conservatives to limit the power of the executive. A potent expression of that strategy was the outcome of the debate over Roosevelt’s grand proposal to ‘lend’ materials to the Allies. After considerable opposition from conservatives and others in Congress, on 11 March 1941 the L ­ end-Lease Act was passed into law and an initial appropriation of $7 billion was approved. Conservatives nevertheless won several

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amendments to the Act to which they added as the war progressed, such as a requirement that formal accounting of Lend-Lease funds be made before new disbursements were allowed. That granted Congress a continuing and important influence over US foreign economic policy during and immediately after the war. The NAM suggested that Lend-Lease ‘may in fact be a vehicle for attaining a new world order rather than merely a means for taking an IOU from a friendly nation’. The terms of the Act, it continued, granted the US ‘a powerful lever in effecting the sort of reciprocal trade agreements long championed by Secretary of State Hull’.39 Meanwhile, the economy benefited from the steady rise in military production during 1941 as Lend-Lease orders, first to Britain then an overrun Soviet Union, were placed in mounting quantities.40 The overall reaction of business to the Lend-Lease provisions was therefore positive, an outcome made easier by the retreat of intense fear of stringent wartime controls.41 Members of the NAM were ‘urged’ by NAM News to fly the flag over their factories ‘as an expression of industry’s determination to serve the nation’, and in the summer of 1941 the NAM organized a tour of eleven top journalists of defense plants authorized by the War and Navy Departments.42 The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 finally ended the quandary, for the NAM and all Americans, over remaining out of the war. Isolationists were silenced and it was ‘all hands on deck’ against the Pacific menace. The NAM pledged industry’s ‘full cooperation’ to Roosevelt, who called for a doubling of what had already been spent on the defense mobilization which paid for the last bout of factory construction and pushed existing plants to capacity.43 As far as business was concerned, the entry of the US fully into the war accelerated but did not alter the basic structural contours of what was already an unprecedented expansion of US industrial power. The greatest impact of the mobilization on the economy after Pearl Harbor was in the conversion of civilian to military production. So far, the rearmament process had touched American consumers very lightly, and mostly in the positive. Now the country faced centralized control of its domestic market-place—a ‘command economy’. That meant the change was more qualitative than quantitative, adding to the complexities of managing a ‘total war’ that involved all of society. Meanwhile, the battle in Washington over control of the mobilization between a ‘volatile mix’ of corporate advisors and New Dealers intensified.44

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While the Japanese attack settled some of the political ambiguities with which conservatives wrestled in the preceding months, it did not alter the fundamental problem of controlling relations between government, business and labor. Indeed, under the conditions of ‘total war’ there was a greater chance their relations would worsen. As the NAM was already aware, the wider impact of the mobilization on American society was likely to be paradoxical. On the one hand, the production effort inevitably boosted the standing of America’s business class. Factories were hungry for workers, firms jostled for contracts and order books everywhere were full. Finally, the country was being lifted from the doldrums of the Depression. The decision by Roosevelt to tread softly in his handling of private business in the nation’s mobilization effort predictably encouraged a renewed confidence that the voice of private enterprise—and not that of government—was at last in the ascendancy. Corporate profits for 1940–1941 were up 20 percent, and NAM members were among the main beneficiaries of the subsidized expansion. Fifteen of the top twenty-five most expensive plants of the war were built and managed by long-standing NAM contributors, such as DuPont, US Steel, Chrysler and General Motors, and NAM members attracted more than half of the largest prime contracts.45 No wonder that the appeal of the corporate conservatives was on the up. Membership of the NAM continued to rise after its boost of 1938, with an additional thousand joining in 1939, five hundred more in 1940 and over seven hundred in 1941, totaling 7765 members covering two million workers—almost a fifth of the total manufacturing workforce46—NAM’s highest total ever. By 1941, the NAM had a professional staff of more than two hundred serving in eighty standing and special committees.47 Even the conservative old guard, like J. Howard Pew, sensed a change in the national mood and that an opportunity was to be had in using the emergency to elevate the standing of business: ‘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’.48 On the other hand, the amplification of the production drive to an ­all-out war effort promised further centralization and an even greater federal presence in directing the economy on all levels. This would place more power in the executive and foster an equally powerful conviction that government planning and regulation, not free-market enterprise, was the answer to economic stability. A poll of corporate executives

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taken shortly before Pearl Harbor revealed that three-quarters of them believed that Roosevelt was using the emergency as a ‘pretext’ to extend the objectives of the New Deal.49 In other words, a new war against the Axis may have just begun, but the old war against the New Deal was far from over. The business world also had some way to go to improve its image with the American public. A NAM-sponsored Opinion Research Corporation poll recorded in May 1941 that 42 percent of Americans felt profiteering was taking place, a figure that had risen to 72 percent by May 1942. A special leaflet was issued in which the NAM pledged itself to present the ‘true facts’ about industrial profits to the public, as the stakes for getting that right were high: ‘the people want what we want – a thriving prosperous nation. We must align these people on our side – now – so that we may find them with us after the war is won’.50 Corporate conservatives therefore found themselves in a dual reality as the war effort screamed into gear, enjoying a much-needed burst of esteem and a sense of power not felt since before the Depression, but still facing a wary public, a hostile administration and an equally renewed sense of confidence in the ranks of their liberal opponents. Unfortunately for the NAM, the first, and most critical, step in establishing the balance of power between the government and business for the duration of the war effort came along sooner than expected. Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt called for a national labor-management conference to establish their relationship as the nation mobilized for all-out war. A surprised NAM immediately condemned the meeting as undermining the powers of Congress, the locus of conservative political attention, to determine labor policy. It was apparent that Roosevelt had called the conference to undermine the progress of anti-labor legislation that was close to being ratified by the Congress.51 The task of staffing such a gathering would automatically have fallen to the premier employers’ organization, but the NAM’s rejection of the conference helped Roosevelt to sidestep the conservative group altogether. Instead, Roosevelt appointed business leaders more sympathetic to his administration to arrange the meeting, such as moderate William L. Batt (SKF Industries), of the Business Advisory Council (BAC). The BAC was devised in 1933 by then Secretary of Commerce, Daniel C. Roper, as a platform for business to inform economic policy. The BAC was largely ignored by Roosevelt and lost credibility among corporate liberal supporters of the New Deal, and by 1942 under Texan ­conservative-Democrat Secretary of Commerce Jesse H. Jones, the BAC

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comprised mainly moderate-minded business leaders who, like Jones, were not liberals but were willing to work within the parameters of the New Deal agenda.52 Now, as a means for bypassing the conservatives, the BAC had new-found utility for the administration. Even though Batt consulted the NAM and the USCC over representation, business leaders at the conference were predominantly moderate in disposition. Still, even with its moderate loading the conference failed to deliver business-labor harmony despite the national emergency. Business leaders insisted that government be refused the power to impose the closed shop, and faced with the collapse of his initiative Roosevelt vested such power in a new National War Labor Board (NWLB) which, comprised of representatives from management, labor and uniquely the public, offered an apparently balanced solution.53 The president had tactically outwitted business leaders at the conference and the NWLB was granted their reluctant approval.54 Despite Roosevelt’s claims that the NWLB sprang from an agreement between business and labor, the NAM took immediate exception to the president’s new ‘alphabet agency’, which for much of the war was directed by liberal Democrat attorney William H. Davis, as just another incarnation of the despised NLRB of the New Deal era. The NAM remained steadfast in its opposition to any federal imposition of labor rights such as the closed shop, war emergency or otherwise. Again, that inflexibility ensured that NAM members were bypassed for selection onto the NWLB, which contained no conservatives.55 The isolation of the NAM was accelerated over the coming months when the anti-labor legislation fell in Congress and the first pronouncements of the NWLB were issued. Even though the NWLB stopped shy of sanctioning the closed shop as conservatives had feared (a meek ‘maintenance-of-membership’ rule was declared), labor avoided any erosion of its Wagner Act protections, such as the right to organize and use collective bargaining, in return for a non-binding ‘no-strike’ pledge.56 The NAM loudly condemned the NWLB for overstepping its authority. A NAM advertisement in the press warned that ‘these decisions must not be allowed to become a precedent if we are to win the war’, and NAM President William P. Witherow likened NWLB policies to ‘dictatorship’, placing opposition to them alongside the nation’s fight against the Axis.57 Such extreme language underscored the inflexibility of the NAM, albeit caught off-guard by Roosevelt, and potentially condemned the

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organization to the periphery of national decision-making, much as it had been during the Depression, over labor and economic policy. As Workman stated, the reaction of the NAM had gravely misjudged the national mood and the Labor-Management Conference ‘marked the nadir of the organization’s political influence’.58 Witherow, however, was confident that all was not lost. He suggested that the war might actually slow the excesses of the liberal planners: ‘the war has so shaken official Washington that even the most idealistic of economic planners recognize the threat to our national safety that will result from revolutionary changes to our social and industrial structure’. Even so, Witherow maintained, ‘such revolutionary adjustments will be proposed’.59 The national mobilization had begun well for the NAM, for all its misgivings. Political constraints meant that Roosevelt had been unable, or was unwilling, to upset his opponents in an election year and allowed big business considerable freedom to run the production effort with a ‘light touch’ approach by the administration. It was certainly not ‘free enterprise’, but the war economy of Roosevelt was a far cry from the regimented, highly centralized systems erected by Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Imperial Japan, the Soviet Union or besieged Britain. Still, the Labor-Management Conference marked the limits of Roosevelt’s bipartisanship. The president was willing to go only so far in appeasing business interests for the overriding goal of winning the war. His renewed confidence from success at the polls, and now as the commander-in-chief of a total war effort on an unprecedented scale, emboldened Roosevelt to exile the corporate conservatives from meaningful decision-making about the production drive. In the coming months, Roosevelt would fight to keep the conservatives at bay and to maintain his hold on the war economy. Moreover, the vitalization of the corporate liberals due to the mobilization, an added concern for the NAM, had gathered pace and, as will become clear, their long-range plans for the future were reaching proportions the NAM could no longer ignore. The immediate task facing the NAM in 1942, smarting at its rejection from the organs of influence, was to devise fresh ways to transmit the agenda of private enterprise that could compete with the inspirational and increasingly sophisticated packaging of the liberal planners.

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Notes











1. Wilson, Creative Destruction, pp. 50–59; and Vatter, The US Economy in World War II, p. 7. The ‘cash-and-carry’ provisions of November 1939 allowed France and Britain to place orders worth $2.9 billion. In terms of unemployment and economic activity, 1940 was still considered a ‘depression year’. 2. Wilson, Creative Destruction, p. 46. The results were from a late 1939 Gallup Poll. 3. Collins, The Business Response to Keynes, p. 49. That theme was later developed by Brian Waddell in ‘Corporate Influence and World War II: Resolving the New Deal Political Stalemate’, Journal of Policy History, Vol. 11, No. 3 (1999), pp. 223–256; and Waddell, The War Against the New Deal, pp. 43–52. 4. Blum, V Was for Victory, p. 117. By early 1940, the unemployment rate was dropping and profits were on the rise; see Hugh Rockoff, America’s Economic Way of War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 162–163. 5. See ‘The National Association of Manufacturers: Historical Highlights’ (circa 1978), 225/XVI. 6. Discussed in Koistinen, Arsenal of World War II, pp. 433–434. 7. ‘Industry Wants Peace: An Address by William B. Warner broadcast over the Mutual Broadcasting System’, 21 September 1939 (leaflet), 217/ XVI. 8. ‘Cash-and-carry’ was the politically acceptable alternative to open support for belligerents. It allowed them to purchase goods but only if they paid in cash and supplied the transportation. The muddled attitude of American business toward the war was discussed by Stromberg who observed that, before 1939, American business generally was still fighting domestic battles and ‘had not formulated a very clear notion of its foreign policy’; Roland Stromberg, ‘American Business and the Approach of War, 1935–1941’, Journal of Economic History, Vol. 13 (1953), p. 63. On business confusion prior to spring 1940 see pp. 70–72. 9. That was especially the case for the motor giants, who resisted government requests for them to abandon domestic production which did not take place until the spring of 1942. See Winkler, Home Front USA, pp. 12–13; Also Klein, A Call to Arms, pp. 241–245; and Wilson, Creative Destruction, pp. 96–97 for a summary of early business reservations about war. 10. The War and Navy departments were staffed by members of the top corporate law firms and investment bankers; see Koistinen, Arsenal of World War II, pp. 39–40 and pp. 44–45. For a longer treatment of Roosevelt’s

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building of a defense ‘coalition’ see Michael G. Carew, Building the Arsenal: The American Industrial Mobilization for World War II, 1938– 1942 (New York: University Press of America, 2010), pp. 59–69. 11.  Quoted in Blum, V Was for Victory, p. 122. The substantial concessions awarded to business are outlined in Waddell, The War Against the New Deal, pp. 55–56. Most of the production was organized using a ­‘government-owned, contractor-operated’ system; for a full explanation see Wilson, Creative Destruction, pp. 59–89. 12. Waddell, in his detailed account of the early mobilization, insisted that Roosevelt’s need for a ‘rapprochement’ with business led him to limit the size of government administration and instead rely on temporary agencies ‘heavily staffed with business advisors’; Waddell, The War Against the New Deal, pp. 56–57. 13. That pre-war transition is documented in Wall, Inventing the “American Way”, pp. 58–61. 14. Both mentioned in ‘NAM Past and Present: Presentation made to NAM New Regional Personnel by Vada Horsch, Assistant Secretary of NAM’, 4 September 1951, 225/XVI. 15. Primer for Americans, prepared by Ryllis and Omar Goslin (NAM, 1940), 846/III. NAM also published Jobs and the Woman, by Ruth M. Leach (Vice President of IBM) for the NAM Group Relations Department; from ‘Bibliography of Economic and Social Material’, 1946, 208/XV. 16. Op cit., ‘NAM Past and Present’. 17.  Elizabeth Fones-Wolf, ‘Creating a Favorable Business Climate: Corporations and Radio Broadcasting, 1934–1954’, Business History Review, Vol. 73, No. 2 (Summer 1999), p. 230. 18. Stations were threatened with losing their licenses if they aired ‘controversial’ topics, but few licenses were actually revoked; see Fones-Wolf, ‘Corporations and Radio Broadcasting’, p. 234. 19. Quoted in Fones-Wolf, ‘Corporations and Radio Broadcasting’, p. 232; also Wilson, Creative Destruction, pp. 100–101. Material on a 10-minute film called ‘Defense for America’ (Paramount) can be found in 206 and 207/XV. 20. From a high-quality booklet for the show ‘Defense for America: A Report to the Nation by NAM and NBC’, 1941, 199/I. 21. See Fones-Wolf, ‘Corporations and Radio Broadcasting’, p. 238. 22. S. Alexander Rippa, ‘The Textbook Controversy and the Free Enterprise Campaign, 1940–1941’, History of Education Journal, Vol. 9, No. 3 (Spring 1958), pp. 50–51. 23. Ibid., p. 52.

58  C. WHITHAM 24. Ibid., pp. 52–54. The NAM sent any ten abstracts free of charge on request, with additional abstracts costing three cents up to a maximum of five dollars. 25. Ibid., p. 55. 26. Ibid., pp. 54–58. 27.  They included the pamphlets ‘Can We Afford Another Post-War Depression’; ‘The 1941 Challenge to the Association’; ‘Internal Prosperity Essential for External Defense’; ‘Industry, Speak Up’; ‘The Real Issue We must Decide’; ‘A Stoic America’; ‘The World Ahead’; and ‘Industry Meets the Challenge of Defense’. 28. The election is covered in Winkler, Home Front USA, pp. 93–94; and Jeffries, Wartime America, pp. 146–152. 29. Tedlow, ‘The NAM and Public Relations during the New Deal’, p. 40. 30. That was the first annual meeting since Roosevelt’s inauguration not to reference directly the New Deal; see Gable, ‘A Political Analysis of an Employers Association’, p. 134. 31. Noted in Wall, Inventing the “American Way”, p. 105. 32.  ‘Total Preparedness for America’s Future’, Address by H. W. Prentis, Jr. (leaflet), 11 December 1940 (leaflet), 222/XVI. 33. ‘Preserving the Private Enterprise System’, Address by J. Howard Pew (leaflet), 12 December 1940, 222/XVI. 34. Noted in Burch, ‘The NAM as an Interest Group’, p. 114. 35. ‘What Should Be Our Policy in the Present European War?’, Address by Brigadier-General Robert E. Wood (leaflet), 13 December 1940, 222/ XVI. These apprehensions were noticeable in the program adopted by the congress which offered nothing new from the stable of NAM policies. It stressed preservation of private enterprise and individual initiative, and a cocktail of frugal government spending as a measure to avoid a post-war depression, while also protecting industry with tariffs and enabling trade expansion after the war; see ‘The Future of America: A Program adopted by the Congress of American Industry, December 1940’ (NAM, 1940). 36.  From ‘Certain Recommendations in Connection with NAM’s Public Information Program in 1941’, 845/III. 37. See Jonathan Soffer, ‘The National Association of Manufacturers and the Militarization of American Conservatism’, Business History Review, Vol. 75 (Winter 2001), p. 780. 38. See ‘The National Association of Manufacturers: Historical Highlights’ (circa 1978), 225/XVI. 39. NAM News, 13 June 1942, 846/III. 40. A useful précis of the Lend-Lease program with figures is in Vatter, The US Economy and World War II, pp. 30–31; for its effect on the US economy see pp. 3–4.

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41. For business reaction to Lend-Lease, see Stromberg, ‘American Business and the Approach of War’, p. 73; and for relief over Roosevelt’s controls approach see pp. 74–75. 42. ‘Significant Highlights’, p. 16, Crawford Papers, WRHS. 43.  The NAM wrote Roosevelt immediately after Pearl Harbor offering ‘two ships for every one sunk’; ‘Significant Highlights’, p. 17, Crawford Papers, WRHS. 44. The phrase is Waddell’s in The War Against the New Deal, p. 70. 45. Figures in Wilson, Creative Destruction, pp. 64–67 and p. 161. 46.  Total manufacturing workforce in 1941 was around 11 million: see chart ‘Total US Manufacturing Employment Since 1939’, Bureau of Labor Statistics, in https://i1.wp.com/mathscinotes.com/wp-content/ uploads/2017/01/ManEmployment.png?ssl=1. 47. Figures from ‘NAM Membership—Number and Dues’, 225/XVI. 48. Vigilance Today for a Free Enterprise Tomorrow (NAM, 1941), 846/III. 49. Quoted in Wilson, Creative Destruction, p. 98. 50. ‘The Public’s View of War and Profits: An Address by J. A. Hartley’ (leaflet), May 1942, 218/XVI. 51. The Bill had already passed the House and was ready for ‘quick approval’ by the Senate; see Workman, ‘Manufacturing Power’, p. 284. 52. On origins see Kim McQuaid, Big Business and Presidential Power: From FDR to Reagan (New York: William Morrow and Co., 1982), pp. 30–34; Domhoff and Webber, Class and Power in the New Deal, pp. 113–115; and Whitham, Rise of the Corporate Moderates, pp. 16–17. 53.  For the intended scope and early work of the NWLB see James B. Atleson, ‘The Law of Collective Bargaining and Wartime Labor Relations’, in Sally M. Miller and Daniel A. Cornford (eds), American Labor in the Era of World War II (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1995), pp. 46–58. 54. Detailed in Workman, ‘Manufacturing Power’, pp. 284–285. 55. Business representatives were either corporate liberals or from the BAC; see Nelson Lichtenstein, Labor’s War at Home: The CIO in World War II (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 52. For more on the NWLB see James B. Atleson, Labor and the Wartime State: Labor Relations and Law during World War II (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1998). 56.  Workers automatically became union members after 15 days of being hired; See Lichtenstein, Labor’s War at Home, pp. 79–81. 57. See Workman, ‘Manufacturing Power’, p. 286. 58. Ibid., p. 284. 59. ‘Remarks of Witherow to NAM Board’, 28 January 1942, 235/XIII.

CHAPTER 4

Coming in from the Cold: The Start of Post-war Planning, 1942

We know that there are those who would like nothing better than to use the war and post-war readjustment period to remold our society in a collective or state socialist form. We cannot combat this threat negatively. We must have and publicly promote a concrete and constructive post-war program. (William P. Witherow, NAM President, August 1942)

So far, the peculiar dynamics of the war mobilization had posed new openings, and new challenges, to the ambitions of the corporate conservatives. Large numbers of NAM members were benefiting directly from the huge upsurge in federal orders for weapons and munitions since before Pearl Harbor and many more were profiting from the uplift this had caused in the wider economy. Within a year, the US was producing more than Germany, Italy and Japan combined. Industry churned out nearly twice as much in 1942 as it did in 1939.1 Capitalism was working again, unemployment was shrinking and wages were rising. Yet the treatment of business conservatives at the Labor-Management Conference in December 1941 showed that there were limits to how much influence Roosevelt would allow his long-time conservative rivals over the direction of this great economic recovery. The inevitable expansion of the US military commitment to prosecute the war would bring with it the unavoidable mushrooming of federal bureaucracy to command those forces. Fear of being completely isolated from the key agencies that would guide

© The Author(s) 2020 C. Whitham, Corporate Conservatives Go to War, Palgrave Studies in American Economic History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43908-8_4

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the biggest industrial mobilization in the nation’s history, and worse still leave those agencies—which carried the potential to radically influence the future economic direction of the country—to the mercy of New Deal liberals in the administration, was on its own enough to trigger a pause for thought among corporate conservatives. After all, the surge in federal spending was providing the massive countercyclical stimulus the economy had lacked for years, just as the New Dealers’ favorite economist Keynes had forecast. Roosevelt had never really committed to Keynesianism during the 1930s, but the example of war carried the obvious potential for encouraging deficit spending as a strategy for managing the economy in peace. That disquiet was voiced by NAM National Vice President Donaldson Brown in July 1942, who repeated the suspicions raised by Warner more than two years earlier that those with ‘ulterior motives’ were going to ‘seize the occasion to contend that the wartime system under which industrial production has worked such wonders could be extended and applied with equal benefit and effectiveness in the post-war economy’.2 A good many of the people to whom Brown was referring could be found in the liberal business groups formed in the years prior to the outbreak of World War II. Foremost among them was the Twentieth Century Fund (TCF) and the National Planning Association (NPA). The TCF was born at the tail end of the Progressive Era in 1919 by Boston retail giant Edward A. Filene, who dedicated his band of business, academic and political liberals to the study of progressive social and economic reform.3 The NPA, established in 1934 by Lewis L. Lorwin of the Brookings Institute and George Soule, editor of the New Republic, was the embodiment of New Deal liberalism.4 Both groups held that private enterprise could no longer be relied upon to safely manage an advanced capitalist economy and that centralized control by the state was therefore necessary. They endorsed some type of sustained Keynesian-style fiscal intervention by the government to work alongside the marketplace to maintain a stable national economy. The two groups shared many leading members and often duplicated research findings and policy recommendations. By the start of 1942, the TCF and the NPA had distributed no fewer than fifteen publications since the outbreak of war in Europe, a third of which dealt with post-war planning, three on international affairs and the rest on the domestic impact of the mobilization. Those studies of the post-war era, such as Guides for Post-War Planning by the NPA and Paths to Tomorrow by the TCF (both in 1941), offered a tantalizing

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glimpse into a future based on a ‘mixed economy’ of public and private enterprise which offered endless peace and prosperity for all.5 That vision formed the backbone of The Road We Are Traveling released in April 1942, the first in a six-part series of short books written by the renowned liberal popularizer Stuart Chase on behalf of the TCF. It would make the New York Times best-seller list for several weeks.6 And the growing interest in how the post-war world might look involved more than the usual suspects. In the absence of a direct government steer from a White House nervous about Congress, even the Commerce Department, run by staunch conservative Jesse Jones, began to explore in 1942 the field of post-war planning with its own team of business sophisticates. Another problem for the NAM was that not all the nation’s business elite currently being drawn into Washington to organize the war drive—and even to lay plans for the peace—were reliably ‘conservative’. Roosevelt, who did not want to aggravate those he relied upon to produce the instruments of victory or their representatives in a Congress he doubted would support much executive expansion,7 craftily selected business representatives to lead the mobilization with a moderate disposition that he believed he could trust and who had tolerated his New Deal experiment—just as he had done in choosing interventionist Republicans Stimson and Knox and in favoring the BAC at the ­Labor-Management Conference. That muddied the terrain for the NAM as it blunted accusations that the administration was ignoring the voice of business or was only padding its agencies with card-carrying New Dealers. Roosevelt was willing to hand over the oars to big business, but he was not about to allow those who had plotted against him for over a decade control over the steering of the entire ship. So it was that the first major body created by Roosevelt to exercise federal responsibility over the national mobilization in January 1942, the War Production Board (WPB), was led by a member of the moderate BAC, Donald M. Nelson of the department store chain Sears, Roebuck and Company. The appointment of Nelson, as in Stimson and Knox, made it difficult for the NAM (at least initially) to find fault. As the NAM president Witherow commented at the time: ‘Even though he may get along with the New Dealers better than most of the rest of us, Don Nelson, after all, is a businessman, and I am glad that it is a businessman who will get a “first crack” at handling this war production problem with the authority needed to handle it properly’.8 The top posts in the WPB, and the various federal experiments that replaced it, were mostly

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filled by moderates from the business world. Total corporate staffing of the WPB rose from 310 to 805 within its first twelve months.9 For all that, Roosevelt was not inclined to overhaul his entire administration to ameliorate the business community. Less comfortable for the NAM was the selection of New Dealer Leon Henderson and ‘pragmatic’ Keynesian economist John K. Galbraith as his deputy to supervise the Office of Price Administration (OPA). Viewed by New Dealers as a counterweight to the many other corporate-dominated mobilization agencies, the OPA operated as an independent body to control wartime inflation from January 1942. Its sweeping powers to set price ceilings placed that branch, alongside the WPB (despite Witherow’s optimism), as the agencies most despised by the NAM as the war progressed.10 Elsewhere, corporate liberals, moderates and academics alike could be found in a variety of government departments keen to make their mark in war and post-war planning. This included US Attorney General Francis Biddle (TCF), Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle (TCF), Assistant Secretary of Commerce William Clayton (NPA and BAC), a governor on the Federal Reserve Board, Ernest Draper (BAC), an economist at the Commerce Department, Frederic J. Dewhurst (TCF), A. Ford Hinrichs (NPA) of the Department of Labor, John H. Fahy (NPA and TCF) of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board and Defense Housing Coordinator S. B. Barber (TCF). A natural receptacle for New Deal liberals was the National Resources Planning Board (NRPB), informed by the leading American Keynesian economist Alvin H. Hansen (NPA), tax expert Beardsley Ruml (NPA) and eminent political scientist Luther H. Gulick (NPA). The NRPB was established in 1939 out of the National Planning Board, one of the last remaining agencies of the first New Deal launched in 1933, and was directed to investigate war and post-war planning. Its close identification with the New Deal era meant the NRPB, an obvious choice for managing the economic mobilization, was bypassed by a prudent Roosevelt in favor of the WPB, and henceforth received lukewarm support from the president.11 Still, during the war the NRPB, which was run by Roosevelt’s uncle, Frederic A. Delano, would issue several major reports on the post-war economy which featured extensive public works schemes, increased taxation and federally funded education, health and pensions schemes to ensure full employment.12 Hence, the war had generated an appealing and fast expanding arena for business leaders to involve themselves in government. Most were devoted to managing the day-to-day tasks of waging a total war.

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Others, however, had their sights set on the future. Some had already produced, or were in the process of tabling, quite sophisticated plans for the p ­ ost-war economy. Most were connected, if not closely aligned, in some way with the Washington bureaucracy, an avenue closed to the NAM, and were advocating policies antithetical to those held by corporate conservatives. If the NAM was to be successful in arresting the encroachments of government upon the economy, limiting the power of labor and preventing any further erosion of the free market system during wartime—let alone ensure its survival afterward—it would not only have to fight its old New Deal foes in the administration but also engage in some way with the arguments being put forward by the new layer of sophisticated post-war business planners. The barbed, anti-New Deal language of the pre-war era had succeeded only in further banishing the NAM to the periphery of meaningful influence. Some in the NAM recognized that national conditions had altered so radically that an equally radical change was called for in the way the organization operated, at least enough to break its spell of isolation. Early in 1942, the NAM undertook a serious reform of its war strategy that borrowed directly from the tactics of the liberal planners. The changes affected how the organization projected its message and the way it selected and packaged its policies. The resulting changes in its public relations operation, and the decision to embark on post-war research, marked a radical departure for the NAM which directly related to and informed one another. As will be seen, these changes combined to exert a moderating influence on the NAM. A key figure in helping to ‘rebrand’ the NAM during the war was public relations expert and Executive Vice President of the NAM since 1934, Walter B. Weisenburger. He led the NAM Public Relations Program which from 1940 had studied ways in which industrial managers could improve their standing with the American public. In February 1942, on receiving the ‘Publicity Director’s Award’ from the National Association of Publicity Directors, Weisenburger offered an early taste of the new approach he thought conservatives should adopt. It was a formula for recasting the image of management from selfish profiteers to genuine public servants. He wanted to show them, in terms first used by NAM President Henning Prentis, Jr., at the Annual Congress in December 1940, as ‘human beings who are far better than the public is allowed to believe’. If industry was responsible for producing the conditions of abundance and well-being for individuals and the nation,

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then ‘why shouldn’t industry sell them itself and get the plaudits for it?’, Weisenburger judged, instead of allowing ‘a lot of labor careerists or political opportunists, disassociated with enterprise, add to their prestige by getting credit for the achievement’. The NAM was already committed to launching a month-long campaign in May 1942 called ‘Production for Victory’ that celebrated industry’s productive virtues by sending twenty newspaper reporters to observe sixty-four defense plants in fifteen states.13 Weisenburger, however, was convinced that the main task facing American business was to win the public to the idea that the motives of management were as sound as its performance. Weisenburger’s conviction that the image of free enterprisers must change drew heavily from the findings of a recent NAM-sponsored poll of ‘What the Factory Worker thinks about Free Enterprise’, run by NAM adviser Claude Robinson’s Opinion Research Corporation. Robinson’s outfit would supply much of the NAM’s public opinion data for the rest of the war. The survey, which involved ‘an exhaustive questionnaire’ of skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled workers ‘in big and little factories’ throughout the country, suggested that the average American worker held neither a liberal nor conservative view of how the economy should function. The views were collected before and immediately after the US declaration of war to ‘test the stability of fundamental attitudes under wartime conditions and to furnish a solid foundation for an intelligent public relation policy during the war years and after’. Weisenburger deduced that the poll showed that Americans were ‘unmistakably bourgeois in their social philosophy’. Eighty-one percent of those asked ‘insist that private enterprise must be maintained’, revealed Weisenburger, and 66 percent believed that ‘unions should not be permitted to have more power’. This was proof, he reasoned, that the public had grown ‘restive’ of the grants of power awarded to labor by an administration looking to check the authority of management who were widely blamed for the Depression. Yet, according to the survey, the same workers who registered their satisfaction with industry’s recent productive achievements expressed a dim view of management’s overall attitude, with large majorities accusing them of holding down wages, seeking high prices, holding onto profits, driving out smaller competitors and of having an ‘impersonal attitude toward employees’. More significantly, the survey indicated that American workers thought they had ‘the greatest chance’ of realizing their objectives ‘not through the unfettered workings of free enterprise, but through pressure brought by unions and through

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government regulation and protection’. Indeed, ‘Workers conceive of government regulation as middle ground’, the survey concluded, and ‘want a balance: competitive, private enterprise, watched over and directed toward their desired ends through collective bargaining and government regulation’. As Weisenburger understood this, the American people believed in private enterprise as an institution but had ‘serious doubts’ about the motives of industry. It therefore fell to management to utilize public relations techniques to increase the public’s understanding of the ‘true motives of industrial management’.14 That general philosophy, of selling a ‘caring’ image of American capitalism to win workers away from their faith in government patronage, guided Weisenburger in his efforts to shift the public image of American business, and of the NAM, for the remainder of the war. The second key turn in the wartime approach of the NAM during 1942 was the decision to wholeheartedly embrace ‘post-war planning’. That is, craft a program, or ‘plan’, for the post-war world that featured private enterprise as the central feature and not government. At first, post-war studies were initiated primarily to remain in touch with the corporate liberals, who were fast pacing the ground of post-war planning and the NAM simply did not want to be left behind. However, over time the investigation of post-war issues began to feed into the over­ arching mission of the NAM to project a more positive, benevolent and ‘intrinsically American’ image of the enterprise system, an image that was becoming perhaps easier to sell given the mounting and universally accepted evidence of the potential for boundless American prosperity after the war. If the NAM could link the wartime economic miracle to the power of US free enterprise and not centralized planning, then why not the post-war economic miracle too? The NAM later boasted it was ‘one of the first organizations to become concerned about the problems of post-war adjustment’.15 The reality was slightly different. It was not until the middle of 1942, well after the liberal planners in the TCF and NPA, that the NAM properly embraced the significance of post-war issues and took dedicated organizational steps toward its examination. In other words, the NAM moved slowly into the realm of post-war studies and was compelled finally to adopt a more active stance due to what it saw as the rising influence of the corporate liberal planners. The earliest mention of post-war issues was, unsurprisingly, in the negative. Likely ‘problems’ associated with the emerging arms

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production drive were raised in the December 1940 annual report of the NAM Committee on the Study of Depressions, established in 1936 to study long-range economic cycles. Again, the harmful impact of the mounting arms drive on the US economy was highlighted in 1941 by the NAM Committee on Economic Policy, the private enterprise watchdog, which ‘devoted a considerable part of its attention to postwar problems’ and allotted one-half of its annual report to post-war issues.16 In its first tentative outline on ‘the future of private enterprise’ in May 1941, the Committee on Economic Policy listed a series of economic actions that would effect a post-defense transition to peacetime production, such as surpluses, taxation, inflation, public works and so on, with specific peacetime problems being ‘how to get along with government’ and how a British or German victory would impact international trade. There was also a conspicuous assumption of a German victory in the question ‘can we compete with German methods in international trade?’.17 One of the most notable contributions of the Committee on Economic Policy to the importance of post-war issues was its survey Can We Avoid a Post-Armament Depression? which was the result of a poll conducted in February 1941. As was the case in public relations, it was the measurement and weighing of outside opinion that registered the deepest impact upon the leadership of the NAM. The Committee sent questionnaires to 2900 members of the American Economic Association asking their ‘frank opinions’ on whether there would be a ‘post-armament depression’ and to offer suggestions for how such a depression might be avoided. The committee explained that its actions were the result of ‘dealing with the economic problems growing out of the disturbed conditions of the world and our own defense program’, and was an ‘outgrowth’ of a 1940 report from the NAM Committee on the Study of Depressions. The effect of the stimulus of defense orders, the committee warned, was already being felt and ‘we may soon enter a period of boom prosperity’. The findings, such as they were, only underscored for the NAM the importance of raising the profile of private enterprise in the face of a mounting expectation of—if not outright support for—a continuing or expanded government role in the national economy. Only 480 replied (one-sixth of the total), but NAM believed the survey represented ‘a fair cross-section’ of professional economist opinion on the problems associated with the defense program. The authors justified drawing conclusions from this sample because they considered the replies were ‘not only representative, but are suggestive’

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and ‘definitely call for further study’. While most respondents (80 percent) believed a post-armament depression was likely, and only 4 percent did not, all those who replied offered qualifications for their decisions. That led the NAM to conclude that ‘there is no clear-cut division of opinion among economists as to whether there will be a post-armament depression’.18 More worrying for the NAM, and further evidence of the prominence of liberal ideas among economists, was that a little over 59 percent compared to just over 17 percent looked to government help in some form to off-set a slump after the war, with almost 42 percent calling to maintain or expand government activity. And from an initial sample of the first one hundred replies taken in February, almost twice as many respondents (sixty-four to thirty-four) suggested federal intervention, through public works or other planning schemes led by planning agencies, as a remedy against a post-war slump over those who favored the ‘revival’ of private enterprise.19 The survey of economists offered a sobering glimpse of the reputation of private enterprise, which had clearly some way to go in restoring its image despite its lauded success in meeting the challenge of mobilization. It was becoming apparent that the chief beneficiaries of the production ‘miracle’ were not those championing private enterprise but those advocating sustained government intervention. So, it was the need to combat the apparent ascendancy of the liberal planners that finally persuaded the NAM to take post-war matters seriously. The wheels were set in motion by incoming NAM president Witherow in January 1942, when he commanded that the Committee on Economic Policy ‘expedite’ its work on post-war affairs as ‘it will be fatal to try to overtake the proposals of the social theorists; we must be first in the field’. It was better to have ‘too much, too soon’, Witherow contended, than ‘too little, too late’. He also suggested the committee adopt a name that included ‘post-war’ in its title, as ‘it is this phase of its work’, he directed, ‘which will capture the public’s imagination’.20 There was more than a little deception in Witherow’s portrayal of the standing of the liberal post-war planners, who had not only started the race but could justifiably claim to be ‘first’. By the start of 1942 the liberal planners had reached full stride in their investigations and analyses of post-war matters and had released a generous collection of publications on the topic. In February 1942, a précis of several recent liberal texts or statements on post-war issues was put together by the NAM that only reaffirmed how far the liberals were ahead. The summary included

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Lewis L. Lorwin’s book The Economic Consequences of the Second World War, the NRPB’s Hansen-informed After Defense—What? and After the War: Full Employment—Post-War Planning, and the NPA’s Guides to Post-War Planning and Urban Redevelopment and Housing: A Program for ­Post-War. These texts were bluntly outlined using large direct quotations, and the only comment to be found was at the end of the summary of the NPA’s Guides, which were condemned as ‘grandiose’ and having a theoretical apparatus ‘full of holes’.21 The problem for the NAM, as the call for haste from Witherow demonstrated, was that conservatives had yet to enter, let alone win, the race to define the post-war world. Soon after these surveys of the post-war planning community the NAM established the Post-War Problems Committee (PWC).22 That the PWC was viewed as a continuation of the Committee on Economic Policy was an expression not only of the rising importance the NAM now attached to post-war questions on the general economy, but a confirmation of the private enterprise ‘guardianship’ origins of the NAM’s first post-war arm. Even so, the inclusion of the word ‘problems’ showed how the NAM still held a largely negative view of a post-war period in which the economic disturbances caused by the war had to be overcome and some kind of ‘normality’ resumed, preferably stripped of the baggage of the New Deal era. The word ‘planning’ was also avoided for its association with the all-too-numerous liberal ‘social’ planners of the New Deal and now wartime eras.23 Yet the prominence given to international questions within the new committee, and its desire to investigate ‘the kind of world we would like to live in when the war is over and the basic condition necessary to secure it’, marked a novel step away from the NAM’s traditional emphasis on finding practical solutions to member issues into the longer-term speculative and theoretical territory of the liberal planners.24 As the preamble made clear, the new committee was actually about more than simply solving problems: ‘How American industry views the post-war world, together with its attitude on the proper relationship of industry to government and to society, will be reflected in the deliberations and consequent recommendations of the Postwar Committee’.25 Leadership of the PWC fell to a handful of NAM personnel who would become continuously involved in the examination and interpretation of post-war affairs in its various guises to the rest of the organization. Overall chairmanship of the PWC fell to S. Bayard Colgate (Colgate-Palmolive-Peet Company), with Frederick C. Crawford

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(Thompson Products Inc.), James H. Robins (The American Pulley Company) and John Airey (King-Seeley Corporation), serving as vice-chairmen with oversight provided by a Steering Committee led by NIIC Board member Wilfred Sykes (Inland Steel). All, with the exception of Robins, were NAM Board directors. The PWC secretariat was provided by Noel Sargent, a business economist who, as Secretary for the NAM since 1933, was a knowing and connected presence within the new grouping whatever his ‘neutral’ capacity. Of the numerous ‘advisers’ attached to the PWC during its existence, the most internationally renowned was Austrian émigré economist-philosopher Ludwig von Mises, an ultra-free trader and rigid opponent of state interference in human life. Mises was unfashionable in US academic circles but found a home in the NAM during the war.26 Present in many of the key committees, Mises however remained invisible from the official record with no comments in the available documentation attributed to the expert. The individual who would become the most prominent Old Guard agent in committee debates was NIIC Board member Edward E. Lincoln of the DuPont Company, for whom several major interventions were registered. The Steering Committee also acted as a consultative and advisory group to the rest of the PWC and was expected to produce an annual ‘review’ of all the NAM’s post-war work. The Steering Committee was answerable to the PWC, which was in turn answerable to the NAM Board of Directors. The Steering Committee was also responsible for contacting other organizations engaged in post-war work, informing them about what the NAM was doing, gleaning their reactions to NAM viewpoints, and generally feeding-back any useful information about their activities.27 The PWC was therefore devised as the chief arbiter of the NAM’s post-war activity. Through its subcommittees devoted to specialist areas of post-war concern, each assisted by subject experts, the PWC was charged with producing a coherent post-war policy strategy for the entire organization, correlating its own findings with those of other NAM committees and activities affecting post-war issues. The commitment to a full investigation of the post-war terrain was reflected in what was for the NAM the unusually large composition of the new committee. The PWC was originally devolved into five subcommittees, which themselves were at times sub-divided. These were the International Relations Subcommittee, chaired by Howard I. Young (American Zinc Lead & Smelting Company);28 the Post-war Purchasing Power Subcommittee, chaired by Howard E. Blood (Borge-Warner

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Corporation);29 the Practical Program for Industry Subcommittee, chaired by S. Duncan Black (Black & Decker);30 the Principles of Government Relations to Industry Subcommittee, chaired by Lucien Wulsin (Baldwin Piano Company);31 and the Economic Textbook Subcommittee, chaired by Robert R. Wason (Manning, Maxwell and Moore).32 This latter unit was charged with the grander task of studying ‘the principles of the private enterprise system’ and listing its ‘achievements’ in one textbook. It was important that a clear, scientific and convincing explanation of free enterprise be presented to counter the growing liberal orthodoxy surrounding the debate about the way forward for US capitalism, and the inclusion of such an important task within the NAM’s post-war body was further evidence of the influence of the liberal post-war planning community upon the minds of corporate conservatives. The PWC also formed special groups to maintain contact with other organizations studying post-war problems.33 The challenge of the business planning community to win Americans to a particular vision of the post-war world had turned into a full-blown race that the NAM had only belatedly entered. To make matters worse, what had appeared to be a simple contest between the two poles of New Deal liberalism and Old Guard conservatism was quickly blurred by the entry of a third strand: the corporate moderates. Keen not to be left out, Secretary of Commerce Jesse Jones seized upon a suggestion by a group of moderates to create a new business organization to compete with the corporate liberals expressly devoted to formulating policy options for the government on post-war planning. To maintain credibility, however, the new group had to operate ‘independently’ of the government to avoid conservative accusations that it was just another New Deal front or a reincarnation of the discredited BAC. Despite that, Jones staffed what became known as the Committee for Economic Development (CED) with several members of his BAC which included its first chairman Paul G. Hoffman (Studebaker). In May 1942, to avoid the wrath of the conservatives, Jones revealed his plans for the CED to the NAM and the USCC. They wanted assurances that the new organization would not compete with their own in the long-term, and secured a ‘gentleman’s agreement’ from Jones that the CED would concern itself only with immediate post-war problems and be terminated once the war was over. Besides, Eric Johnston of the USCC and Charles Hook of the NAM joined the new group to keep an eye on things.34 The NAM was clearly uncomfortable with the founding of yet another business organization

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at such a challenging time for conservatives. For now, the NAM placed its trust in the word of the business-friendly Secretary of Commerce that the CED would not bring any trouble to its door. The critical mass generated by the corporate liberal planners was pulling more and more business activists into the discussion about the post-war world. For some, like the USCC, the attraction of the liberal planners was all too strong to resist. It was not long before the NAM found itself as the lone organization representing the voice of corporate conservatives. In the wake of the bruising Labor-Management Conference in December 1941, the USCC faced a ‘rebellion’ of mainly western members led by Seattle businessman Eric Johnston. He ousted the organization’s old guard under John W. O’Leary and quickly began to modify the rigidly anti-New Deal, pro-free market posture of the USCC. Johnston argued for the acceptance of the principle of collective bargaining and of ‘justified’ government regulation of the economy, and, more importantly, visited Roosevelt to personally inform him of his ‘new look’ USCC.35 Fones-Wolf described Johnston as a ‘cautious moderate’ and under his leadership the USCC moved closer to the policies that would emerge from the moderate CED.36 The ‘coup’ by moderates in the USCC alongside Jones’s formation of the CED was evidence of the fear of isolation felt by corporate conservatives after 1941, underlining the fact that the PWC was born of an environment of considerable external pressure upon the NAM, from its peers and from the public. Within its own ranks, too, the pressure for action was mounting. That was underlined by an intervention from the NIIC, the auxiliary publicity arm of the NAM, over the need to pronounce quickly on post-war affairs. In a letter to PWC chairman Colgate of 10 June 1942, Clifford E. Harrison, head of the NIIC, wanted the PWC to discuss release of a year-old report by its predecessor the Committee on Economic Policy. The report, which contained matters relevant to the post-war debate, had been delayed from being made public due, Harrison claimed, to reservations by ‘certain people’ that it had been put together ‘too hastily’. Colgate, however, was keen not to release any material until they had compiled ‘our full post-war story’, but Harrison, clearly frustrated at the organization’s slow progress on ­post-war matters, wanted the 1941 report to be cleared for publication right away.37 Completed just after the US entered the war, the 1941 Annual Report of the Committee on Economic Policy was devoted exclusively to offering solutions for ‘the future problem of readjustment from a war-time to a

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peace-time economy’ and was entirely pessimistic in tone. The committee resolved that ‘we must win the victory over the post-war depression’, a success which, they fathomed, would be determined ‘very largely by the soundness of the economic policies followed while we are engaged in war’. The committee noted that the defense, and now war, program had already profoundly altered the economic infrastructure of the US economy, making it incapable of providing, as some industrialists believed, both ‘guns and butter’, whereby national income was raised, employment was restored, and prosperity increased. The war mobilization was but a temporary and abnormal activity that granted only the ‘appearance of actual prosperity’, which, the committee argued, would quickly evaporate once the production of armaments ceased unless the post-war transition to consumer production was accounted for in wartime policies. These conclusions were hardly novel and had been widely identified by the business planning community, especially those advocating sustained federal expenditure into the post-war period to off-set these eventualities. Such a solution to easing the pain of the transition was (predictably) rejected by the committee, as this would only increase the national debt and lead to raised taxes or inflation, and only delay the necessity for readjustment to a free enterprise economy. Instead, the committee recommended such measures as encouraging the backlog of peacetime demand, opening-up of the capital market, releasing savings after the war and freeing investment, reducing taxes, no price-fixing by government, the immediate peacetime termination of all war regulations and controls, keeping new plants out of government hands (unless for military purposes), and refusing subsidies for distressed industries. For business, the committee recommended it work hard to develop new products, hold money back to provide dismissal wages (where practicable), and to ‘work constantly’ for an improvement of employee–employer relations ‘to the greatest extent commensurate with the prudent management of their companies’. The committee bleakly concluded: ‘Depression in some lines is inevitable even under the best of circumstances. The above policies, however, would prevent our economic system entering into another period of prolonged unemployment’.38 This was a stark, cold reading of the ‘problems’ associated with removing from an economy the heavy federal involvement that centralized war planning demanded. It was also predicated on the assumption that a free enterprise economy was the natural, let alone desired, end-state for a peacetime America. Nevertheless, the objectives listed in the 1941 Annual Report would henceforth

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constitute the main elements of NAM policies regarding the country’s economic transition from war to peacetime production. The pressure on Colgate was such that, despite his reservations, within a couple of weeks he arranged the first public statement from his new post-war unit. At a ‘Post-War Planning Press Conference’ in the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, New York, on 26 June 1942, Colgate declared that ‘spending our way into prosperity’ through federal works programs, even though it ‘might relieve temporary inconvenience and suffering’, was not the way to bring a smooth transition to peacetime production. Using the findings of the Committee on Economic Policy Annual Report advised by Harrison—even quoting from it verbatim—Colgate dutifully listed all the points suggested by the report for both government and business to adopt to lessen the severity of the post-war transition.39 The first direct foray into the post-war planning debate by the PWC—a bleak forecast of inevitable job losses and economic disruption that could only be mitigated by withdrawing federal restrictions on private business—therefore offered nothing out of the ordinary from an organ of the NAM. This was not the considered, scientific approach to post-war questions that Colgate and others wanted, nor was it the positive and uplifting message of a sensitive employer favored by the restive public relations gurus Weisenburger and Harrison. The hasty announcement of the 1941 findings of the Committee on Economic Policy was a wholly insufficient submission to the flourishing post-war planning conversation that was sweeping the nation. It was cold, mechanical and, worse still, uninspiring. The PWC was charged with gearing the NAM for combat with the liberal planners, and before it could mount a serious challenge the NAM had to agree on a definite platform regarding its attitude toward the general post-war world that aroused, rather than deflated, Americans. Questions about the future were being loudly raised and emphatically answered by the corporate liberal planners. A possible sign that minds were opening in the upper reaches of the NAM had been noticeable just three days before the 7 December 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Until then, it was the only example of a positive spin being placed on the impact of the war on the post-war fortunes of the US by an official of the NAM. In his address to the Annual Congress, economist and apparent lone voice Murray Shields (Irving Trust), expressed no fear of US entry into the war and disputed those who argued that the mobilization would strengthen the New Dealers or

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weaken the national economy into the future. Shields, who would serve as a long-time advisor on the PWC, claimed that the war would generate great industrial and scientific advantages for the US that after the war would enable American foreign trade to ‘emerge into a period of vigorous expansion’, and charged: ‘are not the probabilities of a favorable outcome great enough to suggest that we draw up our long-range plans on the assumption that there is a challenging job to be done and a great opportunity on which we must capitalize?’.40 In an effort to make headway, the PWC circulated in June 1942 a discussion paper titled ‘Some Ideas on the Subject of Post War Planning— Some Basic Assumptions’. The document, which revealingly included the objectionable word ‘planning’ in its title, made some very general and wholly practical recommendations for government and business action in the post-war era which differed little from those contained in the stark Committee on Economic Policy report. Two of them, though receiving no further expansion by the PWC, nonetheless provided evidence of a shifting, widening mindset regarding post-war affairs. The first included the tabling of ‘master schedules’ to meet domestic and international industrialization demands, designed to allow accurate estimates of US industrial needs to ‘cater to this foreign demand’. The second involved the formation of research ‘institutes’ to cover major geographic regions of the world to identify ‘post-war markets for American trade, industry, and technical skills’. These schemes were the pragmatic outcome of a set of assumptions laid out at the beginning of the document that were most notable for revealing a degree of optimism about the post-war period hitherto absent from earlier NAM pronouncements: ‘What is wanted is not a series of short run post war transitional and largely emergency stop-gap measures, but a program which looks beyond transition to high and continued levels of national prosperity’. Furthermore, ‘the war will be won, and following it will come shortly the beginning of the industrialization of the whole of the Asiatic mainland and much of both Africa and South Africa. The knowledge, the engineering, the technical and managerial skills and the machinery and equipment of this industrialization process will come largely from the United States’. As a consequence of that process, the authors claimed, the US ‘will be compelled to put a rising floor under the American standard of living’. To take full advantage of the ‘huge markets’ that awaited US industrialists, businesses were required to be ‘coordinated in such a fashion that the end of the war will not only not usher in a severe slump, but will be followed by rapid

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rebuilding and readjustment to meet the enormously expanded possibilities opening out before us. And that planning must begin now’.41 The discussion document clearly showed that, like apparent bellwether economist Murray Shields, some in the PWC were either directly or indirectly taking their cue from the liberal planners and were beginning to embrace a more optimistic, if nakedly self-interested, view for business of the post-war era. For them, heavy censure of government interference was secondary to emphasizing the potentialities (and less so the problems) facing business in the post-war world. The distance the NAM still had to travel to reach agreement on such basic post-war policy positions was noticeable in a discussion which took place around the time ‘Some Ideas on the Subject of Post War Planning’ was being weighed. It occurred during July 1942 over one such elemental topic: the scientific basis for defending the free enterprise system, which had been entrusted to the Economic Textbook Subcommittee of the PWC. The minutes of the meeting (which continued into the early hours) are not comprehensive, but they are refreshingly uninhibited and quite lengthy and offer a rare glimpse into the decision-making process of the NAM elite. It was also the first recorded clash between the moderate ‘optimists’ in the NAM and the ‘pessimists’ of the Old Guard. The PWC wanted to build an advertising campaign around a textbook that provided ‘a more complete understanding of what the individual enterprise system really is’, but progress had been slow. Little wonder, as the team had been instructed not only to describe how the enterprise system worked, but to consider its outlook for the future and deliver a ‘positive program’ with recommendations ‘for the continuance of the private enterprise system’ after the war that students, business organizations and a ‘wide audience’ could digest. Over the weekend of 11–12 July 1942, Colgate organized a meeting at Hershey, Pennsylvania, of the Economic Textbook Subcommittee and the NAM Economic Review Group to thrash out the contents of the book. Some headway was made regarding certain of its contents, but the meeting was more significant for illuminating clear differences in the NAM leadership over key areas such as the nature of free enterprise, responsibility for unemployment, the extent of protectionism, ending wartime controls, how the message was to be sold to the public, and the responsibilities of the US in the post-war world. From the outset, it was clear that a noticeable divide existed between certain of the assembled experts over a textbook draft that was evidently

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too moderate for some members to stomach. The most outspoken critics of any watering-down of what they perceived as conservative doctrine were NAM advisor Edmond E. Lincoln of the DuPont Company and NIIC Board, and E. V. O’Daniel of the American Cyanamid Corporation. Ranged against them were the textbook coordinator Wason with support from PWC chairman Colgate and vice-chairs Crawford and Robins. Friction arose over even the simplest of topics, such as identifying what they all had spent years defending—the American economic system. Crawford stated that ‘the American way represents human nature operating under selfish motives in the best sense of the word’, while the universality of the US approach was disputed by others. The assumption in the textbook draft that what was good for the US was good for the rest of the world was disputed by Lincoln who claimed that ‘not 10 per cent’ of the world could make the American system ‘really work’, as most of the world was not ‘constituted’ the right way. There was even considerable debate over the precise terminology to be used to describe the American economic way. Many argued that the term ‘free’ better described US enterprise, and the use of ‘system’ was preferable to the word ‘capitalism’ which had, according to Ray Westerfield, Professor of Political Economy at Yale University, attracted a ‘bad connotation’. The phrase ‘free enterprise system’, O’Daniel believed, was also commonly used by the public and was more neutral than other ‘political’ terms such as ‘the American way of life’. Detractors from the use of the word ‘free’ included PWC Steering Committee member Lucien Wulsin, who preferred the term ‘individual’, as did the authors of the textbook draft. Only after a show of hands was the group forced, after a close vote of eighteen to fifteen, to accept that henceforth the term to be used in the textbook would be the ‘American Individual Enterprise System’. The hard-liners around Lincoln and O’Daniel may have lost the vote over terminology, but in confronting more substantial areas of the draft textbook which they found disagreeably weak they were more successful. On the matter of government regulation, O’Daniel prevailed in toughening the language. He was unhappy that as it stood the draft implied support of the ‘general welfare clause’ of the constitution, instead of arguing that ‘government regulation should be restricted to protection of the rights of individuals and minorities’. O’Daniel also expressed ‘quite forcibly’ what he and many others at the meeting believed was an acceptance implied within the textbook draft of ‘trends toward centralization and government control’. He wanted it made clear that ‘we do

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not approve of some of the trends which are in violation of the very spirit of enterprise’. Lincoln also ‘violently criticized’ the suggestion that the government should not introduce deflationary policies after the war to meet pre-war price levels as it was ‘misleading and an indictment of the NAM’. Likewise, O’Daniel felt that treatment in the book of the issue of distribution of wealth ‘should be more dogmatic and less apologetic’ and, together with Airey, carried a motion that reference to unemployment compensation be omitted because, as others affirmed, it was a ‘self-indictment’ of the enterprise system and ‘an admission that we had serious unemployment’. The textbook, they conceded, would not be able to avoid dealing with the issue of unemployment, even though, as Lincoln held, it ‘may muddy the waters more’. Crawford was less worried about the negativity surrounding the difficult question of unemployment, declaring that joblessness was ‘the price you pay to keep a free enterprise system’. Claude Robinson, president of the Opinion Research Corporation, sought a more delicate approach: ‘It is hard to answer the popular arguments of the man-in-the-street who says you insure your house, why not insure employment? If you have to tell the public that you are against social security, you are licked. In this book, we need good symbols. In the art of persuasion, let’s hold out hope of improvement. Say you’re for social security, but say it in your own way’. Unable to agree, the group passed the thorny issue of explaining the causes and remedies of unemployment to the PWC. Another area of controversy surfaced over the matter of protectionism, a classic redoubt of the NAM. Accusing the textbook authors of supporting a substantial lowering of US tariffs after the war to ease world trade, Lincoln fulminated that this was ‘one of the most superficial and inaccurate statements ever put out by this Association’. Tariffs were necessary, he maintained, and it was also historically inaccurate, as the draft suggested, to blame them for the economic mess of the 1930s. Lincoln was supported by PWC member Millard D. Brown (Continental Mills) who believed the US should protect its own industries and many ‘cannot exist’ without them. Lincoln also objected to other aspects of the draft which suggested a more internationally minded America. The proposal that the US ‘facilitate’ the reconstruction of war-torn nations was spurious, as not only did he believe (somewhat fantastically) there would be ‘less reconstruction after this war than ever’, he further charged that ‘Our job is going to be to look out for ourselves when the war is over. After this war, we will be more nationalistic than ever’. Those who

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supported Lincoln pushed for a vote to eliminate all criticism of US tariff policy from the textbook, but a vote was denied. Instead, a compromise was reached whereupon a re-write of the section on tariffs was agreed ‘taking account of the objections made by Dr. Lincoln and others’. The hard-liners had enjoyed some success at the meeting in protecting some of NAM’s traditional positions from the tampering hands of the moderates. That would not be the case for another item which aroused deep-seated prejudices about the involvement of government in the economy, namely the post-war removal of wartime controls. Lincoln was the most forthright in condemning supporters of the gradual removal of controls rather than their immediate liquidation. He accused Westerfield (Yale), Willford I. King (New York University), and Bradford Smith (US Steel), as bearers of ‘academic thinking’ for claiming that some controls must remain for a spell after the war, and ‘he could not see any condition to warrant price regulation’. Despite ‘considerable discussion’, Lincoln was overruled and it was agreed that the word ‘eliminate’ be substituted in the textbook by one ‘which would indicate a continuance of the controls for a while’. The way the textbook campaign was to be presented to the public was also debated by the group, and again that revealed differences in the style of approach between the hard-liners and the moderates. The desire to compete for public sympathy more forcefully was questioned by Lincoln. He accepted that the NAM would have to ‘handle the subject cautiously’, but for him the document was too ‘defensive and apologetic’ and lacked ‘conviction’, especially when those ‘on the other side’—that is liberals—were positive ‘and they attack’. Lincoln was convinced that one of the reasons that the enterprise system had ‘broken down’ was ‘because business leaders have given ground to their opponents’. Colgate found agreement when he proposed that ‘the emotional appeal should furnish the background for the development of the book’. The reaction of the liberal opposition was clearly a concern of those assembled. John C. Parker (Consolidated Edison Company) worried that to refer in the textbook to earlier ‘political action’ was ‘gratuitous’, and it was better that the book made no reference to the New Deal or individual figures, but ‘address our arguments to philosophies and not people’. Wason stated that the textbook ‘should come before the public free of all invitations of government to help industry’. Similar considerations of perception led Harley L. Lutz (Princeton University) to request that a chart in the draft be removed, not because it was inaccurate, but because it ‘emphasizes

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the fact that the upper 2 per cent still receive a large proportion of the total income’. The differences between the hard-line conservatives and those seeking moderation at Hershey over principle areas of national economic policy were clear. But where their divergence was most noticeable was in the discussion of America’s general post-war function in world affairs. The episode highlighted a growing problem for the traditionalists at the NAM, as the increasingly obvious fact of US supremacy in international affairs after the war raised new questions about the relationship between the state and the economy that inevitably bound American prosperity with a greater, not lesser, role for government. That was one reason why those who were beginning to call for a moderation of various NAM staples—like Colgate, Crawford, Robins and Wason—were so heavily concentrated in the PWC. At Hershey, the group was unanimous that post-war issues were of such importance that they deserved a separate chapter within the textbook, but agreement over the section labeled ‘The Broad Outlook of the American Individual Enterprise System’ (the introduction to the final chapter outlining a ‘positive program’ for the future) was less conclusive. According to the minutes, discussion of that subject ‘wandered pretty far afield’ and discussion was so broad that ‘little in the way of constructive suggestions’ was made to alter the textbook draft. The ‘highlights’ from the discussion noted that foreign trade ‘and the role which the United States will play in foreign markets and in world relations generally’ was the dominant topic. Differences emerged between ‘the extremely nationalistic’ viewpoint, attributed in the minutes to Lincoln, and the more internationalist outlook presented by Crawford, Robins and Wason. Lincoln argued that foreign trade had ‘little effect’ on American prosperity and voiced the traditional conservative belief that ‘internationalism abroad means socialism at home, because it means building up a strongly centralized government’. Crawford and Robins, on the other hand, believed that after the war the US would become ‘very active’ in the economies of other nations, a feat accomplished ‘not by government subsidies, but by the initiative of American businessmen who would see the opportunity for development abroad’. Robins claimed that the US would ‘play an important part in policing the world’, and Wason, flatly disagreeing with Lincoln’s point earlier, believed that ‘acceptance of the American system in other countries is possible’. Indeed, Crawford was minuted as saying that ‘our destiny for the next one hundred years would be a policy of imperialism

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and that this country would become a dominant force throughout the world’.42 In all, at Hershey the forward-thinking modernizers on the PWC had received a substantial mauling at the hands of the NAM Old Guard.43 After several frank and heated exchanges, the moderates had been forced to accept compromises on their proposals for textbook discussions of post-war unemployment compensation, re-employment of veterans and the lowering of tariffs. They were also obliged to harden their language in defense of free enterprise, be less ‘apologetic’, and generally concede no ideological ground to their liberal opponents. The moderates had, however, successfully defended their stances on the removal of wartime controls and, by default after a battle of attrition, international relations. Indeed, the rush of unbridled optimism and confidence voiced by the moderates at Hershey over the future power of America was in sharp contrast to the more guarded, distrustful and insular posture of the hard-liners. They were clearly at odds with each other. And it was that sort of positivism about the country’s post-war prospects that drove some in NAM to urge compromise on certain of the organization’s time-honored beliefs, such as accepting greater responsibility for government to manage economic life both at home and abroad, and to embrace internationalism over isolationism and protectionism. The textbook writers withdrew to work on their magnum opus, but there would be no rush to conclusions: it would be another four years before their thoughts were released. Nevertheless, the meeting at Hershey was extremely timely and showed how involvement in post-war planning, which elicited a host of positive ideas about America’s future and invited close exposure to the ideas of the liberal-dominated business planning community, had begun to influence leading sections of the NAM.44 The potency of the liberal message of optimism about the post-war era was even beginning to impact former gloom-mongers in the ranks of the NAM. This included economic adviser John C. Gebhart, who penned the uninspiring Committee on Economic Policy Annual Report of 1941. In his address to the Institute on Preparing for the Post-War World at Springfield College on 24 June 1942, Gebhart complained that business had ‘up to now’ paid ‘little attention’ to post-war problems and had ‘left the field to government planners’ with ‘elaborate schemes for making over our economy’. Gebhart presented a detailed picture of the wartime economy and delivered a powerful criticism of the liberal philosophy as manifest in the NRPB, whose recipe for avoiding a post-war

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depression entailed a mixed economy, deficit spending and public works that ‘would eventually result in the extinguishment of the private enterprise system as we have always known it’. Admitting that business had no ‘blueprint’ for the post-war economy, Gebhart believed that a depression was avoidable and there were ‘favorable factors’ in the current situation which could bring prosperity after the war, such as a backlog of consumer demand, technological innovations and improved processes. In short, an organized private sector could avert economic crisis and render ineffective the prescriptions of the liberal planners. For Gebhart, the choice was stark: ‘In planning for the post-war period, America must choose whether it will rely on the operation of a system of individual enterprise or whether it will embark on a plan of government spending and control to increase our national income and bring about full employment’.45 The need to find inspiration and opportunity in the changes inflicted on the US by the processes of war, rather than disruption and fear, was being recognized elsewhere in the NAM hierarchy beyond the confines of the PWC. None other than Chairman of the Board Walter D. Fuller, in his address on 2 July 1942 to the National Education Association Convention on ‘The World We Are Making’, blended old-fashioned conservative triumphalism about the superiority of free enterprise with an enthusiastic cry for a better world tomorrow. After blasting the liberal ‘prophets of disaster’ for dismissing the power of free enterprise to deliver on war production, Fuller claimed it was the responsibility of Americans to prepare now for the ‘next crisis’ after the war had been won. Using all too obvious euphemisms, Fuller implored his audience of educators to help in banishing ‘post-war ghosts’ such as the fear of depression from the minds of Americans by fostering ‘national conviction of how freedom of opportunity, freedom of enterprise, and our other powers can solve our mutual problems’.46 The allusion to a brighter future for the nation once the fighting had stopped was used by Witherow in his statement to promote the launch in August 1942 of an ‘educational campaign’ by the PWC. The campaign was designed ‘to stimulate consideration of post-war problems by management’ and followed the release in July 1942 of the PWC’s first publication, a leaflet entitled ‘Preparing Now for Post-War Problems: A Practical Program for Industry’. Another hurried contribution, the leaflet comprised a series of questions in a checklist format for management that related to post-war industrial preparation, such as finance,

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products, markets, distribution and personnel.47 Adoption of these measures (all twenty-eight of them) would, the PWC reckoned, ‘avoid, or effectively cushion, a post-war depression’.48 The educational campaign involved circulation of a ‘brochure’ to NAM members, put together by the Practical Program for Industry Subcommittee of the PWC, which contained what the NAM president stressed was not a questionnaire but a series of ‘procedural suggestions for self-analysis’ that he hoped would ‘stimulate thoughtful study’ by management of post-war issues. Witherow called upon members to take practical steps ‘to bring us out of the war in a sound and strong position’, and, in an important signal of the increasing openness of the NAM to the exploration of ideological as well as practical considerations in the struggle to defeat the liberals, the president wanted to ‘outline our own framework for the pattern of American society in the post-war world’. Witherow admitted that NAM’s position on what that ‘framework’ should look like was in its early stages, but made it clear why such thinking was necessary: ‘We know that there are those who would like nothing better than to use the war and p ­ ost-war readjustment period to remold our society in a collective or state socialist form. We cannot combat this threat negatively. We must have and publicly promote a concrete and constructive post-war program’.49 In other words, conservatives must step up and be counted in the national debate about post-war America or risk losing out to their rivals. The concept of ‘challenge and opportunity’, articulated for the first time by Fuller and echoed by Gebhart and Witherow, would evolve as a core theme of the NAM post-war planners. For now, however, the struggle by would-be moderates to lighten the demeanor of the NAM and encourage new thinking on post-war matters, let alone win a consensus, still had some way to go. The clash with the hard-liners at Hershey left a deep impression upon the moderating voices within the PWC. So far, the PWC had sustained a public presence during the summer of 1942 with the rapid unveiling of material that was concerned exclusively with the practical aspects of the post-war transition. By September, the PWC was ready to deliver to the NAM leadership its initial thoughts on the overall post-war picture. Under the promotional heading of Jobs, Freedom, Security: The Post-War Program of the NAM, the PWC circulated its seventeen-page draft report for scrutiny. In essence, Jobs, Freedom, Security was little more than a buoyant makeover of the Committee on Economic Policy

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1941 Annual Report, being slightly less gloomy, more positive in tone. That was apparent in the draft’s opening line ‘Ahead of us is victory!’, but the PWC urged that planning for the peace ‘must be started now’, and that it was the responsibility of both business and government to design an effective post-war program. The line on government regulation of capital, prices and taxes followed the outline of the Committee on Economic Policy 1941 report, and the policy toward labor—opposition to the closed shop, demand for the equal right to join as well as not join a union and freedom to engage in collective bargaining outside of the union—affirmed the stock NAM position on unraveling the federal protections under the Wagner Act. The lone original suggestion was to establish an ‘Economic Policy Board’ of privately selected and funded economic experts to study economic trends and make policy recommendations to the government. The only evidence of a moderating touch, albeit a light one, was on the issue of international economics. The inclusion of a section devoted to ‘Economic Foreign Policy’ was a new digression for the NAM on post-war matters which had so far been ignored. Still, that was by far the least sophisticated offering, revealing the NAM’s traditional protectionist, isolationist mindset, such as in demanding the blanket elimination of all wartime controls, the reduction of taxes, the opening of capital markets which sought only to return international economic relations to their pre-war status. Indeed, on the need to supply post-war reconstruction aid the PWC echoed the hard-line espoused by Lincoln at Hershey by calling for minimal US engagement with the war-damaged nations and only when it served American ­ self-interest. After all, the US ‘shall not become a Santa Claus to the rest of the world’, and Americans should only provide reconstruction ‘to whatever degree is advantageous to us…the United States has neither the ability nor the moral obligation to keep the rest of the world from starvation and distress’. Nevertheless, within even this most hard-headed business reasoning the PWC recognized, albeit weakly, the interconnectedness of domestic with international prosperity when it admitted that where any reconstruction aid was granted it would simultaneously ‘protect our own interests’ as ‘lasting prosperity abroad is of direct advantage to us, since poverty stricken countries are necessarily poor customers for the products of American industry and agriculture’.50 In Jobs, Freedom, Security, the moderates in the PWC had failed to present anything more than a slightly less-pessimistic view of the ­ post-war period. It was certainly more upbeat than usual NAM

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pronouncements, which focused exclusively on ‘problems’, and in introducing a section on foreign economic policy—the chief stomping-ground of the liberal planners and a hot topic at Hershey—the moderates had tried to inject some freshness into the conservative discussion. Yet what was still absent was any attempt to provide a ‘vision’, as suggested by Fuller and Witherow, of how conservatives thought the postwar world should look, let alone one that was packaged in such a way that could inspire or be successfully ‘sold’, as Weisenburger counseled, to Americans. A major difficulty faced by those who were convinced of the need for change in the NAM was their need to also win the organization’s wider membership around to the goal of portraying free, private enterprise capitalism in a way that would draw Americans away from the appeals of the big government liberals. The complexity of this task was demonstrated when on 19 September 1942, Witherow, who had been a keen advocate of raising the organization’s profile on this issue, made a somewhat clumsy attempt to introduce the topic at a convention of the highly conservative American Legion. Handicapped by having only the first draft report of the PWC to work from, under the heading ‘Building America’s Future’ the NAM president delivered an awkward mix of traditional conservative government-bashing diatribe with uplifting pledges for a brighter future. Overall it was clear that Witherow wanted most of all to underscore the need for conservatives to more eagerly prepare for the post-war world: ‘It is imperative for us to look as well [as winning the war] to the future material and spiritual progress of America and the world’. That was the limit, however, of his post-war ‘vision’. In a direct reference to the liberal post-war agenda, Witherow recognized that although ‘certain types’ of economic planning were beneficial, ‘great care and caution’ was needed in their execution: ‘The future will not be wholly Washington-made, politically conceived, or fabricated alone by industry or labor…conflicting viewpoints should be winnowed out in preparation for the war’s economic aftermath’. The NAM ‘does not propose any armchair dreams or objectives’, Witherow declared, but urged US industry to begin preparations for the achievement of a ‘higher standard of living’ for Americans after the war. To ensure this objective, Witherow listed items from Jobs, Freedom, Security, which included ensuring jobs for veterans, encouraging new production techniques and products, and ‘friendly cooperation’ between government, business and labor. But first and foremost, Witherow sought to ‘rationalize and

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redetermine’ the post-war relationship between government and business, whereupon the ‘essential duty of government in business is that of an umpire’. The experience of government agencies in running the war program had borne out his theory, as ‘some have proved by indecision, jealousy and red tape the fallacy and impotency of bureaucracy’. Private enterprise, on the other hand, was already developing technologies that would transform the post-war world, allowing Witherow to declare poetically: ‘Give us a victorious peace and the freedom of enterprise it should guarantee, and our progress will be unprecedented. Let our swords be might and mighty indeed will be our plowshares’.51 The lack of dynamism, coherence and genuine inspiration in the PWC’s message, such as that inelegantly expressed by Witherow, compared badly with the elaborate forecasts of security and prosperity from the liberals. Unlike the champions of free enterprise, liberals were not constrained by associations with a boom-bust past and were free to offer something ‘new’, a positive, exciting vision of a better post-war world that Depression-era Americans wanted to hear. This was a deep concern for some members interested in post-war matters. Shortly after the circulation of Jobs, Freedom, Security, PWC adviser Edgar W. Smith, public relations director at General Motors, felt compelled to share his reservations about the PWC’s current approach. His letter to PWC Secretary Sargent, fueled by a considerable unease regarding the command of the liberals over the post-war debate, was a lucid and insightful summation of the task facing conservative champions of free enterprise. Smith called for a less negative, more scientific and overall more compelling argument for supporting the leadership of private enterprise after the war. He challenged the orthodoxy within the NAM for their ‘lack of realism’ in assuming that by simply listing the ideal conditions for private enterprise to prosper after the war Americans would ‘more or less automatically’ benefit from those conditions and be ‘permitted’ to function along the lines to which they were accustomed. Warning that the task was ‘very much more complicated and difficult than that’, Smith maintained that conditions in the US had changed far more dramatically than the NAM appreciated and demanded a more positive intervention to depose the hold of the liberals: It is no longer our problem, as it was in 1938 and 1939 and 1940, and even in 1941, to stay the tide towards greater centralized authority and control over the economy; it is our problem now to begin to plan for a

88  C. WHITHAM reversal of that tide which, in consequence of the regimentation urgently required by war, has now reached almost full flood. The “philosophical regimenters” in the Administration will certainly take every opportunity to seize upon the war-time results of regimentation as an argument for its perpetuation in the post-war period, and it will surely be a harder task to stop them in this course, fallacious though it is, than it was to stop them when they had no war-time practice or results to point to. I think, in consequence, that it is less than ever sufficient to take the line that we have taken in previous years.

Smith preferred that the NAM instead acknowledge ‘frankly and freely’ that total regimentation of the economy was essential to prosecuting the war, and even ask for more of it; stress the ‘profound and fundamental difference’ between a war and a peacetime economy; and acknowledge that the social and economic dislocations that would exist after the war would ‘invite’ political intervention. Lastly, and more importantly for Smith, was the need for the NAM to convince the public that private enterprise was both willing and able to provide a solution which would make political intervention in the economy ‘unnecessary’. Hence, through a loud enunciation of the proven record of private management to deliver and its capacity for ‘enlightened self-interest’, Smith outlined what he considered was a ‘realistic document’ that was not ‘merely critical or carping’ but that ‘would rest its case not upon an emotional plea for a chance to run with the ball again, but upon a demonstration of the factors all along the line that are requisite to the making of a touchdown’.52 The shortcomings flagged by Smith struck at the heart of the NAM aspiration for a post-war revival of free enterprise and were inevitably featured in the debates within several of the PWC subcommittees that followed circulation of Jobs, Freedom, Security in September 1942. As at Hershey, their deliberations showcased the differences between those who were more willing to acknowledge that conditions had changed and that a degree of flexibility and accommodation was required of the NAM mindset, and those who resisted such adjustments and served as the watchdogs of time-honored conservative beliefs. Of all the fields debated by the PWC, it was international affairs, both economic and political, which featured some of the most critical debates about the post-war outlook of the NAM. Indeed, international affairs had featured in the clash at Hershey. This was because, especially

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for the liberal planners, the greatly anticipated post-war dominance by the US of world trade, finance and investment was perceived as not just an added bonus for a handful of US corporations but as providing the essential bedrock for the limitless prosperity and raised living standards of the American people for decades to come. The essential and indispensable connectivity of the post-war domestic economic realm with that of the international—one that was presumed to be ultimately at the disposal of the US—provided much of the force behind the positive schemes of the liberal planners. The TCF and the NPA sketched a future of guaranteed full employment, prosperity and security based on centralized national economic planning within a fully integrated system of international political and economic cooperation. If the conservatives aimed to seriously challenge its opponents, then the NAM could no longer ignore the seismic changes that war would bring to the international order and the beneficial place the US would inevitably occupy in any new arrangement. In short, the NAM would have to deliver a vision of the post-war world that matched the scale and imagination of the liberals. This meant reigniting its long-lost concern for international economics and tackling its recent bout of isolationism on a host of international issues, which on economic questions alone involved highly complex and politically charged policies on tariffs and trade, banking and investment, and most fundamentally the underlying relationship between the national and international economy. This was not to mention the NAM’s position on an abundance of political and security responsibilities considered obligatory for a nation that was nearing ‘superpower’ status. The importance attached to international questions in the study of post-war matters was immediately acknowledged by the PWC when it decided in the late summer of 1942 to expand the work of the International Relations Subcommittee into two further subdivisions. It was within these two new groupings that the distance between those willing to moderate and the purist watchdogs was registered once again. At their meeting of 20 August 1942, subcommittee chairman Young and PWC chairman Colgate decided that, while it was impossible to provide a ‘blueprint’ of the post-war order, the topic could be usefully divided into matters of practical concern and those related to principles. This crude separation of two highly related issues was an example of the historic tendency toward practicality within the NAM. A Subdivision to Study Certain Practical Problems was created under the leadership of a hard-line veteran of Hershey, Millard Brown (Continental Mills),53 and

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the other subdivision, led by Colonel Willard Chevalier (Business Week) and literally named Committee to Formulate Principles which are Needed for a Post-War World, was charged with the nakedly ­self-interested task of finding policies that ‘would promote the kind of international peace which would best facilitate orderly economic and social progress in the United States’.54 Notable advisers to the subdivisions included a former economic advisor to the State Department, W. W. Cumberland (Wellington & Company), a World Court judge, Manley O. Hudson (Professor of International Law, Harvard Law School), a pre-eminent climatologist, Samuel Van Valkenburg (Professor of Geography, Clark University), and Alexander V. Dye of the National Foreign Trade Council and former head of the federal Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce.55 Despite its all-star cast, the first meetings of Brown’s Subdivision to Study Certain Practical Problems in September 1942—of which arch-conservative Lincoln was a member—offered only the most predictable and unimaginative suggestions regarding the solution of ­post-war problems and underscored the deeply self-interested mindset of the group. Indeed, consistent with the ‘Santa Claus’ theme expressed in Jobs, Freedom, Security, the subdivision considered that in dealing with post-war international issues, ‘the primary consideration of Americans should be the continued welfare of the United States and its citizens, as this will best contribute to the welfare of others’. Only if the US had a food surplus, the group determined, would it be ‘logical and desirable’ for the US to provide aid but on condition that it be repaid over a ­ twenty-five-year period. This business-like approach was justified because ‘it will not cure the ills of the world for the United States to impoverish itself in the post-war period’. Similarly hard-headed conclusions were arrived at over assistance for the reconstruction of war-torn nations, the extent of which the group judged too early of determination but when granted ‘should be made on a sound commercial basis consistent with the national welfare of the assisting country’. After all, the ‘primary job of each country will properly be to put its own economic house in order’. The same judgment was extended to wartime recipients of Lend-Lease aid from the US, who should not have their debt canceled after the war but be allowed to either repay over a longer term at a lower rate of interest, or offer the US ‘substantial foreign credit’ at some future time. As for international trade, the subdivision believed there was no need for any greater involvement of government in an activity which

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‘takes care of itself’ and without such interference beyond that deemed necessary for national defense and the protection of business from ‘unfair’ foreign competition—much as it had always done. Furthermore, government corporations established during the war to operate overseas in directing investments, trade and raw materials must be ‘liquidated’ after the war as this would be ‘consistent with the preservation of free enterprise…’.56 Likely due to the restraining influence of Brown and Lincoln on the group, the Subdivision to Study Certain Practical Problems therefore offered no policy prescriptions that were not already familiar to the NAM.57 The same could not be said of the second subdivision of the International Relations Subcommittee devised to look at ­ ‘principles’. The Committee to Formulate Principles which are Needed for a ­Post-War World was far more open-minded in its approach to international relations, and its treatment of this question was more refined than that which appeared in the September draft Jobs, Freedom, Security, being less blatantly self-interested and leaning noticeably in the direction of the liberals. Fundamentally, the subdivision fully embraced the interconnectedness between national and international prosperity which, it argued, had been brought about by recent improvements in communications and transportation, a fact which, in a possible reference to the NAM traditionalists, the subdivision believed had ‘unfortunately’ been missed by many contemporary observers. The group, however, consoled any diehard protectionists with the assurance: ‘The kind of world that is best for American manufacturers is the same as that which is best for the world in general’. Quoting Assistant Secretary of State and arch-liberal confidant of President Roosevelt, Sumner Welles, the group urged worldwide access to raw materials, freedom of trade and an end to the acquisition of territory by the major powers. The group was also insistent on the need for the US to be involved in some type of international organization after the war. However, they shied away from making specific recommendations about the shape or form of that organization or how it would function in regulating world trade, finance or security. Nevertheless, such engagement with world agencies was ‘not merely the goals of American business’, the group argued, but were ‘the essential conditions of peace and prosperity throughout the world’. No doubt aware of the significance of its conclusions for a traditionally isolationist organization, the subdivision offered this gentle summary by way of a closing plea: ‘This means that our best chance for economic progress in the United States

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will be through cooperation with other nations in a real effort to maintain post-war world order, and to participate in international agencies for that purpose. This need not mean, as some seem to fear, a surrender or loss of sovereignty, but action pursuant to international agreement’. The subdivision ended its report with an appeal for earnest action on the part of the US in establishing the kind of world order that best suited its interests, which was based on a position paper submitted by Harvard law professor and World Court judge Manley O. Hudson in late October 1942 entitled ‘The Postponement of Peace Means the Forfeiture of Opportunity’. In a very short and general statement, Hudson challenged what he considered was the prevailing thesis that the terms of the peace would have to wait until the post-war transition had been completed, and ‘whether the launching of a new international order must be postponed until passions have cooled and judgments have sobered’. Essentially, Hudson argued for the victorious powers—that is the US— to strike while the iron was hot: If the war is to be followed by an attempt to construct a new world order for the future, it would seem, therefore, that that attempt cannot be postponed until the world is restored to something approaching normalcy. It should be begun while power is still lodged with the peoples who have carried through the military struggle, before those peoples have lost their interest, before other peoples have begun their obstruction. It should be carried on while the work of reconstruction is in progress. A long armistice might mean an extended period of disorder, at the end of which the world would have made no permanent advance on the road to peace and prosperity.58

Though muted, there was clear evidence of the influence of liberal ideas about the post-war world upon the group under Chevalier which, unlike the subdivision under Brown devoted to practical problems, was apparently devoid of any NAM hard-liners resistant to any softening of conservative doctrine. Chevalier’s subdivision acknowledged a core liberal thesis about international affairs, principally that the anticipated material shift in the economic standing of the US after the war brought with it a compulsion to involve itself directly and centrally in the economic and political organization of the world. On its success in fulfilling this duty the future of American prosperity was at stake. As Hudson warned, early recognition of this reality, and the winning of Americans to

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an understanding that their fate was more than ever tied in with that of the rest of the world, was an essential part of winning the peace.59 The reports of both subdivisions were combined to produce the final submission of the International Relations Subcommittee to the first report of the PWC, dispatched on 13 November 1942. The decision to present the findings of the subdivisions in unaltered form was a significant one that implied endorsement by the subcommittee not only of the broadly predictable conclusions of the group under Brown but also of the relatively moderate opinions of the group under Chevalier. At twenty pages long, the offering by the International Relations Subcommittee was a substantial contribution to the final product, and its appreciation of the importance of international relations to the domestic success of the US economy was the key reason why this document differed substantially from previous NAM declarations. ‘Our domestic prosperity has a direct relationship to the prosperity and well-being of the rest of the world’, the report began. More importantly, the subcommittee recognized the need for ‘the maintenance of world-wide peace and order’ to realize that prosperity: ‘Thus it follows that the establishment of an orderly and stable world relationship is not merely an ideal of our times. It is a practical and stark necessity for prosperity and well-being of the peoples of all lands. If we are realists we must recognize the need for changes in the international framework to maintain such sound relationships’. Fundamentally, the International Relations Subcommittee recognized that the times had changed. As well as the importance of having a stable and sympathetic international order to prosper, the subcommittee rejected the business-like tone of the Brown group on the matter of American food surpluses to suggest that the US ‘ship promptly’ its surplus to needy countries ‘under such terms of settlement as the circumstances warrant’. Still, beyond acknowledging the importance of establishing a stable world order and being less hard-nosed toward helping the war-ravaged nations, the subcommittee retreated from indicating just how the US government could realize these objectives. For instance, the subcommittee recommended that a ‘framework’ be established through which world political and economic relations could be maintained ‘on an orderly basis’, but did not offer any suggestions regarding what form that might take, only that it was ‘assumed’ that such an organization would be under the ‘responsibility and leadership’ of the US and its ‘associates’. This neglect was noticeable, especially when the NAM News had devoted considerable space to the signing of the United

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Nations Charter in June 1942 and focused specifically on the implications for international trade after the war.60 The reluctance to suggest the United Nations, Roosevelt’s favored vehicle for post-war world organization, was indicative of the unshakable distrust within the NAM of government-sponsored agencies. Hence, the International Relations Subcommittee argued against broadening the power to act of the government, stating that both domestic and international prosperity after the war would be improved by the ‘termination of wide executive and administrative authority over international economic relations’, with the conduct of foreign trade remaining firmly in private hands. The ‘real function’ of government, the subcommittee maintained, was in somehow ‘creating the conditions’ for the development of world trade. In terms of specifics, the subcommittee wanted the new ‘framework’ to allow generalized access to the world’s raw materials and manufactures, as the development of the international economy was ‘bound to be beneficial to the United States’. The subcommittee’s multilateralism was, however, tempered by its acceptance of such trading devices as tariffs, quotas and subsidies so long as nations used them in ways that would ‘develop and promote international trade to the advantage of the participating nations and the world economy’. The main device for establishing improved trade was universal adoption of the most-favored-nation principle, as exemplified by the Reciprocal Trade Agreements process begun in 1934. The subcommittee also echoed the wider cynicism of the NAM on the potential to genuinely eliminate barriers to trade which, the subcommittee insisted, many nations depended on to survive: ‘We believe it is not possible to lay down once and for all policies that would keep open the channels of trade’. Instead, the subcommittee called weakly for ‘some reasonable solution for the important and complex international economic problems of the postwar period’ which would allow ‘a better opportunity’ for a ‘sound internal postwar economy in the United States’.61 The resultant blending of liberal and conservative positions on international relations revealed the paradox within which subcommittee members were apparently caught. On the one hand, they recognized—as did a growing number of business activists at the time—the vital importance to American domestic prosperity of controlling (by the US ideally) world economic relations after the war, and that a unique moment existed for the country to realize this objective. The US would find the going a lot easier if the world accepted American economic values and

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principles, and it was accepted that ‘our best chance’ for economic progress in the US meant ‘cooperation’ with other nations in keeping the world orderly through international agencies. The US had therefore to break from its isolation and act immediately ‘while power is still lodged with the nations who have carried through the military struggle’. On the other hand, the subcommittee was either unwilling or unable to acknowledge that in order to realize these goals a significant expansion, not retraction, of government involvement in the economic and political sphere both at home and abroad would be required commensurate with the acknowledged enhancement in the duties and responsibilities of the US on the world stage, involving forthright action in the realms of trade, finance, military affairs and diplomacy, necessary to maintain the kind of stability sought by the NAM. In other words, the International Relations Subcommittee wanted—indeed viewed as imperative—increased access by private hands to the world’s markets and resources. But, in apparent disregard of the greatly increased duties and responsibilities of the US in enabling these vital ‘needs of the twentieth-century world’ to be met, the subcommittee wanted its goals achieved with the barest involvement of government.62 The need to advance things quickly was undoubtedly partly to blame for these inconsistencies. Yet it would be a while before these proposals, however ill-defined, would emerge into the public domain. Two more draft reports were ‘hurriedly prepared’ by the PWC for the NAM hierarchy in October and early November 1942 before the recommendations of the International Relations Subcommittee subdivisions had been submitted. It now contained a daunting thirty-four practical steps for business to follow for the ‘successful realization’ of the post-war objectives of jobs, freedom and ‘opportunity’—the latter word replacing ‘security’ as a clear symbol of the embrace of a more positive tone by the PWC which as yet found no echo within the larger document.63 The impact that post-war studies were having on the NAM was evidenced at the organization’s first annual gathering since Pearl Harbor. One-third of the three-day conference was dedicated to considering post-war matters, and in a tone, it seemed, of great optimism. Just one year into the war, speakers expressed supreme confidence in the ability of the Allied forces to triumph over the Axis, and were extremely upbeat about the chances for the post-war prosperity of the US. In its ‘War Program of American Industry’, the Congress agreed that ‘Industry does not believe that a disastrous post-war depression is unavoidable or that

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fundamental changes in our social order are inevitable. It does believe that a new era of opportunity and progress can be ahead for the United States when the war is won’.64 The confidence of the NAM was no doubt boosted by the results of the mid-term elections in November 1942. Rising prosperity led many Americans to question the need for intrusive legislation as the rationing of staples like tires, refrigerators, gasoline, sugar, coffee and the last new automobiles began in 1942.65 A string of military setbacks in the Philippines, New Guinea and the Solomon Islands added to the negative view of the Roosevelt administration over the year. The result was a drop in enthusiasm at the mid-term elections of November 1942—just 28 million voters compared to 50 million in 1940—which boiled-down to a low turnout for the Democrats and an average one for the Republicans. It was hardly a resounding vote for conservativism, but popular disquiet over the administration and some voter defection delivered a major boost to the Republicans in Congress, who were gifted forty-four seats in the House, seven seats in the Senate and several key governorships for the Grand Old Party. The ‘conservative coalition’ was set to raise a storm in Washington.66 No wonder that at the next annual meeting of the NAM—its ‘War Congress’—animosity toward the New Dealers was as strong as ever. Planners in Washington were accused of ‘taking it for granted that we are going to win this war, and are meanwhile conspiring, under the guise of the emergency, to destroy our American way of life’.67 Business, the NAM insisted, could win this war if government allowed business greater freedom to get on with the job. That meant supporting management in planning and carrying out production by eliminating the closed shop, banning strikes and outlawing picketing, reducing red tape and rejecting ‘all proposals which seek to use the war as a cloak for socializing the nation’.68 Although the main emphasis of the War Congress was to assure Americans that industry, not government, could deliver victory, it was in this rather bullish atmosphere that the NAM aired for the first time outside the committee room its initial thoughts on the subject of post-war affairs. In fact, the NAM was so determined to mark its arrival on the post-war scene that it asked the War Congress to endorse the findings of the PWC in a resolution ‘Industry’s Post-War Program’. Unfortunately for the PWC, all it had to offer was the broad ‘positions’ enumerated in its first draft report Jobs, Freedom, Security of September, as a final draft

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was still not ready, a further testament to the complexities involved in the study of post-war affairs. In this regard, winning the acceptance of the members to a softening of two important planks of NAM policy would be no minor achievement. This related to policies that had been ‘won’ by the moderators at Hershey, namely a renewed emphasis on the promotion of ‘international exchange of goods, services and capital’ in ways that were ‘mutually advantageous’, and the policy on the elimination of wartime controls was downgraded from ‘immediate’ to ‘as soon as feasible’ after the armistice.69 To ensure the War Congress backed the proposals, the NAM hierarchy pulled out all the stops. As a build-up to the resolution a full exposition of the major findings of the PWC was tabled before the delegates. ‘Significant features’ of the sessions were later published in a 46-page booklet Discussions on the Postwar Outlook ‘as a provocative challenge to post-war planning by industry and as a contribution to current literature on the task that will confront the nation when victory is won’. The booklet recorded a symposium held at the conference under the heading ‘Industry’s Plan for the Postwar Period’, and two addresses from guests Ralph Robey, Associate Editor of Newsweek, and D. C. Prince, vice president of General Electric. The speeches and exchanges at the War Congress offered a useful summary of the level of unanimity and of discord that existed over several areas among those within the NAM entrusted with investigating post-war affairs. In his address, Robey, Liberty League star of ‘textbook controversy’ fame and soon to be chief economist for the NAM, spoke about ‘The Possibility of Postwar Prosperity’ using a series of highly finished pictorial charts which depicted the standing of various aspects of the US economy based on the assumption (allegedly purely for technical purposes and not as a forecast) that the war would be over by the end of 1943. Robey believed these charts showed that the US economy in the post-war period would have sufficient quantities of purchasing power, demand, productive capacity and labor ‘to make prosperity a certainty’ and ‘to continue production at a higher peacetime level than this nation has ever enjoyed’. On the subject of ‘Postwar Planning by Corporations’, Prince detailed how corporations currently engaged in war production might best transition to peacetime production to ‘harness’ what he predicted as a ‘violent boom’ in demand after the war. Still, Prince counseled that even with everyone working overtime it would not be possible to satisfy public demand in all sectors for possibly two or three years after the

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war, arguing that rationing and price ceilings would ‘act as a safeguard for sound business’. Despite his grim prediction of long-lasting price controls, Prince was confident that Americans would be driven into the arms of private industry as the group ‘most capable’ of providing freedom from fear and want.70 The symposium, chaired by another Columbia University dignitary, Professor of Education Lyman Bryson, comprised Robey and several personnel from the PWC. The ‘academics’ Murray Shields, Ray Westerfield (Yale University) and Dr. J. O. Downey (General Motors) were joined by Chevalier, Airey, Wason, H. B. Arthur and E. V. O’Daniel. Bryson claimed the questions he had selected for the panel to debate had been drawn from ‘a vast mass’ of questions that were ‘pouring in constantly at the headquarters of the NAM’.71 The questions fielded at the symposium dealt both with practical issues related to problems of the transition, such as readjusting the country’s finances, maintaining production and reviving small business, and questions related to America’s post-war role in world economic, political and military affairs. The role of public works in easing employment in the transition was ridiculed beyond its ‘essential’ function of providing roads, sanitation, housing and so on or used to help develop ‘large private firms’ or ‘maintain the standard of living’. Public works should not, Chevalier continued, be used by ‘extremists’ to ‘convert our economy from one of private enterprise to some variant of socialism’. The only controversy of any sort that arose among the group was over the timing of the removal of wartime controls. Robey argued for immediate termination of wartime controls, as ‘when you say six months you say permanently’. Besides, ‘the decision on this’, Robey contended, ‘will determine whether we have an individual enterprise system in this country after the war at all’. Airey, vice-chair of the PWC, strongly disagreed, noting that an immediate removal of controls would raise prices and create a ‘chaotic situation which will unnerve everybody’. Unlike Robey, he was less afraid of ‘regimentation’ of the economy if wartime controls persisted, believing that ‘as we have stood it for a few years already…we can stand it a few months more after the war ends’. Wason agreed with Airey that regimentation was unlikely given the public distaste of wartime controls, ‘which has given them a consciousness of restraint and limitation…The entire nation is fed up’. To the delight of the audience (applause was noted), Wason decreed: ‘Every employee of every employer here is in favor of having these controls terminated’. Wason went so far as to suggest—in language hitherto novel for a NAM

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official—that such was the frustration of labor and its union leaders with government regulation that management should lend them a hand. Central to his reasoning was the idea, first articulated by Weisenburger in February 1942, that private enterprise should seize the unique circumstances of the war to improve their standing with the American public. ‘We are now in a period’, Wason deduced, ‘when public relations policies of manufacturers should be used to the utmost to make every employee further aware of what every manager contends with every day’. Wason was supported by another fellow of the PWC, economic advisor H. B. Arthur, who was ‘rather optimistic’ about returning to a pre-war level of government regulation but confessed ‘it would be optimistic beyond reason to hope that we should go back to the days of 1929’. It was on this point that discussion turned to international affairs and whether, as Bryson put it, ‘the average American businessman has got to think about a world economy as well as about a national economy’. Downey certainly thought so, and delivered a long speech about the necessity for the US to bear more responsibility on the world stage. He believed that the greater interdependency of the world after the war would lead to more foreign trade and obliged the US to ‘prompt prosperity in all parts of the world. I think that is essential…Self-interest demands that we do this’. Downey supported the creation of a ‘permanent world organization’ to supplant the short-term policing of the world by the three biggest industrial nations that would survive the war, namely America, Britain and the Soviet Union. The establishment of world political stability, Downey fathomed, would encourage US business to become interested in the industrialization of the populous regions of the world undertaken, that is, in accordance with ‘the principles of free enterprise and international business…The greater our participation, the greater would be the opportunity for American manufacturers in the enhanced prosperity’. The theme of self-interestedness was taken up by Chevalier, who wanted businessmen to forget the ‘emotional and sentimental’ baggage commonly attached to the question of American involvement in world affairs and be more ‘practical and realistic’ about it: ‘My own attitude toward this subject of cooperation with the rest of the world is dominated by the matter of American self-interest’. The chairman of the International Relations Subcommittee asked: ‘Do we want to live and do business in a world organized for peace or for war?’. For Chevalier, the conditions for post-war American prosperity laid in creating a framework that could

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tackle disarmament and security, conduct rehabilitation and reconstruction, and deal with ‘correcting those economic dislocations which lurk behind all wars’ using ‘international agencies’ to deal with the ‘control’ of scarce resources, ‘negotiation’ of tariffs and trade barriers, ‘regulation’ of international exchange and ‘general economic cooperation’. On this latter point, Chevalier was making the case for US membership of an array of international organizations designed to create a post-war economic and political order upon which lasting American prosperity was ensured and maintained. The benefits, thanks to the unique conditions of the imagined post-war order, were, as Downey triumphantly (if not prematurely) saw it, clear: ‘The opportunity today is greater than ever before to establish free enterprise as the basic economic system for most of the world’. However, no applause was registered for Chevalier’s plea for a more sympathetic attitude toward post-war US involvement in world affairs. This was not the case for Shields, whose response to the same question ‘We must be prosperous here if the world is to be prosperous’, purely emphasized the necessity for a domestic rise in the standard of living based on the ‘great opportunity’ offered by the post-war period, but on the proviso that government began its retreat from the economy ‘right away’ and kept doing it ‘until it is obvious to all that the vital force of business and investment initiative is beginning to show real vigor again’.72 The promise of a more profitable and business-friendly future for private enterprise was apparently enough for the War Congress to endorse the tentative post-war program of the PWC. The national meeting also offered a vital platform for another essential figure in the ­re-configuration of the NAM. In his address before the delegates, Weisenburger, using material and themes he used in his speech to the National Association of Publicity Directors back in February, crowed that the fight to win public confidence in free enterprise had at last been won. Now, however, he warned of an equal danger to the enterprise system: liberal reformers. ‘The people have been sold so well the merits of the system that we need not fear the honest, above-board advocate of Communism or any of the other forms of collectivism. But the real danger is in those who give lip service to private enterprise while they suggest modifications which would destroy it…The issue no longer is private enterprise versus collectivism; it is private enterprise versus “modified” enterprise – not right against left, but right against wrong’. The trend toward a moderate center-ground, as illustrated in the defection of the USCC and the creation of the moderate-leaning CED, was now

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a more worrying development to Weisenburger than the familiar challenge of the New Dealers. He thought that efforts should be made to ‘preserve individual initiative’, namely to oppose government leadership over the economy, not merely defend the right to own property. This effort was of immediate concern, even alongside the winning of the war, as he feared that if managers were to wait for public anger to rescue them against federal power, free enterprise was ‘liable to be modified beyond recognition’. The only permanent solution was, according to Weisenburger, to convince the American public ‘that enlightened private enterprise will exercise its economic power with such a sense of social responsibility that a policeman need not be placed in every office’. The job of management, therefore, was to showcase its capacity to care: ‘This altruism, idealism, of the average American is of great importance in our public relations job…no leadership can hope for public endorsement unless it demonstrates a sympathetic understanding of the problems of the less fortunate in America’. Through this motivational language, Weisenburger was seeking to alter the mindset of a hard-nosed, negativistic and traditionally reactive organization more familiar with achieving unanimity and declaring on ‘principles’ than offering bold direction. He wanted them to see the dangers of complacency, to utilize the apparent openness to alternatives in the wider population, and finally to seize the initiative from the liberals. As he bluntly concluded: ‘The public wants positive leadership from management. If industry does not rise to this chance to establish business influence, then the people cannot be criticized for turning to whatever other source offers leadership’.73 It was taking a while for the NAM to draw the tactical, organizational and ideological lessons from their encounter at the Labor-Management Conference of 1941. The NAM had shown on countless occasions that this burgeoning, top-heavy, closed and highly elitist organization was badly designed to respond quickly and subtly to pressures both exterior and interior in origin. It was increasingly apparent to several of its forward-thinking leaders that simply asserting the merits of free enterprise was not enough to impact an increasingly mainstream belief in the ­long-term feasibility of government participation in the economy. This was in spite of the fact that American enterprise was doing a successful job in tying itself to the ‘production miracle’. The challenge was for the NAM to translate this physical show of the power of private enterprise, if only nominally ‘free’, into support for corporate conservative leadership once the fighting had stopped.

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What made isolation for the NAM in the 1940s less acceptable was the palpable rise, and not decline like in the late 1930s, in the power of the New Dealers, rejuvenated by the war mobilization and thrust into positions of influence across a galaxy of new federal agencies by a Roosevelt administration of unbroken tenure. Despite a rightward shift at the polls, the dominance of corporate liberals in the discussion of ­post-war planning was further evidence of the isolation of conservatives from meaningful influence over the country’s future. The apparent recruitment of fellow business conservatives from the USCC like Johnston to the ranks of the liberal bandwagon in 1942, and the formation of a new, corporate moderate challenger in the CED highlighted the isolation of corporate conservatives. The loss of the USCC from the conservative camp left the NAM as the sole defenders of the laissez-faire order, further marooning it to the outer fringes of political discourse— the ‘cranky outsider in the new national order’, as one historian put it.74 The closing words of Weisenburger at the War Congress encapsulated the test facing corporate conservatives. The problem was that another year had passed since the public relations chief had identified the ‘image’ problem of the NAM, and in his mind the organization was still far from ready to compete toe-to-toe with the powerful, uncomplicated and evidently popular—even among business activists—schemes of the liberal post-war planners. At the policy level, the PWC offered a possible route for the NAM to make headway against the liberals but was far behind in the race to be ‘first in the field’ of post-war planning. Open-minded figures in the PWC had started a debate over fundamental questions about the post-war world, such as international affairs and even the timeline for relinquishing price controls, but there was considerable resistance to making any significant changes to the core policies of the NAM. The clash at Hershey showcased these differences and as a mechanism for clarifying policy was not repeated. Nevertheless, major figures were beginning to recognize that the post-war supremacy of the US would bring with it new opportunities but also new responsibilities, with some of them impacting on domestic as well as international policies. The true ramifications of many post-war issues were yet to be developed, but there was an explicit recognition of the need to prepare for a transformative era. It was a slow start to post-war planning, but by the time of the War Congress the NAM had emerged tentatively, with more of a whimper than a splash, from the gloom of the 1930s into the brave new world of post-war planning.

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As we shall see, in 1943 the NAM inched steadily into the national decision-making process by relaxing its stance on non-engagement with the business-labor framework set-up by Roosevelt and engaging more forcefully and more positively in the post-war planning debate. The pleas of Weisenburger began to have effect as the NAM borrowed heavily from the inspirational language and scientific approach of the liberal planners in its image makeover. This landmark ‘moderating’ turn which had begun in earnest in 1942 within the PWC was brought to fruition by the passion and commitment of incoming president of the NAM and former PWC vice chairman, Frederick C. Crawford.

Notes









1.  Walter LaFeber, Richard Polenberg, and Nancy Woloch, The American Century: A History of the United States since 1941 (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 2008, sixth edition), p. 5. By 1942, the industrial mobilization was complete: see Carew, Becoming the Arsenal, pp. 163–167. 2. Quoted in Fones-Wolf, Selling Free Enterprise, p. 26. 3. The only ‘official’ history of the TCF is that of former wartime Assistant Secretary of State, Adolf A. Berle, entitled Leaning Against the Dawn: An Appreciation of the Twentieth Century Fund and Its Fifty Years of Adventure in Seeking to Influence American Development toward a More Effectively Just Civilization, 1919–1969 (New York: Twentieth Century Fund, 1986 edition). 4. The official history of the NPA is The National Planning Association at Work: Six Decades of Providing Solutions to America’s Challenges, NPA Report No. 278 (Washington, DC: National Planning Association, 1995). 5.  National Planning Association, Guides for Post-War Planning, NPA Planning Pamphlet No. 8 (Washington, DC, November 1941); and Twentieth Century Fund, Paths to Tomorrow (New York, 1941). 6. Stuart Chase, The Road We Are Travelling (New York: Twentieth Century Fund, 1942). For analysis see Whitham, Rise of the Corporate Moderates, p. 45 and p. 78. The final book, For This We Fought, came out in 1946. For a short study of Chase, see William A. Hodson and John Carfora, ‘Stuart Chase: Brief Life of a Public Thinker, 1888–1985’, Harvard Magazine, September–October 2004. Some of his private papers are in the Manuscripts Division of the Library of Congress. 7. Blum argued that Roosevelt accepted Congressional opposition to his policies ‘as if by default’ in 1942; Blum, V Was for Victory, p. 222. 8. ‘Remarks of Witherow to NAM Board’, 28 January 1942, 235/XIII.

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9.  WPB staffing is detailed in Koistinen, Arsenal of World War II, Chapter Eight (figures from p. 199). Winkler estimated that three-quarters of the WPB was staffed by business executives; Winkler, Home Front USA, p. 18. That included Robert R. Nathan, long-standing member of the NPA. 10. The formation of the OPA is described by Waddell, The War Against the New Deal, pp. 84–86; and Koistinen, Arsenal of World War II, pp. 420– 422. For some businesses, the impositions of the OPA far outstripped any regulation they had endured under the New Deal; see Wilson, Creative Destruction, p. 164. 11. In July 1942, Roosevelt rejected the study of post-war issues in the State Department but allowed them to continue ‘informally’ in the NRPB; see Blum, V Was for Victory, p. 224. 12. For histories of the NRPB see Philip W. Warken, A History of the National Resources Planning Board, 1933–1943 (New York: Garland, 1979); and Marion Clawson, New Deal Planning: The National Resources Planning Board (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981). For a contemporary account, see Charles E. Merriam, ‘The National Resources Planning Board: A Chapter in American Planning Experience’, American Political Science Review, Vol. 38 (December 1944), pp. 1077–1088. 13. Detailed in Wilson, Creative Destruction, p. 102. 14. ‘Interpreting Industry to America, by Walter Weisenburger’, 17 February 1942, 844/III; and ‘What the Factory Worker Thinks about Free Enterprise’, circa early 1942, 847/III. Italics in original. 15. ‘Comments on the Postwar Activities of the NAM’, 24 April 1943, copies in 288 and 289/I. 16. Ibid. 17.  ‘The Future of the Private Enterprise System in America: Tentative Outline’, 13 May 1941, 272/I. 18. See Can We Avoid a Post-Armament Depression? A Survey of Opinions Submitted by Members of the American Economic Association to the NAM (June 1941), 288/I. A section of the report, titled ‘A Post-Armament Depression is Unlikely—A Minority View’, was included at the end. 19.  From ‘How to Mitigate or Avoid a Future Depression’, circa March 1941; and ‘Questionnaire of Opinions Regarding the Post-Armament Depression’ (with a copy of the original letter sent to AEA members), circa February 1941, in 272 and 273/I respectively. 20. ‘Remarks of Witherow to NAM Board’, 28 January 1942, 235/XIII. 21.  ‘Some Post-War Plans: A Summary’ (no author), 9 February 1942, 289/I. Also included in the NAM summary were two other statements— that of the International Labor Organization of the League of Nations and of the Church of England (‘Malvern Declarations’). For the ILO, the plea to a recent convention in New York by the Lord Privy Seal and

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leader of the British Labour Party, Clement R. Atlee, that ‘a combination of freedom and order is required in the economic world’ was taken as representative of the post-war outlook of that organization, while the passing of a motion by the Church of England which declared the accumulation of vast resources in the hands of a few men a ‘stumbling block’ to living ‘Christian lives’ was also noted. 22. The exact date of its formation cannot be verified, but the earliest mention of the PWC in available documents was 21 February 1942. 23. The word ‘planning’ was hardly uttered by any NAM figure and rarely appeared in any of the NAM literature during this period. 24.  Wilfred Sykes in NAM News: ‘Postwar Preparation’, 26 June 1943, 288/I. 25. Reprinted in NAM News, 17 July 1943, 225/XVI. 26. Mises fled the Nazis to the US in 1940 but was unable to gain employment until 1945. He rose to prominence in the 1950s alongside his better-known protégé Friedrich von Hayek, but wrote little in the ­ 1940s. His treatise The Essence of Barter Trade (1941) and Autarky and Its Consequences (1943) are both mentioned in brief NAM reviews of his work in 289/I. For scholarship see Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands, pp. 34–35 and p. 40; Israel Kirzner, Ludwig von Mises: The Man and His Economics (Wilmington: ISI Books, 2001); and Burgin, The Great Persuasion, pp. 78–79 (on arriving in the US). 27.  See ‘Memorandum on Objectives of the Postwar Committee and Particularly Its Steering Committee’, 8 June 1943, 287/I. 28.  Members included Arthur, Millard Brown, Colonel Willard Chevalier (publisher of Business Week), Houston, Hoyt, Lincoln, and Mackay. For details of company affiliation or profession and the committee membership history of these and all the personnel named in this book see Appendix. 29. Members included R. L. Fowler, H. M. Hooker, H. W. Hoover, R. W. Moore, Wampler, W. R. Webster and J. R. Whiting; listed in ‘Postwar Purchasing Power Subcommittee of NAM Committee on Post-War Problems’, 1 May 1942, 290/I. 30. Members were Melvin H. Baker, F. N. Bard, James E. DeLong, H. Donn Keresey, Edward E. O’Neill, and W. W. Sieg. 31. Members included Graves, Klein, D. F. Lane, McAfee, John C. Parker, Carlton Smith, and S. Tomkins; listed in ‘Principles of Government Relations to Industry Subcommittee of NAM Committee on Post-War Problems’, 15 April 1942, 290/I. 32. Members included Emery, Harrington, Dingle, Airey, Mallon, Lutz, King, Bradford Smith, Goodwin Smith, Brown, Beitzel and Patch.

106  C. WHITHAM 33.  ‘Comments on the Postwar Activities of the NAM’, 24 April 1943, 288/I. 34. There is very little primary evidence of the exact founding of the CED. What there is comes mainly from Karl Schriftgiesser, Business Comes of Age: The Story of the Committee for Economic Development and Its Impact upon the Economic Policies of the United States, 1942–1960 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1960); pp. 24–25; and McQuaid, Big Business and Presidential Power, p. 132. An updated discussion of its origins can be found in Whitham, Rise of the Corporate Moderates, pp. 67–74. 35. See Workman, ‘Manufacturing Power’, pp. 293–294. 36. Fones-Wolf, Selling Free Enterprise, p. 28. Johnston later published a full explanation of his ideas in America Unlimited: The Case for a People’s Capitalism (New York: Doubleday, 1944). 37. Harrison to Lawson, Wilkinson and Hosking, 10 June 1942, 846/III. 38. All from ‘1941 Annual Report of the Committee on Economic Policy (Fourth Draft)’, circa December 1941, 846/III (copy also in 290/I). 39. NAM Press Service, ‘Post-Defense Problems’, 26 June 1942, 289/I. 40. ‘Post-War Economic Prospects’, by Murray Shields (NAM, 4 December 1941). 41.  ‘Some Ideas on the Subject of Post War Planning: I—Some Basic Assumptions’, 2 June 1942, 289/I (Italics in original). 42.  All from ‘A Summary of a Discussion of the American Individual Enterprise System Study by the NAM Committee on Postwar Problems and the Economic Review Group at Hershey, Pennsylvania, July 11–12 1942’, 16 July 1942, 289/I. 43. Most space in the minutes was given to the responses of the ‘conservatives’, whether that reflected the actual balance of the meeting is unknown. Those named in the minutes were Crawford, Robins, Wason, Lincoln, O’Daniel, Westerfield, Colgate, Sargent, Robey, James T. Young, Bard (PWC Steering Committee), Emery, Harrington, Dingle, Airey, Parker, Wulsin (PWC Steering Committee), Mallon, Lutz, Gebhart (former Secretary of Committee on Economic Policy), King, Bradford Smith, Goodwin Smith, Brown, Beitzel, Patch and Black (PWC Steering Committee). 44. Immediately following Hershey, Colgate received several letters of mixed criticism from NAM members about the circulated textbook draft, some of them having been present at the meeting itself; see letters in 289/I. 45. ‘What Can the Businessman and the Industrialist Expect after the War: Address before the Institute on Preparing for the Postwar World, by John C. Gebhart’, 24 June 1942, 5/I. 46. ‘The World We Are Making: By Walter D. Fuller before the National Education Association’, 2 July 1942 (leaflet November 1943), 218/XVI.

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47.  See ‘Preparing Now for Post-War Problems: A Practical Program for Industry’, July 1942, 209/XV. The leaflet was the product of the Practical Program for Industry Subcommittee which framed its work around the general post-war policy adopted by the Congress of American Industry of December 1941 which called for lower taxation on companies, liberal banking and credit policies and reduced government debt. In May, the Subcommittee listed several ‘sound business principles’ to be considered by management, which included dedicated research into post-war problems related to the provision of jobs, finance and products, the conservation of financial resources (‘rainy day’ money), methods of retraining personnel, analyzing likely distribution problems and the study of export markets; see ‘A Suggested Position for the Practical Program for Industry Subcommittee’, 20 May 1942, 289/I. 48. From an early draft in ‘Employer Preparation for the Post-War Period: Memorandum under Consideration by the NAM Post-War Problems Committee’, 21 February 1942, 289/I. 49.  NAM Press Service, ‘NAM Launches Campaign to Outline Post-War Plan’, 3 August 1942, 289/I. 50. From Jobs, Freedom, Security: The Post-War Program of the NAM, 2 September 1942 (revised), 289/I. 51. NAM Press Service, ‘Higher Living Standards Are Industry’s Post-War Objective, Says Witherow’, 19 September 1942, 289/I. 52. Smith to Sargent, 14 September 1942, 290/I. 53. Members included Hoyt, Mackay, Mallon, Lincoln and Hugo N. Schloss. 54.  ‘Minutes of the International Relations Subcommittee of the NAM Committee on Post-War Problems’, 20 August 1942, 290/I. Members under Chevalier were Henry B. Arthur, George H. Huston, Clark H. Minor and Edgar W. Smith. 55. Other advisers were John Lee Coulter, Ellsworth Huntington (Professor of Geography, Yale University, foremost world geographer), Alvin H. Killheffer (Legal Department, E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company, Inc.), Marcus Nadler (Professor of Finance, New York University), Frederick L. Schuman (Professor of Government, Williams College and member of Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service) and J. O. Downey (Chairman’s Staff, General Motors); see ‘Memorandum on Objectives of the Postwar Committee and particularly its Steering Committee’, 8 June 1943, 287/I. 56. ‘Minutes of International Relations Subcommittee Subdivision to Study Certain Practical Problems of the NAM Committee on Post-War Problems’, 9 and 29 September 1942, both in 290/I.

108  C. WHITHAM 57. Brown’s final report was submitted on 23 October 1942; see ‘Minutes of International Relations Subcommittee Subdivision to Study Certain Practical Problems of the NAM Committee on Post-War Problems’ (with final recommendations attached), 23 October 1942, 290/I. For the trail of earlier versions of the subdivision’s conclusions see ‘Recommendations of International Relations Subcommittee Subdivision to Study Certain Practical Problems’, 7 October 1942 (Appendices A, B and C), 290/I. 58. ‘Report of Colonel Chevalier’s Subdivision on International Relations’, circa November 1942, 290/I; and ‘The Postponement of Peace Means the Forfeiture of Opportunity’, submitted by Manley O. Hudson for consideration at the meeting of the Committee to Formulate Principles which are needed for a Post-War World, Subdivision of International Relations Subcommittee of NAM Committee on Post-War Problems, 31 October and 1 November 1942, 289/I. 59. Chevalier’s subdivision certainly had sight of material with a liberal bias. This included CED trade liberal theorist Sumner Schlicter in ‘Postwar Boom or Collapse’, Harvard Business Review, Vol. 21, No. 1 (Autumn 1942), and the writings of TCF publicist Stuart Chase in ‘Lewis Haney Analyzes Chase’s Picture of Future’, from New York Journal American, 29 October 1942. They also reviewed reports from British industrialists about post-war trade, which supported lower tariffs and recognized wartime controls might have to remain for a period after the war; see ‘British Export and Economic Reconstruction: An Interim Report prepared by the Research Committee of the Institute of Export, consisting of an inquiry into the principles which should underlie the conduct of harmonious International Trade’, circa 1942; ‘Post-War Trade: Second Memorandum by the National Union of Manufacturers’, May 1942; and ‘Report of the Special Committee on Post-War Industrial Reconstruction’, Association of British Chambers of Commerce, 6 May 1942; all material in 289/I. Also various ‘digests’ of academic and official pronouncements (including historians) on the post-war world of all persuasions were looked at and their positions briefly (one page) outlined. The opinions of British historian Arnold Toynbee, left-wing political theorist Harold Laski, Vice President Henry Wallace, Republican John F. Dulles, liberal economist Gardiner Means and Keynesian enthusiast Alvin Hansen were all viewed; these are also in 289/I. 60. See NAM News, 13 June 1942, 846/III. 61.  As the subcommittee insisted: ‘It would serve no useful purpose for this report to enter into the details of a blueprint for future international organization’; from ‘International Relations: As proposed to the Post-War Problems Committee by its Subcommittee on International Relations’, 13 November 1942, 289/I.





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62. Ibid. 63. See Post-War Jobs-Freedom-Opportunity: Preliminary Statement Based on Three Recent Meetings of the NAM Post-War Problems Committee, 12 October 1942 (contains statement ‘hurriedly prepared’ on cover); and Jobs-Freedom-Opportunity: A Preliminary Statement on Our Post-War Problem by the Post-War Problems Committee of the NAM, 4 November 1942, both in 289/I. 64. From NAM News: War Congress of American Industry, 12 December 1942, 847/III. The essentials of this statement were drafted by the NAM prior to the Congress; see ‘Employer Preparation for the Post-Defense Period’, which began: ‘Some people believe that a big post-defense depression is inevitable. We don’t think so’ (235/XIII). 65. On rationing see Koistinen, Arsenal of World War II, p. 426. 66. Explained by Jeffries, Wartime America, pp. 152–156. Even the conservative Southern Democrats improved their standing in 1942, dominating the major committees. Winkler described the conservative coalition as ‘an almost insurmountable bloc’ in Congress after 1942; Winkler, Home Front USA, p. 96. 67.  Initiative Will Win the War: An Address Delivered by J. Howard Pew before the War Congress of American Industry (NAM, 1942), 222/XVI. Pew added: ‘This is no time for experiments in business reform’. 68. From NAM News: War Congress of American Industry, 12 December 1942, 847/III. 69.  Ibid. This list was essentially that sent by Sargent at the request of Weisenburger; see Sargent to Weisenburger, 27 July 1942, 289/I. 70.  Discussions on the Postwar Outlook: Including Two Addresses and a Symposium from the War Congress of American Industry, December 1942 (1943), copies in 288 and 290/I. An outline of Robey’s presentation can be found in 289/I. 71. There is no evidence of questions ‘pouring’ into NAM, but a long-list of possible questions was collated in November from five different sources (not identified) that dealt broadly with basic NAM concerns such as the role of government in the economy, the continuation of wartime controls, the political, economic and military role of the US, relations with Russia and Britain, and the restructuring of post-war finances. Another list of questions was made indicating which panellist should answer them: of the 31 questions nine dealt with international issues. For both lists see ‘Questions for Discussion at Special Panel on Post-War Problems’, 16 November 1942; and ‘Proposed Questions for the Post-war Symposium’, 14 November 1942, both in 289/I.

110  C. WHITHAM 72. All quotations from Discussions on the Postwar Outlook. The symposium discussion was released separately under the title ‘Industry’s Plan for the Postwar Period’: copies in 289 and 290/I. 73. ‘Your Day in the Court of Public Opinion: An Address by Walter B. Weisenburger before the War Congress of American Industry’, 3 December 1942, 844/III. 74. Workman, ‘Manufacturing Power’, p. 295.

CHAPTER 5

The Peak of Post-War Planning, 1943

Given a lasting peace, and with real cooperation between management, labor and government for more efficient production, America will enter not a period of depression but its most glorious and prosperous era. (Frederick Crawford, NAM President, January 1943)

The year 1943 began well for conservatives. The first year of war for America had pushed the general public further away from those identified with the social reform agenda. The return of prosperity after years of hardship for many Americans weakened the bond they had established with the New Deal Democrats now that government assistance was no longer perceived as necessary. Public disquiet with the Democratic Party was registered not only by refusing to vote, but also by some in voting for the other side. It seemed the national mood was finally turning. The resultant fillip to the conservative coalition triggered a legislative rout of several lingering New Deal agencies and the scalps of some high-profile figures in Washington during 1943, limiting the scope for liberal activism and further solidifying the government–business relationship that had so favored the country’s biggest corporations. Industrial chiefs were riding high after feasting on a bonanza of military contracts, two-thirds of which were signed with just one hundred of the country’s largest firms, with thirty or so mammoth corporations gobbling half of those deals.1 Having benefited from the ‘wave of irritation’ among voters toward

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government regulation, the Republicans, according to Blum, prepared to ‘impress upon postwar public policy an unequivocally conservative stamp’.2 The rise in the fortunes of Congressional conservatives was naturally welcomed by the NAM. It appeared to confirm the estimates of its public relations elite on the shifting sympathies of the masses and boded well for the launch of its many initiatives to win American hearts and minds to the side of private enterprise capitalism. It remained the task of the organization, however, to convert the electoral gains and any consequent enfeebling of the administration into material advances for the cause of corporate conservatives. Liberal planners and corporate moderates, now represented in a new business organization specifically created to devise post-war policy on jobs and production, the CED, posed a continuous and serious threat to the credibility of the NAM as the ‘true’ spokesperson for the interests of business. Newsweek called post-war planning ‘the most popular intellectual pastime in the United States today’.3 A lot of work was still needed by the NAM to ensure Americans properly understood and embraced the credo, and the post-war leadership, of private enterprise. In 1943, the NAM emerged onto the public stage with fresh confidence and a dynamic leader to impress its own ‘stamp’ on the ­post-war direction of the country. No single figure was better equipped to lead the NAM in the uncharted waters of 1943 than Frederick C. Crawford. Already active in the PWC, now as NAM president for 1943, then chairman of the Board and honorary vice president, Crawford would remain at the heart of the NAM until 1949. A well-known Cleveland philanthropist and civic leader with boundless enthusiasm and an innovative mindset, Crawford’s pragmatic outlook was some distance from that of the conservative Old Guard. On labor and government relations, Crawford preferred negotiation and engagement to confrontation. For example, as president of the medium-sized automotive and aircraft parts manufacturer Thompson Products since 1933, Crawford was a pioneer of ‘humanizing’ employee relations, adding welfare programs, a personnel department and countless workplace initiatives using modern communication techniques to win the loyalty of his staff. These methods enabled Crawford to form a ‘company’ union and avoid dealing with the established trades unions, which he thoroughly despised. Indeed, it was his regular clashes with the NLRB/NWLB that endeared Crawford to the upper echelons of the NAM and led to his nomination as its president.4

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His approach to government was summed up in his first report to the NAM Board. Having made four trips to Washington (from New York HQ) in six weeks, Crawford noted there was considerable ‘confusion’ in government but ‘if we don’t aggressively help those fellows, we’ll pass up the best bet of the decade’. Crawford joined the Labor-Management Policy Commission of the War Manpower Commission, devised to balance the labor needs of industry, agriculture and the military, and met with James Forrestal, Under-Secretary of the Navy, and James Patterson, Assistant Secretary of War, along with ‘many others’ on the issue of contract renegotiation, and Cordell Hull, Secretary of State, on post-war trade.5 Of these agencies, the most significant was the National War Labor Board. Crawford reversed the NAM policy of non-participation in the NWLB (which replaced the NLRB during the war), a decision that for the first time in NAM history recognized the legitimacy of government’s role in managing industrial relations. Crawford joined with the USCC to have more conservative-minded business representatives appointed onto the regional and national levels of the NWLB, a tactic that did not alter the outlook of the NWLB but assisted in raising the credibility of the NAM, just as Crawford designed.6 Crawford’s essential reasoning for involving the NAM more closely in the agencies of government was because he was afraid the conservative business voice was being ignored. His impression from his ‘soundings’ in Washington confirmed Weisenburger’s thesis that those seeking to ‘modify’ capitalism rather than completely replace it were the new enemy. ‘From the President down, they’re all paying homage to private enterprise’, but, Crawford noticed, ‘apparently see no difficulty in combining the corporate state and free enterprise. This is the most dangerous post-war trend on the horizon’. For Crawford, this meant ‘postwar planning is a “must” for this Association…Otherwise, we’ll lose the newly displayed confidence of the public in private enterprise’.7 Soon after, Crawford represented the NAM alongside Charles Hook on the Research Committee and Field Division of the CED.8 The decision to reach out to any government organization that would allow representation from the NAM and to emphasize post-war studies was just two of the three components of Crawford’s strategy to make the NAM appear ‘caring’ and to lessen its political isolation. The most important objective, however, for this media-savvy executive was to change its public image. He agreed with Weisenburger and Harrison that the whole organization should be united around a single theme.

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He wanted the NAM to embrace the new science of public relations to shape NAM policies, such as those on labor, into ‘positive packages’ which incorporated what he called a ‘social turn’ that would transform the NAM into ‘a better symbol of public acceptance even while advocating an extremely vigorous labor program, and yet not draw fire as a labor baiting organization’. Under Crawford, the entire NAM machine was geared to more vigorously communicate with government, legislators and the public in a bid to dispel negative perceptions of corporate conservatives and raise their standing in the wider national debate about the future of the country. A Legislative Policies Commission, and a Management Principles Commission to codify relations between management, workers and the public, was formed at the heart of a NAM structure with more staff and space. As he remarked: ‘I want to get positive, constructive and definite with both Congress and the public. That’s the only kind of leadership that will get business anywhere’.9 An early speech by Crawford in January 1943 showcased the fundamentals of his approach, which modified NAM’s core message about the post-war world with some liberal-informed twists designed to soften its harder edges. As he had shown during his spell as vice-chairman of the PWC, Crawford agreed with Weisenburger and the ‘internationalist’ element of the PWC that the NAM should be far more positive about the nation’s future. The task for Crawford was to link the wartime rebirth of US capitalism to a brighter post-war world that featured the role of private enterprise and not government intervention, as tendered by the corporate liberals. So, the self-evident power and efficiency of private enterprise in delivering the country’s production miracle was still front and center in Crawford’s delivery, as was the conflation of the fight for world freedom with the ‘freedoms’ that Americans enjoyed at home, just as it had been in almost every public speech by the NAM leadership since at least Pearl Harbor. Yet in three other important respects Crawford introduced something new to the established wartime refrain of the NAM. The first was a distancing of the NAM from the caricature of corporate conservatives as laissez-faire absolutists and casting them instead as simple traditionalists energized by the chance to wipe the slate clean and get things right: ‘This [traditional freedoms] does not mean’, Crawford affirmed, ‘that industry is longing to return to the dear dead past, that management is a bunch of old fogies yearning for the era of “laissez faire”. We don’t want “laissez faire business”, “laissez faire labor”, or “laissez faire government”. But we do want to stop America

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slipping. Business wants to recapture the traditional American progress— now stopped for over a decade—and go forward, not backward—to a better and better life for all’. Central to his ability to sell the idea that the future would be brighter was in utilizing the notion, so successfully promoted by the liberals, that the post-war world held vast potential for American advancement. This was the second of Crawford’s variations to NAM’s posture, a greater emphasis on and enthusiasm for the enormous post-war potential of the US economy not just at home but in a global setting, with the US as the leading force for world prosperity. Crawford had shown a glimpse of his predilections on international relations at Hershey during his stint as vice-chairman of the PWC. For him, the post-war world was no longer one filled with ‘problems’ for Americans, whereupon the ‘normal’ economic life of the country had been upset by the diversions of war. Rather, the post-war era was cast as a far better place than anything Americans had experienced before, filled with even greater opportunity and potential. And of this gift, Crawford was absolutely convinced: This isn’t the American sunset – the end of free enterprise or the decadence of Western civilization. The postwar world will be the greatest chance we, or the peoples of the globe, have ever had for advancement… When peace comes the whole world will be America’s market and America’s opportunity to demonstrate on a grand scale the ever-lasting practicability and soundness of our initiative system…When we turn to peace again we’re going to have the best hand in the international economy game if we play our cards well.

Third, and in another partial embrace of the liberal credo, Crawford underscored the vital and immediate role to be played by government in establishing the rules of the international economy. He accepted that planning of international trade and negotiations between countries to secure commercial rights lay with government, and that ‘with real cooperation between management, labor and government for more efficient production, America will enter not a period of depression but its most glorious and prosperous era’.10 With a softer tone toward government and labor, and a more ‘internationalist’ recognition of America’s global responsibilities, Crawford tried to alter the perception of the NAM as negative, blind defenders of a bygone era into a forward-thinking, positive organization full

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of enthusiasm for an incomparable future and committed to delivering on the values so bloodily upheld by countless Americans worldwide. In short, he was trying to deliver on Weisenburger’s appeal for an updating of the conservative mantra. Crawford rejected the idea that Americans would be convinced of the righteousness of private enterprise simply by alluding to the ‘good old days’ before the Great Depression. Instead, Crawford deduced that Americans needed to be won over by looking forward not back: to the prospect of a future that would be better than the past, a future that only private enterprise—as per the production miracle—was capable of delivering in the ‘truly American’ way. The raised tenor of enthusiasm for a better post-war America was given a parallel hearing in a radio broadcast in January by Noel Sargent. In his role as secretary for the NAM since 1933 and now as PWC secretary, Sargent was in the cockpit of NAM decision-making both at its headquarters in New York and in its latest work on anticipating the post-war role of industry in the US. The breaking of his customary ­ silence over matters of policy (Sargent rarely gave interviews) was likely indicative of the new atmosphere of reform that Crawford brought with him into the head office. With the caption ‘Industry Looks to the Future’, Sargent declared that a stable post-war world order was ‘a practical and stark necessity for the prosperity and well-being of peoples of all lands. If we are realists we must recognize the need for changes in the international framework to maintain such sound world relationships’. Furthermore, Sargent recognized that the domestic performance of the US economy had a ‘direct relationship’ to the well-being of the world economy. This led to one conclusion: ‘This means, as I see it, that we must endeavor to provide both the domestic conditions necessary for effective functioning of the American economic system and the e­ xternal conditions necessary for such effective functioning’.11 This was an enunciation of the liberal philosophy on the centrality of international economics: the only way to domestic prosperity was by harmonizing the world economy with that of the US. A contemporaneous speech by Robert R. Wason, however, showed that Crawford’s new look NAM was very much a work in progress. In his address at the Young Men’s and Young Women’s Hebrew Lyceum on 19 January 1943, Wason, who had been open-minded on international affairs in his work for the PWC, spent most of his time berating the record of Roosevelt in trying to restore American capitalism, even likening the president’s policies to those of the German dictator.

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For Wason, the war against the New Deal was far from over; in fact, it was more acute than ever before. He claimed that government, through the Wagner Act, the National Recovery Administration and pro-labor legal rulings—‘these cancerous growths’—had given ‘every advantage’ to workers. Unless this ‘monopoly by labor’ was broken, Wason insisted, ‘we will not have prosperity in this nation in any post-War period’. Advising only that the US pursue an international policy of ‘enlightened self-interest’, Wason firmly believed that the key to post-war prosperity was in the domestic realm: ‘Our Post-War years will be filled with prosperity and progress when we kill domestic socialism in the United States as dead as it will be killed in Germany and Italy in the early months ahead of us’. Although Wason was speaking in a ‘personal capacity’ and not on behalf of the NAM, the discussion was later printed as a booklet.12 This hard-line diatribe from a leading member of the PWC who had shown flexibility in backing the moderators at Hershey showed that Crawford and his followers did not have mastery over all sections of the NAM leadership, at least not on every element of their strategic overhaul. An essential component of the latest drive by Crawford to put the NAM in the front seat of economic decision-making was to assert its plans for the post-war era. There could be no more delay in releasing the first report of the PWC. Deliberation over its contents had been so painstaking that the report was not ready for what would have been an ideal launch ceremony at the War Congress, and a final draft was not fit for inspection until 15 December 1942, with the holiday intermission pushing back its release until early 1943, a delay that proved costly for NAM aspirations to compete with the liberal planners. On 1 January 1943, conservatives were faced with the Roosevelt administration’s latest official contribution to the post-war planning debate with the release of the liberal-inspired NRPB’s report Post War Plan and Program, which repeated its call for large public works and welfare schemes after the war.13 The need to speak out more openly on post-war matters was underscored by a survey conducted by the Psychological Corporation in November 1942, using questions supplied by the NAM and published by the NIIC in February 1943. It revealed the high level of public demand for immediate post-war planning (92 percent), but also division over how the transition to peace should be conducted. For conservatives, the poll reassuringly noted a small rise in positive attitudes

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toward private management of the economy over that of the government (47 percent wanting less government control over 30 percent wanting more compared to 46 percent and 38 percent a year earlier), and majority support (67 percent) for private management over government control of business, but a strong demand (61 percent) from those polled for ‘a vast public works program’ to cushion any spike in unemployment after the war. Clearly, there was much work to done to convince Americans not to place their trust in government but in the abilities of private enterprise to win the peace as successfully as it was winning the war.14 The need for the NAM to declare substantially on its attitude to post-war affairs was now acute. On 3 March 1943, the NAM made a brief press announcement that ‘a thorough study’ of post-war problems was being undertaken by the PWC Subcommittee on the Transition Period but made no mention of when the PWC’s first full report might appear.15 Just a few days later, the first PWC report was ready, and copies of Jobs, Freedom, Opportunity: Preliminary Views of the Postwar Problems Committee of the NAM were hurriedly circulated to the press for comment no sooner than the official release date of 26 March 1943. Once again, the NAM was cursed with poor timing. On 10 March 1943, Roosevelt had already submitted to Congress his post-war program based upon the NRPB document of January. Two days later, the NAM contacted the press to say it would be issuing a news release to explain ‘the relationship between the two’.16 Immediately dubbed by the NAM as ‘the New Deal blueprint for the postwar world’, Roosevelt asked for a transition period of gradual demobilization of the armed forces and the ending of war contracts ‘consistent with economic and social welfare’, the availability of grants to facilitate conversion and the gradual termination of wartime controls until shortages had been corrected, which could take ‘many months, possibly even two or three years’. In his brief internal appraisal of the president’s demands on 12 March 1943, Sargent commended the idea of gradual demobilization of the military but questioned the basis for deciding what constituted ‘social welfare’ and generally doubted that controls would be axed or that ‘grants’ would not become politicized. But Sargent reserved his most stinging criticism for his assessment of Roosevelt’s long-range proposals for post-war prosperity which more obviously revealed the administration’s ‘Third New Deal’ pretensions. The creation of ‘new forms of joint private and governmental partnership’ in certain former war industries and suggestions that

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labor had the right to ‘share in management’ was predictably hailed by Sargent as ‘the entering wedge for socialistic control of all industry!’. In particular, the proposal for all children to have equal access to education invited the incredulous Sargent to ask: ‘Does this mean combined black and white education in the South, and combined Jap and White education in California…?’17 Having lost a considerable degree of initiative, on 26 March 1943 the NAM finally offered its alternative program for the peacetime transition and at long last entered substantially into the growing national debate about the post-war world. The proximity of the arrival of Jobs, Freedom, Opportunity, however, to that of the NRPB report was difficult for the NAM to avoid. As was evident in the opening sections of its press release, the NAM was keen to point out that the report by ‘92 of the nation’s outstanding industrial leaders’ who were ‘a veritable “Who’s Who” of Industrial America’ had been completed several weeks before that of the NRPB and was ‘equally pertinent now’ as its ‘basic economic truths’ were, the NAM believed, the only way the NRPB objectives could be obtained.18 As the PWC report was based upon studies conducted during 1942 and was already overdue for release, there was little time for Crawford’s new strategic turn to fully percolate into its contents. Jobs, Freedom, Opportunity was essentially the same as the first draft in September that was endorsed at the War Congress in December 1942. It was pitched very simply with barely any technical data or jargon, conveying a straightforward, unsophisticated, message about the need to empower the American enterprise system after the war. In many ways, it came across as anti-government, anti-closed shop and pro-enterprise as any NAM pronouncement of the time. The tone of the report was, however, more upbeat, less negative than most NAM releases, certainly those of the Depression era, and the NAM was now tracing a direct and positive link between the unmistakable ‘production miracle’ of the war mobilization, the supposed power of ‘free enterprise’ in delivering that miracle and the vast potential for national economic advancement after the war which only private management could furnish. The report, now swollen to forty-eight pages from the original seventeen, was certainly to be taken seriously. Though it was stressed this was not a ‘finished’ plan but more a statement of ‘principles’,19 the issues it raised, as NAM Chairman Witherow asserted in the foreword, were of such importance that ‘it would be folly for industry to ignore them’.

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Private enterprise, the PWC contended, was the only vehicle for achieving the levels of productivity and employment required for a country that will end the war with ‘beyond any question, the greatest productive capacity in its history’. As regards labor, the line was predictable enough, that government was required to act ‘fairly’ in breaking the ‘monopolistic’ tendencies of the trades unions as well as those of business, and supported the notion of ‘collective negotiation’ between management and workers to seek agreements ‘to their mutual advantage’, a term it preferred to the dreaded phrase collective bargaining which it opposed as adversarial. ‘So conceived’, the PWC continued, ‘“collective negotiation” is a desirable element in the industrial world and should be recognized and encouraged as a part of our postwar planning’. The proposal for an ‘Economic Policy Board’ was absent, but the section on international relations followed exactly that which was presented by the International Relations Subcommittee to the PWC in November 1942, and consumed almost one-third of the report.20 This included a stronger recognition of the vital relationship between domestic and international economics yet the somewhat paler advocacy of US membership in world agencies to police trade, finance and security. This inconsistency regarding international affairs, along with other observations about the role of government in the PWC report, featured in a ‘digest of reactions’ from a number of corporate and academic leaders compiled especially for members of the PWC. Though fourteen of those asked were members of the NAM, moderates from the USCC, BAC and the CED, as well as liberals from the NPA, TCF and the administration, were also canvassed.21 Indeed, the majority of the fifty respondents who replied were complimentary toward the document. Twenty-three agreed that Jobs, Freedom, Opportunity was ‘an excellently written document and should contribute much to our thinking [about] postwar problems’. This group included Eric Johnston of the USCC and, more notably, the country’s loudest cheerleader for New Deal liberalism and chief writer for the TCF, Stuart Chase. Another arch-New Dealer, Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles, commented that although there were statements in the report ‘with which I am not in agreement’, overall he was ‘impressed’ with the work put into the report by the PWC. Robert Sproul, President of the University of California, noted that the report’s ‘chief weakness’ was in its discussion of the function of government ‘both internally and externally’. The more active role for government in external trade outlined in the report was not, Sproul

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believed, followed through in its examination of the domestic charge of government, which appeared ‘to imply too little, in view of the pronounced trend towards larger governmental participation in economic affairs and the complexity of the problem of maintaining healthy economic growth and reasonable stability’. This evaluation by Sproul was one of the few negative comments made about the report, which mostly came from a more moderate standpoint on the question of the post-war importance of government. This included Paul G. Hoffman of the CED, whose ‘frank criticism’ that the PWC overstated the ability of private enterprise to supply all the jobs after the war and should insert the word ‘majority’ instead, betrayed his more accommodating stance toward the role of government in the economy. The strongest rebuttal came from Keynesian economist and NPA adviser Alvin Hansen of Harvard University, who believed Jobs, Freedom, Opportunity was far too optimistic about the prospects for post-war prosperity and too dismissive of the role of government. For him, a depression was inevitable without federal intervention. The PWC had, in his judgment, over-estimated the level of pent-up demand for domestic goods, especially in cars and radios, and ignored the need for business to engage in ‘adequate prior blue-printing’ of public works schemes ‘so that when depression comes, as it surely will, based upon 100 years of experience we should be prepared to go ahead and not to improvise and boondoggle as we always have in the past’. For Hansen, such realities were ‘so universally agreed upon’ that he could ‘see no reason why’ business did not come out ‘clearly and definitely’ for government-sponsored jobs in the post-war period.22 This deliberately wide survey of the corporate and academic reception of Jobs, Freedom, Opportunity was an indication of how important the PWC viewed the opinion of the business post-war planning community and of its acceptance as a legitimate contributor. As PWC member Alfred E. Mallon (Pillsbury Flour Mills) succinctly put it: ‘I do hope it [the report] will fit in with the more liberal policies of our new President to create better public relations with the ideas of the NAM than we have had in the past’. But not all agreed with Mallon. The only respondent who criticized Jobs, Freedom, Opportunity for being too moderate was John Scoville, statistician for the Chrysler Corporation. Scoville, who would later act as an advisor on the International Relations Subcommittee, showed that the PWC still had work to do in convincing some of its deeply conservative brethren, especially on attitudes toward labor. What Scoville found ‘highly objectionable’ was the PWC’s

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assertion that management had some level of responsibility to maintain maximum employment: ‘It is pure hypocrisy to assume that business enterprises are charitable institutions formed for the purpose of promoting the general welfare. Let’s be candid and admit that in the economic sphere the ruling principle is and should be selfishness’.23 As Jobs, Freedom, Opportunity hit the bookshelves, Crawford issued a call for American business to accept the changed realities brought about by the war and embrace internationalism, if only in abridged form, by lobbying for ratification of the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act (RTAA). He clearly hoped to cash in on the nod to internationalism given by the War Congress in the resolution it passed in December. The RTAA was due for renewal in June 1943 and was first legislated in 1934 as a mechanism for improving American export trade by granting the president—rather than Congress—the power to offer tariff reductions on US goods in return for reciprocal treatment on similar goods bilaterally agreed with other nations. The RTAA had minimal success in buoying the US economy during the Depression by securing deals with mostly Latin American states and a handful of Europeans.24 Many conservatives, including the NAM, opposed the RTAA as it not only strengthened the executive but was a ready-made device for the multilateralists in the administration around Secretary of State Cordell Hull to banish all vestiges of international protectionism after the war and, in conservative eyes, expose US industry to foreign competition. In arguing that this was not the case, and aware of his audience (some eight hundred businessmen), Crawford had to weave a careful line that rejected the long-standing NAM support of protectionism but avoided the ‘liberal’ cause of multilateralism. After bellowing emphatically that the NAM believed ‘this nation has outgrown economic nationalism…Our industrial genius has forced us out into the world. Whether we like it or not, we are part of a world economy’, Crawford was keen to point out that although this would mean an increase in trade, he was calling for ‘greater international trade in a fair manner’ and was not advocating ‘dropping all tariffs to the ruination of American industry’. Nevertheless, Crawford stressed that industrialists could not forsake the part of government in providing the right conditions for their prosperity: ‘It would do irreparable harm to our cause if we gave the nations at whose side we are now fighting any reason to suspect that we were going to renounce our interest in world affairs and retire to the selfish inaction of economic isolationism’. In an appeal to the self-interested in his audience, the

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­ ost-war world, Crawford reasoned, offered great opportunities for busip ness, especially in the rubble of war: ‘America has a big job ahead of it after this war. Rehabilitation of shattered countries and peoples is part of that job. Rehabilitation won’t be just a big-hearted gesture on our part. The ­war-torn countries have materials that we urgently need. They represent rich markets for our goods. It will be just plain, common sense to help the world to right itself’. Crawford spoke highly of prospects in the Chinese, Latin American and Soviet markets, the latter ‘probably’ emerging as the world’s second-largest industrial nation, arguing that ‘enlightened self-interest on the part of both nations will demand a trade rapprochment[sic] between American and Russian industry’. In short, ‘our domestic well being in the postwar world demands more trade among these and all nations’.25 Crawford’s message was adopted as official policy toward the RTAA when Board member E. H. Lane delivered testimony on behalf of the NAM before the House Ways and Means Committee on 22 April 1943. Lane argued in support of renewal as ‘such agreements tend in the general direction of greater trade between nations and the development of greater international goodwill’, and echoed Crawford’s message on the need to drop old conservative doctrine about foreign competition and recognize post-war political as well as economic realities: ‘it seems to us that a definitely expressed refusal now on the part of this nation to make reciprocal trade agreements when the war is over would tend to promote present ill-will against the United States…we do submit there is a better opportunity for future world peace if we do conduct mutually beneficial trade with other nations than if we seek to exclude all foreign trade and to maintain an international economic vacuum for the United States’. Lane described, just as Crawford had done a week before, a post-war environment of opportunity and ‘possibilities’ for US economic advancement astride a war-torn and needy world. Lane was sure, however, to dispel any notion that the RTAA should be used to enhance government involvement in economic affairs and slammed ‘economic planning’ by ‘special interests’ as contrary to the ‘general welfare’. The NAM, however, attached conditions to their support, mainly by demanding safeguards against over-zealous usage of the legislation, and conditions designed to ensure that foreign trade was conducted by individuals and private corporations rather than by government. Further, Lane concluded that NAM support for renewal was based on the belief that trade agreements with sufficient Congressional restrictions limited

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‘post-war governmental control of international economic relations through executive and administrative authority’. Noting that the RTAA device ‘has neither created the Utopia claimed by its original advocates nor the catastrophe predicted by its early opponents’, Lane’s support for the RTAA was less than enthusiastic and, beyond recognizing that protectionism was a mindset incompatible with post-war economic expectations, seemed to represent as far as the NAM hard-liners were willing to go in support of liberalizing international trade.26 Winning over the NAM leadership to a new line on the RTAA was an early victory for Crawford in his mission to realign the organization with what he perceived were the changed realities of the modern world. An obvious ally in the NAM hierarchy was Weisenburger, who under Crawford was allowed more freedom of expression. During 1943–1944, Weisenburger almost doubled the NIIC research arm to more than four-hundred and fifty persons, improving the NAM’s ability to produce higher quality proposals and to better shape public opinion. This would, Crawford hoped, improve the NAM’s persuasiveness when lobbying Congress or government officials who were routinely exposed to the more sophisticated arguments of the corporate liberals and organized labor.27 Weisenburger was clearly an enthusiast of opinion polls, and in April 1943, the results of a NAM survey of the post-war plans of industry were released in booklet form ‘to acquaint the public with typical peacetime planning activities’ of American business. The poll showed that business was not at all anxious about the post-war economy and was overall very well organized for a rocky transition period. Called Peacetime Plans of Industrial Companies, the report, based on responses to a questionnaire, letters and interviews, concluded that business was highly confident of attaining ‘the highest living standards America has ever known’ after the war. Apparently, ‘hundreds’ of businesses had begun peacetime planning, under a typical setup of a ­post-war committee composed of department heads with the vice president as chair. The task of post-war planning was best handled by management, the report unsurprisingly found, as employees ‘prefer to be engaged in war production’. Further, the report noted the considerable optimism of business and the confidence of the ‘typical manufacturer’ in finding a post-war market for all their goods. Proud of its wartime achievement, industrial management recognized ‘an opportunity to merit the same public approbation in the peace era by developing sound postwar plans now’. However, the report conveyed the impression—what it admitted was a

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‘conservative view’—that businesses anticipated little change in the way the post-war economy would be run, and that managements were ‘skeptical of postwar planners who expect the world to be spectacularly different after the war’, as the rise in standards would be ‘evolutionary rather than revolutionary’.28 The innate conservatism of the type expressed by managers in the company survey, especially regarding post-war international matters, was something that Crawford was determined to confront. The theme of internationalism featured heavily in a speech he delivered in May 1943, the occasion when Crawford unleashed what was later dubbed his ‘seven-point program’ for government and business to follow in the p ­ ost-war world. It was an address heavily influenced by the latest conclusions of the PWC in its report ‘Business Program for Postwar Prosperity’ that was circulated internally as a ‘tentative basic expression of industrial postwar goals and principles’.29 Enunciated before the prestigious Economic Club of Chicago, Crawford’s talk was concerned primarily with underlining the centrality of private enterprise to the practice of American economics, its democracy and its ideals. It contained the usual conservative commentary on the perils of ‘state socialism’ and that private enterprise was the ‘only one way to reach a better postwar world’. He demanded that Roosevelt pronounces on his ‘real’ attitude toward private enterprise, the uncertainty of which Crawford startlingly believed was ‘the greatest threat to prosperity in the postwar era’. Still, in what was a distinctive trait of his oratory, Crawford was filled with optimism about America’s ‘new and bigger destiny’ that was guaranteed unless ‘we bungle our opportunities’. When he got around to it, Crawford’s ‘seven points’ were mostly predictable, calling for the greatest freedom possible for private enterprise to create post-war jobs. He called for a post-war America with free-flowing capital, pro-investment tax laws, currency stability, easy credit, flexible price policies and the elimination of ‘unnecessary controls and regulations’ on business. On labor Crawford was vague, asking only for a labor relations policy that would ‘restore industrial harmony and increase production’. His soft-pedaling on labor relations was notable given that on Capitol Hill, a law was being debated for which the NAM, for once, could shout. A series of broadly unpopular strikes by coal miners in May–June 1943 compelled several states to enact anti-union legislation which offered Congressional conservatives the chance to pounce. The Smith–Connally Bill called for the ­prohibition of strikes in plants critical to the war effort, a thirty-day cooling-off

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period after a strike had been balloted in other industries, and secret ballots of union members in government-supervised elections.30 Yet in two important respects Crawford’s speech broke from the norm of NAM declarations. Firstly, the NAM president acknowledged that equal responsibility fell upon business, which he urged should have their own, individual peacetime plans and ‘work hand and glove with government to bring about a better postwar world and not just criticize’. He termed it ‘business statesmanship’. Secondly, Crawford ended his speech underscoring his opening point about the international dimension of post-war prosperity, making it clear that unless ‘the whole international picture is conducive to the existence of our ideals, the seven steps outlined cannot of themselves do the job of domestic rehabilitation’. In so doing, Crawford acknowledged—the first of his office to do so—what was fast emerging as the overriding post-war objective of US leaders in both government and business: ‘[the American people] recognize the necessity of this country taking part in world leadership, and helping to create an international atmosphere in which our domestic ideals can safely exist’.31 Much of Crawford’s ‘seven-point program’ was revisited in the fall of 1943 when Alfred Sloan of General Motors pronounced on the matter of post-war planning. That such a heavyweight from the NAM Old Guard stepped forward to enthuse managers about post-war prosperity and to ask them to embrace internationalism was an encouraging sign for the moderators in the NAM. It was already decided that his long lecture on ‘Post-War Jobs’ to the Economic Club of Detroit—a place he dubbed ‘the Capitol of War Production’—would be released as a t­wenty-eight-page pamphlet on the occasion of his address. Sloan delivered a direct and earnest appeal to business on the need for private enterprise to prepare now for the longer-haul of ‘winning the peace’. He urged management to look beyond the bonanza of ‘unparalleled’ profits that would follow the immediate cessation of hostilities, which he estimated would occur sometime at the end of 1944, and start laying the groundwork for the sustained productivity and growth of the American economy. For Sloan, the war mobilization provided the opportunity to rectify the ‘many economic errors that so prejudiced our progress’ and ‘the expansion of free enterprise’ in the years before the war. To avoid ‘similar handicaps’ from returning when the war was over, Sloan claimed that business must take the initiative in maximizing the full utilization of the nation’s resources, in raw materials, manpower and plant capacity, to ensure the highest levels of productivity and employment are achieved,

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thereby reducing calls for the continued intervention of government in the longer term. Sloan acknowledged that government was needed in managing the difficult transition phase, when controls on prices, taxation and the flow of money would be crucial in controlling inflation and the effective distribution of goods, capital and services. But for the longer term, beyond laying down national economic and fiscal policies and ‘proper regulation’ that enabled free enterprise to flourish, any further expansion of government involvement in the economy, especially through deficit spending, would lead to ‘a direct conflict’ with private enterprise in the marketplace and ‘mark the beginning of the end – the end of the American competitive system as we have known it, the beginning of the socialization of enterprise. It is one approach or the other. It cannot be both. We must choose’. It was a direct attack on the moderate advocates of a ‘mixed economy’ identified by Weisenburger as the real enemy. The Motown general drew straight from Crawford’s speech-card when he called on business to act ‘intelligently’ in its affairs and look at the wider picture: ‘business leadership cannot limit its horizon of action to the physical production and distribution of goods and services. That will not meet the challenge of the future. It must…integrate its policies into the economic and social structure as a whole’. On international economics, Sloan held that reciprocal trade was a ‘fundamental principle’ that had been ignored in the inter-war years: ‘There is no other way. As our national income expands we shall need more of the products of other countries, for no nation is entirely self-contained’.32 The credo of ‘business statesmanship’ was given a regular airing by the pioneering NAM president, who clearly regarded himself as a model exponent of the practice. Perhaps his fullest elucidation of the concept came in a presentation before the Canadian Manufacturers Association in June 1943, at which Crawford uttered that private enterprise had created ‘a far-seeing, statesman-like industrial leadership that intends to make peace its business too, and help to create a future world that’s safe to live in’.33 This largesse was extended directly to government departments busy with the war effort in a letter to the secretaries of the Navy and War, WPB chief Nelson, the head of the Board of Economic Warfare and leaders of Congress. Crawford invoked the ‘outstanding contributions’ of business leaders in the production effort to urge government to utilize business more fully to deal with the problems ahead which ‘will require the proven ability, the “know-how” and the experience of the trained businessman’.34

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The welcome alignment of Sloan with Crawford’s publicity drive was indicative of an added challenge the new president had before him. By June 1943, halfway through his one-year term at the helm, Crawford voiced his frustration with the laggardly engagement of the association’s leaders and its general membership with his program. In his report to the Board, Crawford cited the example of Congressman Forest A. Harness who was fighting for the pro-business Smith–Connally Bill. Harness complained to Crawford that although several hundred trade unionists and members of the public had derided him for supporting the Bill, no industrialist had offered encouragement. ‘There you are, gentlemen’, Crawford continued, ‘a telling case in point, revealing what I believe is the greatest short coming in our battle to preserve free enterprise’, namely: ‘It isn’t how far the NAM will go in this fight; it’s a question of how far management, which makes up our management, will go’. For Crawford, the pressure was on: ‘my observation is that only businessmen, working, speaking, putting their necks out, appearing before Congress, and most of all standing together can make the most of this golden, and probably last, opportunity to preserve the benefits of enterprise to a nation of free men’.35 A major plank in energizing the NAM rank-and-file to ‘put their necks out’ was to arm them with the right weapons. Post-war studies, and the PWC, were regarded as central to Crawford’s aim of winning Americans to the side of private enterprise, and Jobs, Freedom, Opportunity was for him ‘one of the first important documents’ in this direction.36 Thanks to the PWC, the NAM was edging closer toward a comprehensive ‘plan’ for post-war America, and one that finally embraced, due to the ‘enlightened statesmanship’ of Crawford and others in the PWC, a free enterprise ‘vision’ of the role and responsibility of the US in the new post-war world order. The corporate conservatives were finally trying to match the success of the optimism-based ‘brighter and better future’ designs of the liberal planners. The PWC also believed it had an important edge in being able to market its growing package of policies over that of the liberal proselytizers. One of the possible keys to NAM’s success in dominating the discussion about post-war affairs might be its ability to access thousands of individual enterprises located in communities across the country. With its large membership of mostly small and medium-sized businesses, the NAM was confident it had a built-in advantage in spreading its message by offering practical solutions at ground level that was

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beyond the capacity of the smaller, ‘think-tank’ groupings of the liberal planners. By 1943, the NAM was approaching nine thousand members.37 The PWC had already experimented with holding ‘hearings’, led by the International Relations Subcommittee, to determine the attitude of industrialists toward various international questions such as the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act and the trade aspects of the Lend-Lease arrangements. These were held in Chicago, Boston and Birmingham during March 1943. At each hearing representatives of the International Relations Subcommittee comprised a ‘small panel’ for the assembled businessmen.38 By the middle of 1943, the PWC was ready to test its ideas in a ­six-month tour of one-day conferences on post-war planning across the country. As Sykes explained when he launched the regional series in June 1943: ‘We regard these conferences as of the utmost importance because the practical answers to hundreds of realistic problems formulated by our Postwar Committee can only be expected to come from the individual enterprises and local communities’.39 On 21 June 1943, the PWC held its first conference in Cincinnati, dubbed the Southern Ohio Postwar Conference. It was so well attended (more than two hundred) and received such ‘extraordinary interest’ that a special supplement to NAM News was released once a month to report on the conferences that followed in the cities of Detroit, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. A supplement was also necessary to better publicize the proceedings, as the gatherings were billed as ‘off-the-record’, meaning they were not covered by the press. The conferences followed a simple morning and afternoon panel structure, with Sargent as chairman and leading members of the PWC as the core speakers or chairmen at each meeting joined by a selection of the local business elite drawn from the regional business associations, such as the local Chambers of Commerce. The ‘feature’ of each conference was a ‘discussion panel’ designed to measure the extent of current planning and ‘to stimulate them to further concrete solutions’. Sykes and especially Chevalier were quoted at length in the report of the inaugural Cincinnati meeting. All the speakers shared an optimism about the reconversion period and the prospects of a post-war boom, and called upon local businesses to start making serious and immediate preparations for the peacetime conversion.40 This included conservative economic advisor Murray Shields, who in a speech to one of the regional conferences declared that his Economic Principles Commission hoped ‘to offer

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a program for reenergizing the economic structure’ of the US based on the supposition that ‘after the post-war readjustment slump is out of the way, we probably will enter a period marked by an increasing standard of living, active and expanding industries and perhaps a really great prosperity’. Shields expressed, in a very dry, matter-of-fact way not at all like the fiery and passionate orations of Crawford and others, the growing confidence among leading NAM conservatives that popular support for liberal solutions—which he merrily demolished in his long address—was on the wane and that free enterprise would prevail in the post-war period.41 The bolder strategic emphasis of the NAM, on claiming the achievements of the wartime production miracle for private enterprise and linking them with a continued post-war prosperity that only private enterprise could deliver, was succinctly put by Sykes in his keynote speech at Cincinnati on ‘Free Enterprise in the Postwar World’: ‘To get back the system of free competitive enterprise we have two arguments. One is that we come into court with clean hands – see our war achievement. The other argument will be the effectiveness of our postwar planning’.42 The promotional leaflet for the Cincinnati event confirmed that for the NAM post-war planning was about more than just ensuring a smooth technical transition and avoiding depression. It was about making the most of fresh openings: ‘Not only is this a time of grave responsibility, but it is also a time of unrivalled opportunity – a time for full and careful evaluation of future prospects. Industry’s tomorrow will be built with the ideas and the planning of today’.43 On 13 December 1943, the NAM released a booklet entitled Questions and Answers about Postwar Problems which was a compilation of statements made by panelists at the PWC regional conferences held that year in Cincinnati, Detroit and San Francisco. Not surprisingly, selections for the published edition were very much loaded in favor of the NAM and the PWC, featuring Sargent, Sykes, three members of the International Relations Subcommittee in Chevalier, Scoville and Charles E. Young (Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company), and PWC advisor Hudson. They addressed a wide range of topics about the post-war period, and agreement on most was unsurprisingly widespread. On the question of when planning should start and by whom, it was agreed that planning should start immediately and be undertaken by individual companies, not by a central agency such as the government. Indeed, it was better that planning was influenced by ‘keen competition’ between businesses than by notions of ‘community interest’

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or under the direction of a ‘master plan’, which smacked too much of ‘collectivization’. More importantly, when asked if Americans should expect a post-war depression, no-one supported the idea. All of the panelists were confident there would be ‘assured’ and ‘different’ markets ahead to sustain US growth, and basically accepted Nathaniel Whitney’s (Procter and Gamble Company) account of a post-war transition that comprised of a short period (six to nine months), of ‘hesitancy’ as industry reconverted and the armed forces demobilized and certain wartime controls were lifted, followed by a twelve- to eighteen-month boom in consumer goods (based upon pent-up demand), before a short depression which would inaugurate a more sustained, ‘real boom’ in durable goods that he predicted ‘might last as long as ten years or even longer’. As for the continuation of government controls after the war, there was unanimity on the belief that these should be removed as quickly as the economy permitted, but that the transition to a peacetime economy would depend crucially on the application of the ‘intelligent’ extension of some controls, especially those regarding price inflation. As Chevalier insisted: ‘Conversion has got to take us back to peacetime conditions step by step under controls every bit of the way’. However, as Sargent added, the best way to avoid inflation would be if the government permitted the ‘maximum amount of competition’ between private industry. Then, the situation would ‘take care of itself’. On the question of the ­post-war function of government, there was slightly less agreement. Scoville was downbeat about the attitude of Americans toward government, the majority of which he thought ‘desire some sort of regimentation’, and ‘the situation is rather a melancholy one, it seems to me’. Scoville’s assessment of the American psyche was forcefully rebutted by Haney, who was ‘quite confident that in a surprisingly short time after the war is over the overwhelming majority of Americans in all walks of life will join us’ in support of free enterprise. Whitney offered a more sophisticated solution, and one that echoed the gently moderated philosophy of some leaders of the NAM: ‘There must be recognition on the part of government that private industry and private enterprise is the lifeblood of democracy and on the other hand, there must be recognition on the part of business that in certain respects they must cooperate with the government’.44 The message that private enterprise was the only system that would bring prosperity after the war, and that free enterprisers were the only ones with the expertise and practical know-how to deliver that

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prosperity, was a major theme of the PWC under Sykes. The chairman of the PWC gave full vent to his opinion in a series of seven newspaper articles which he wrote at the invitation of the International News Service. They were distributed by the INS to newspapers across the US as a pamphlet called Postwar Prospects with a combined circulation of around twenty-five million. The articles were a prime opportunity for the PWC to promote itself, and set out the core message rapidly taking shape among its committees. Sykes also used the occasion to take a swipe at the liberal post-war planners, a clear acknowledgment by the NAM of its direct competition. The articles were jargon-free, basic iterations of the case for private enterprise to lead the post-war transition and, as was becoming the trend in PWC releases, were couched in optimist language, even if the message contained some painful home-truths. ‘We have everything we need for postwar prosperity’, Sykes exclaimed in his first essay, but warned that ‘the going will be tough’ before ‘we get into that Promised Land’, threatening layoffs of several weeks for as much as two-thirds of war workers during the reconversion period ‘on the way back to a real postwar prosperity’. The articles put the case for lowering corporation tax to release post-war capital, avoiding public works schemes that provide no ‘real’ jobs, and eliminating government controls over prices and wages. The role of government was ‘not to dominate enterprise except in a national emergency’, after which it was the ‘duty of government immediately to set enterprise free’. Sykes complained that ‘too many people in Washington don’t like our system of free private enterprise and don’t wish to see it succeed’, and government had not yet indicated its willingness to set the economic system ‘free’ after the war. Government should be forced to take a stand, Sykes declared, perhaps through a declaration like that of the Atlantic Charter of post-war aims signed by Britain and the US in August 1941, which committed signatories to an open, liberalized world economy after the war. After all, Sykes continued, the ‘past faults’ of the economy were down not to the failed institutions of business or government, but ‘fallible human judgment’. Besides, the wartime achievement of business was reason enough to back free enterprise in peacetime. And in his final rallying call, Sykes declared: ‘I believe the lessons of the past point plainly forward to a postwar revival of free private enterprise, in an economy policed by government but not dominated or controlled by it…With a favorable economic attitude on the part of government and labor, it is my conclusion that the postwar expansion of our free enterprise system will be limitless’.

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This unabashed, unapologetic plea for free enterprise and the associated hazards of a post-war transition was notable in that it was informed by a recent ‘opinion survey’, which Sykes acknowledged, of factory workers conducted by Fortune which showed that, when asked to choose between three different types of post-war job, most (55 percent) picked low income with security over good income with 50-50 security (27 percent), and only 15 percent chose a job which offered a high income if you made the grade but no job if you failed. The conspicuous anxiety of workers about the future was, for Sykes, based on misinformation, and their fears were being preyed upon by unscrupulous liberal planners. He therefore carried a stinging message for NAM’s planning bedfellows. Admitting he was inspired by the fact that ‘men of imagination’ across the country had formed roughly two hundred post-war planning groups, Sykes revealed they also made him ‘mad’ with their assertions about the immediacy of post-war jobs and prosperity ‘as soon as the Japs are licked – if not sooner’. For Sykes, their lack of realism was because these planners lacked the ‘responsibility’ of making practical decisions as, unlike the NAM, they do not represent ‘men who must make some plan work’. What Sykes wanted to do to these planners was ‘cut them down to practical operating size. And that is what they need’. Indeed, ‘other planners’ did not cherish free enterprise the way the NAM did, to which system they only wanted ‘to do more or less postwar violence’. According to Sykes, the various post-war plans boiled down to nothing more than ‘a choice of democratic or authoritarian solutions’. Sykes railed against the ‘self-appointed reformers of enterprise’ who ‘may not get all they plan’, but in the process of the transition there was a ‘real danger’ that ‘they may get enough to turn free enterprise into something else’. The biggest threat to post-war free enterprise, therefore, lay in a power-hungry Washington and in the misguided idealism of the liberal planners, as the American public, concluded Sykes, was ‘overwhelmingly for private enterprise’.45 The assumption made by Sykes of the ‘overwhelming’ sympathy of Americans toward free enterprise was an important, if not entirely persuasive, item of faith for conservatives. It was a conviction that hinged on whether Americans were so impressed with the war record of private enterprise that they were willing to risk the ‘temporary’ heartache of post-war job losses and reduced profits to defend it rather than lean on government to ease the transition with public works and market regulation in ways outlined by the liberal planners. If it were true that support of this kind was widespread, even in 1943 as Weisenburger, Harrison and

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the Opinion Research Corporation would have the NAM believe, then a victory for free enterprise after the war was all but guaranteed with the replacement of the liberal clique that currently ruled the White House by a sympathetic government at the general election in 1944. Yet actions speak louder than words, and although a political solution by way of influencing members of Congress and supportive government officials was part-and-parcel of the NAM strategy to bring about change, these traditional lines of attack were heavily augmented by a wide-ranging assault in 1943 on the ‘hearts and minds’ of the American public. The regional post-war conferences were part of a general effort to inject enthusiasm into the country’s business managers about post-war potentialities and to stimulate post-war planning at the local level. Now the NAM sought to enlist managers in propagating the message of free enterprise directly to American workers. As Crawford, a notorious public relations enthusiast, himself asserted in October 1943: ‘The most important single thing management can do today is to have a free enterprise program so simply defined that it can sell the program to its workers… If each of us could sell the program in his own plant and community, we would save America, because the industrial population of this country is going to hold the balance of political power in the future’.46 The solution was the ‘Soldiers of Production’ campaign which began in July 1943 under the NIIC as an important part of the crusade to improve the public image of American business by arousing commitment to the free enterprise system and to closing the distance between management and labor. ‘Soldiers of Production’ hoped to encourage direct contact between employers and employees in inspirational workplace rallies across the country. Mostly held on company time, the NAM sought to exploit its managerial contacts to press its message that management ‘cares’ upon a captive workplace audience. The somewhat grand purpose of the rallies was clearly explained in the organizer’s handbook: One of today’s vital problems is the lack of mutual understanding between labor and management. Such mutual understanding can serve as a means to correct the common problems of absenteeism, inefficient production, lack of teamwork, lack of pride in one’s job, lack of appreciation for company and product, lack of patriotism, and lack of understanding of the principles which have built this nation and are destined to carry it on to ever greater heights.

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From these rallies, a ‘follow-up program’ of company-level ­post-war planning was encouraged.47 The events, which often involved local business associations and trades unions in their organization, were nonetheless tightly controlled by the NIIC and with no opportunity for discussion or meaningful exchange were highly one-sided, leaving employees in no doubt about their purpose. Each thirty-minute rally was ‘tailor-made’ in advance at a meeting between management and a NIIC representative who supplied an ‘outstanding’ speaker free of charge. Despite their bespoke appearance, there was little room for deviation. A typical rally, according to the NIIC, began with music being played over the public address system as the workers assembled, followed by the singing of the national anthem led, of course, by a company man. After a twenty-minute talk by a NAM speaker, the rally was addressed briefly by the company president who gave way to a ‘patriotic song, sung by all’ and directed by an ‘appointed song leader’, before the rally dispersed to more recorded music. The NIIC was obviously keen to lighten the mood of the rallies by incorporating a musical element, with a suggestion that each event could be arranged ‘to effect the best use of available employee musical talent, such as orchestra, glee club, vocalists, etc’.48 Keynote speakers were also heavily directed by the NIIC. They were expected to deliver a ‘stirring and dynamic message’, with very specific guidance on the themes this should cover: This spokesman for industry – a spokesman for America and things American – now glorifies our democracy in the efforts of industry, links the fighting forces with the production lines, emphasizes the importance of the individual company’s products to the war effort, and appeals to the spirit of American loyalty to finish this war so we may return in peace to our individual freedoms and a postwar world of production and plenty. After the war, this man, who presents the true facts of industry with the emotional and human appeal so necessary to popular understanding and enthusiasm, will pay tribute to our victorious democracy and to industry’s magnificent contribution thereto, will link and reunite the fighting forces with their production comrades, and will open up the broad vista of that kind of life to which mutual understanding and the cooperation of one and all in a world of freedom, initiative, and greater production of the world’s goods will inevitably lead.49

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Heavily draped in patriotic symbolism and much hometown fanfare (including school bands and local choirs), the NAM message came across as humble, ‘traditional’, uncontroversial yet authoritative. The new marketing thrust of the NIIC/NAM was neatly articulated by one of its most wholehearted advocates. On 19 October 1943, Crawford addressed the Philadelphia Executives Conference on Public Relations in an effort to convince managers of the need to take their image more seriously. Crawford began his speech by declaring that there was ‘no question’ in his mind that the US would win the war, but it was afterward that Americans faced the ‘biggest task’ of preserving ‘all our historic freedoms’. Crawford warned that ‘political plans to besmirch business management are in the making’, but industry, having ‘failed miserably’ to encourage ‘a better understanding of our economic freedom’, was obliged to act: ‘As a molder of mass thinking, industry has a sacred obligation to perform’. Crawford listed ways in which labor—‘confused and groping for enlightenment’—could be educated in the ways of the private enterprise system, such as the relationship of production to wages and the difference between ‘honest ownership’ and the distribution of income. ‘What these people are thinking’, Crawford maintained, ‘will determine the future of free enterprise in America’. Crawford also demanded that managers better clarify their ‘motives’, which he argued ‘were being grossly misrepresented and greatly misunderstood by the public’, by launching in their workplaces a thorough public relations program through which managers could ‘sell’ free enterprise.50 The newly elevated scale of the NAM’s interest in post-war planning was revealed in May 1943 with the issuing of a revised list of objectives and a fresh configuration of the PWC. The changes came within days of circulating its latest draft of ideas for a ‘Business Program for Postwar Prosperity’ which Crawford had enthusiastically endorsed.51 The PWC Steering Committee agreed, after ‘considerable discussion’, that its objective—enumerated as three but essentially one—was to disseminate industrial, governmental and public ‘understanding’ about p ­ost-war goals and problems.52 The task of determining what those ‘goals and problems’ were fell to chairman Colgate and Steering Committee chairman Sykes (now a National Vice President of the NAM), with new PWC vice-chairmen Lewis H. Brown (Johns-Manville Corporation), NAM Board member Harry A. Bullis (General Mills, Inc) and Charles Kendrick (Schlage Lock Company).53 Together they presided over a

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more streamlined committee network, with the five original subcommittees reduced to three—namely distribution, transition and international relations—and assumed overall responsibility for ‘all of the activities of the NAM directly relating to the postwar picture’.54 The re-structuring elevated two original subcommittees to full committee status alongside the PWC. The Economic Textbook Subcommittee, which was charged with identifying the main problems of the post-war transition and communicating how they would be resolved through the mechanism of private enterprise, was detached from the PWC and re-branded as the Economic Principles Commission and given the broad task of ­providing overall theoretical guidance on the merits of private enterprise, combining executives and economists in the production of monographs on the ‘enterprise system’. This would include their own two-volume tome in 1946. In theory, this better aligned their work with the overarching public relations direction of the central NAM organization. The Economic Principles Commission was stocked with conservative economists, many non-academic, who were well-known to the NAM. These included chairman Wason, Shields, Lutz (Princeton), Westerfield (Yale), J. T. Young (Pennsylvania), Cumberland, Bradford Smith, King (NYU) and Parker, all under the intellectual guidance of chief NAM economists Gebhart and von Mises. The liberal magazine In Fact criticized the Commission for ‘being formed of commercial and college economists biased towards employers and no more than propagandists for the principles of the NAM’.55 Such was the enormity, and apparent complexity of their undertaking, that nothing would be heard from this group for another three years. The second PWC branch to be promoted was the Practical Program for Industry Subcommittee, renamed the Corporation Peacetime Planning Committee and chaired by Board member Norman W. Wilson (Hammermill Paper Company). This change allowed Wilson to focus entirely on compiling practical guidance for the internal postwar planning of individual corporations, leaving broader post-war questions to the PWC.56 Even after this exercise in ‘consolidation’, the PWC membership had swollen to one hundred and twenty-nine persons from fifty-eight cities in twenty-one states. The PWC Steering Committee under Sykes was also revamped, with original moderate-inclined members James Robins, Lucien Wulsin and Robert Wason (all veterans of the Hershey meeting), joined by likeminded Colgate and a promoted Chevalier, with receptive Board heavyweight Fuller balanced by firm conservative Board directors

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Lammot du Pont (E. I. DuPont de Nemoure and Co.) and J. Howard Pew (NAM Regional Vice President and NIIC Board).57 The Transition Subcommittee was chaired by newly appointed NAM Director Airey, and Distribution was chaired by Howard Blood. What proved of most significance was placing the chairmanship of the International Relations Subcommittee in the hands of committed internationalist Chevalier, who replaced Howard Young (now a NAM Regional Vice President). The International Relations Subcommittee was asked to deal with current debates, such as extension of the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act, to ‘amplify’ recommendations of the 1942 report Jobs, Freedom, Opportunity and to supply ‘explanatory and factual memoranda’ for industrialists attending conferences.58 The increase in the scope of the PWC led to NAM’s most substantial contribution to the post-war debate so far. On 25 October 1943, the PWC began the task of deciding what that contribution would be when it met to consider the draft reports of its three subcommittees on transition, distribution and international relations in preparation for release of their second yearly report. The twenty-three page-long draft report of the Transition Period Subcommittee detailed a sixteen-point program for transition period employment. It largely echoed the optimistic line of recent speeches by NAM leaders. The subcommittee was confident that ‘the ingredients for postwar prosperity will exist’, based upon ‘enormous’ domestic demand, pent-up buying power and ‘huge’ rehabilitation needs abroad. These factors meant that ‘a postwar depression of widespread character is quite unnecessary’. The subcommittee divided the transition into three separate conversion periods. The first was already taking place during the hostilities as war contracts began to expire leaving plants facing conversion either to other war production or to essential civilian production. The second period, between the end of the war in Europe and that in the Pacific, would present similar difficulties for business faced with converting either to civilian production or further war production. The final period, when hostilities were over in all war zones, would be when the process of transition from war to peacetime production was completed, lasting, they reckoned, from six to eighteen months. The subcommittee urged business to prepare immediately and that government seek the help of the same ‘business and industrial brains’ in the solution of the peacetime conversion as it did for the wartime mobilization. In fact, its program for enabling this transition placed a heavy

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responsibility upon government to beat a hasty retreat from its wartime role as manager of the economy and allow private enterprise to do its job. It wanted ‘prompt’ payment of any amounts due to companies, the removal by Congress of ‘all restrictions on the capital market not essential to the protection of the public’, revision of federal tax laws to allow the building of reserve funds and capital by enterprises, rapid release of ­government-owned plants to private hands and the ‘removal of the threat of government competition with private business’.59 One issue that the Transition Period Subcommittee found very difficult to deal with was that of public works schemes. There plainly would be at least a temporary need for such provision in the immediate conversion period, but the problem was finding a way that the subcommittee could acknowledge this fact without unduly bolstering the liberal advocates of large-scale post-war federal works schemes to provide the jobs that private enterprise could not. For example, M. D. Levy (Angelica Jacket Company) proposed long-range public works schemes, which the subcommittee believed was ‘a confession’ that private enterprise could not provide the necessary jobs in the transition period, and consequently, the government could ‘continue a program of deficit financing indefinitely’, assumptions that the rest of the group fundamentally rejected. Only if it was proven that ‘the job cannot be done by free competitive enterprise’, would the subcommittee consider more thoroughly the question of public schemes to provide employment.60 The subcommittee eventually agreed on a wording about public works that they felt comfortable with that accepted ‘it may be necessary to supply private enterprise with sound public works to give temporary employment to persons no longer required in the armed forces’.61 More generally, the Transition Period Subcommittee called in its report for the ‘restoration of free competition’, and that business be guaranteed ‘freedom from fear of government control of business in the postwar period’. The subcommittee offered no surprises in its recommendation for the timescale for ending wartime controls and regulations, as it was recognized this was dependent upon several conditions but that to call for the immediate ending of all controls with the ending of hostilities was ‘inadvisable’. On labor policy, the subcommittee was similarly consistent with earlier PWC recommendations, arguing the need to oppose the ‘monopolistic’ practices of organized labor and allow veterans the ‘equal right’ to not join a union. Demobilization of the armed forces

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had to be undertaken as rapidly as possible with the stipulation that all those demobilized be re-employed in private enterprise.62 The draft report of the Distribution Subcommittee63 was equally upbeat about the prospects for post-war success, opening with the declaration that ‘this country can produce undreamed of quantities of goods and services’, but added that achieving this goal was as much about tackling the matter of distribution and marketing of those products as it was about increasing their quantity and quality. For that reason, the subcommittee argued for an end to the ‘steady and disturbing trend toward political control of distributive activities’, and that every such law ‘unless genuinely justified on the ground of public welfare’ was ‘a blow at free enterprise’.64 Beyond this, the subcommittee offered very little in the way of practical suggestions for achieving a better post-war distribution of goods, demanding only that the NAM press the Census Bureau of the Commerce Department to provide adequate market data for industrial as well as consumer distributors.65 The draft report of the International Relations Subcommittee was titled ‘Proposals and Principles for Establishment and Maintenance of External Order Essential for Domestic Postwar Prosperity’. The recommendations of the subcommittee were the most ­ forward-thinking and challenging to the NAM orthodoxy than any other to emerge from the PWC. Advisers on the subcommittee were Manley O. Hudson, Ellsworth Huntingdon (Yale), Howard Huston (American Cyanamid Company), John Scoville (Chrysler Corporation) and Ludwig von Mises.66 These tentative suggestions were definitely not a call for a ‘return to normalcy’ after the war and went further than Jobs, Freedom, Opportunity in its support of overarching international economic and political organization and of multilateral solutions to world trade. The subcommittee began by listing what it believed were the four ‘major desires’ of the American people. They were to win the war; to have ‘productive work’ (as opposed to fabricated jobs under public works) for veterans and war workers; to make it ‘unnecessary’ to fight in another world war; and ‘to have a postwar America in which the keynote will be freedom, opportunity, and prosperity for individuals’. The report was divided into four sections dealing with international cooperation, international economic relations, the disposition of rights and interests in enemy countries after the war, and the eventual settlement of Lend-Lease obligations. The subcommittee strongly advocated the formation of new international organizations immediately the war ended,

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with one to specifically deal with the prevention of the use of force by any nation on another. This was because the subcommittee believed that if the US was to be protected from future wars and be allowed to prosper ‘our conception of national self-interest must take into account the interests of other peoples as well as ourselves’, and Americans must reject the notion that ‘we can be prosperous by attempting to stay aloof from the problems of the rest of the world’. After all, the subcommittee continued, the US would ‘enjoy domestic prosperity if other parts of the world, or at least most of it, are able to trade with us and each other. In short, we are not international altruists at all when we say that sustained prosperity and well-being in the postwar United States will largely depend on the maintenance of world-wide peace and order, and the absence of economic stagnation in other important nations’. The subcommittee reiterated its message from Jobs, Freedom, Opportunity that the time was right for the country to act, as the US faced ‘an opportunity, rare in history, to proceed with the organization of future world peace’. If the US could present ‘a clear and positive program’ of post-war aims, then other nations would gain confidence and it would add ‘great weight in shaping the eventual form of world cooperation’. As in Jobs, Freedom, Opportunity, the subcommittee was short on specifics because it argued much depended on post-war conditions ‘which cannot be reliably forecast’, but the subcommittee recommended continuing and expanding the work of the Permanent Court of International Justice (World Court) and actually named the United Nations as a potential body ‘to impose and enforce peace throughout the world’. The advocacy, and lengthy discussion in the report, of the possible role of the World Court in the ­post-war period was likely because one of the advisers to the subcommittee, Manley O. Hudson, was a World Court judge. However, the subcommittee warned against creating an organization of only ‘democratic’, or ‘like-minded’ states, or of the US entering into an alliance with another great power, as such solutions would only invite rival groupings.67 On international economic relations, the subcommittee repeated its earlier call for a worldwide expansion of production and goods, for the maintenance of stable financial conditions unhindered by domestic policies of ‘continually and designedly unbalanced budgets’ and the expansion of world trade. The latter required limiting, if not eliminating, the ‘unsound effects’ of such devices as high tariffs, quotas, subsidies and other discriminatory practices which the subcommittee argued were ‘the

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greatest international trade danger to the well-being of the United States in recent years’. Again, the preferred method of the subcommittee for achieving freer trade was to extend the model of the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act. On this basis, the subcommittee itemized the ‘general principles’ that each government should follow to enable economic cooperation between nations, all of which entailed widening the access of business, capital and goods within and between states which must run a balanced budget and not interfere with the performance of individual enterprise (such as operating firms abroad or providing government loans). All this was to be monitored by an ‘International Board of Trade’ with advisory capacity only. However, the subcommittee offered more than a hint of approval for the multilateral approach of the m ­ uch-vilified State Department. The advocacy of liberalized world trade was likely helped by the presence of economist von Mises, an extreme free-trader, as an advisor on the subcommittee. Its second recommendation was for the establishment of a ‘general international accord’ of a codified system of agreements ‘open to all nations’ beyond those of bilateral agreements (like under the RTAA). In this regard, the subcommittee was also very clear that much of the aforementioned cooperation would be greatly assisted by the conditions attached to the Lend-Lease agreements, which specified that ‘repayment’ of any aid must be such as ‘to promote mutually advantageous economic relations between them and the betterment of world-wide economic relations’, and the ‘elimination of all forms of discriminatory treatment in international commerce’ such as tariffs and other trade barriers.68 The subcommittee report was far more strident in its support for world organization and trade liberalization than it had been in Jobs, Freedom, Opportunity. The subcommittee was convinced that the US must extend its economic values and political norms across the world through an international organization, even mentioning (unlike in Jobs, Freedom, Opportunity) the United Nations as a potential body. These acts were viewed as essential, and not just a bonus, to US domestic prosperity. Like the liberals, the PWC had begun to articulate a rounded ‘vision’ of a post-war world in America’s image. The heavy endorsement of trade liberalization after the war met with the immediate disapproval of the NAM hierarchy. Differences between the PWC and leadership hard-liners in the NAM were exposed when the Board met on 27 October 1943 to approve the recommendations of the PWC meeting two days earlier. The PWC had broadly accepted the

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Transition and the International Relations Subcommittee drafts, asking only that the Distribution Subcommittee report be ‘rewritten in aggressive, instead of defensive, manner’.69 The Board, however, endorsed the report of the Transition Subcommittee, but wanted inserted a firmer statement on war controls which it believed should expire no longer than twelve months after the end of military hostilities.70 Where the Board took stronger exception was with the paragraph on tariffs in the International Relations Subcommittee report on ‘international economic relations’. The essence of the Board’s unhappiness was that the subcommittee’s report was not sympathetic enough to the ‘justifiable’ use of tariffs, in particular to maintain industries essential to national defense or to protect American workers against lower living standards in other countries. The report was passed back to the PWC Drafting Committee for ‘further consideration’, and two Board members were assigned to oversee the revisions. The Board would not sign-off on the overall PWC report until it had been considered by the Board ‘in its entirety’.71 The back-and-forth between the Board, Executive Committee and the PWC over the precise wording was so protracted that it was decided to publish the PWC annual report without the contentious segment on tariffs so that the NAM had something to offer its members at the Second War Congress in early December 1943.72 The blossoming of the post-war strategy of the NAM came at the end of a red-letter year for conservatives on the Hill. By the end of 1943, the Congress had axed the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Works Progress Administration and the National Youth Administration from the original New Deal programs and left a butchered Farm Security Administration and Rural Electrification Administration to survive with limited funds. Most of these old agencies had been made redundant due to the mobilization, but Congress also targeted for elimination current wartime agencies, such as the Board of Economic Warfare, the NRPB and the Office of Civilian Defense. The latter was devised to boost morale and organize local volunteers against air attack under the command of popular New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia with the assistance of civil rights campaigner Eleanor Roosevelt. To protect the agency from the axe, the president asked his wife to resign.73 The attacks on New Dealer Henry Wallace, chief of the Board of Economic Warfare, by Congressional conservatives and Jesse Jones, Secretary of Commerce, reached such ferocity that Roosevelt collapsed the entire agency, to the surprise of liberal onlookers.74 The much-maligned ‘socialistic’ NRPB, the primary vehicle

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of the administration’s post-war planning, was denied funding and was gone by August 1943. During the year, Roosevelt neither initiated nor supported any social reforms. He learnt his lesson early, when in March 1943 the majority of House Democrats joined with the Republicans to kill Roosevelt’s proposal to set a national limit on wages ($25,000), a measure designed to ‘share’ the burden of sacrifice among Americans but clearly a step too far down the road of direct regulation of the labor market for most legislators.75 Roosevelt even moved to replace personnel disliked by conservatives. This included Nelson of the WPB, who had become highly unpopular among members of the business community. Roosevelt first added corporate moderate NPA and CED member Charles E. Wilson (General Electric), and William Batt (BAC) to bolster Nelson before he eventually left in 1944. Liberal Leon Henderson, along with Galbraith, was replaced by corporate moderate Chester Bowles to run the Office of Price Administration. In a further act of amelioration, at the end of the year Roosevelt asked legendary financier Bernard Baruch, organizer of the US mobilization in World War I and renowned business champion, to report to Congress on the reconversion. A rare official reply to a Crawford letter from an exhausted Roosevelt betrayed the temperament of an embattled president in November 1943: ‘Your organization has, I know, given much thought to post-war problems… The people of the United States look to industry in the post-war period. It is my hope that they will not be disappointed’.76 At nearly one hundred pages long, the Second Report of the Postwar Committee of the NAM easily exceeded the size and scope of its predecessor—a testament to the expansion of NAM interest in, and commitment to, post-war affairs. The Second Report crowned the busiest and most productive year for the NAM’s post-war planners. Indeed, that this hefty volume, produced by ‘a committee of more than 150 businessmen representing a cross-section of the country’,77 was intended to confirm the NAM as a legitimate contributor to the national debate on post-war matters was evidenced in Crawford’s sweeping foreword to the Second Report which he claimed ‘merits careful consideration by all those interested in the solution of major national and international postwar problems’. In terms of content, the Second Report was a straightforward compilation of the final reports of the various PWC subcommittees on the aspects of most post-war concern on the transition, distribution and international relations, bringing a significant rise in detail compared to its first report Jobs, Freedom, Opportunity in what

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appeared to be a clear attempt to showcase the scientific objectivity of the NAM team. Nevertheless, the conclusions remained essentially unchanged. The Second Report placed the same weight of emphasis on the primacy of ‘competitive free enterprise’ as the surest way to achieve post-war prosperity as earlier reports, regularly chiding government for unnecessary interference in economic affairs. Citing none other than Roosevelt-inspiration President Woodrow Wilson, the introduction ­ to the Second Report made clear that ‘in time of peace the government should not seek to limit or control the wants or needs of people, nor the means of satisfying them. It should limit its domestic activities to maintaining an environment that promotes trade and which permits and encourages sound business operations…’.78 The Second Report agreed with the consensus of the Transition Period Subcommittee in April that the post-war conversion can be divided into three periods: during hostilities, when some war contracts begin to end; the period between the end of the European conflict and the war in the Pacific; and the ‘major transition’ from war to civilian production when all hostilities were over, lasting ‘from six to eighteen months’. The PWC targeted several areas for post-war attention. It wanted ‘speedy and equitable’ war contract termination which, alongside demobilization of the armed forces, might require ‘additional legislative authority’ to fulfill. The fair disposal of government war plants and surpluses, which would require a Congressional commission ‘independent of existing agencies’, and war controls should be terminated within twelve months of the ending of hostilities, as the Board had advised. ‘Necessary’ construction projects— namely those not undertaken for the purpose solely of providing jobs— should be promptly started at war’s end. The PWC also drew attention (more than any other business group) to the ­under-researched conversion issue of distribution, noting that marketing executives ‘must accept the responsibility NOW for aggressive planning and studied preparations’. As for labor, the PWC repeated the familiar NAM line that post-war labor policies should be agreed which recognized that ‘monopolistic practices’ in labor (such as the closed shop) were as harmful as those in business, and that unions ‘should be just as responsible legally as business’ in not ‘coercing’ employees to join their ranks. The PWC wished that government and labor ‘would announce now that they would act in these ways’.79 The sole area that indicated any change in the attitude of the NAM toward the post-war world was international affairs. Unlike in Jobs, Freedom, Opportunity, questions of post-war international economic and

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political affairs now occupied the largest section in the Second Report. The suggestions followed closely those stipulated in the subcommittee final draft of October 1943, with its rejection of protectionism and a commitment to some kind of liberal post-war order that suited America’s interests. ‘It is desirable’, the PWC began, ‘to set forth the major principles and methods which should be considered now for the establishment of that kind of international order which would assist in the development and maintenance of domestic and postwar prosperity in the United States’. The PWC offered few specifics, except laboring the need for an ‘international body’ to regulate civil aviation, and noted that its survey of international trade was not yet ready. Thanks to the objections of the Board over the tariff question, the section devoted to international economics was far shorter and less committed on the matter of trade liberalization than the PWC subcommittee had preferred, containing none of the damning language on the perils of trade discrimination contained in the subcommittee draft.80 The root of the intractability on international questions at the top echelons of the NAM was at least partially traceable to the outcome of a landmark Republican Party meeting on Mackinac Island in September 1943. Convinced by various Gallup Polls that Americans were as much concerned with avoiding future wars through some form of international organization as they were about domestic economic security, Republican foreign policy experts agreed to support a ‘cautious internationalism’ in the next presidential election that respected sovereignty and used international law—rather than executive agreement—as its guiding principle. The freedom of movement of the US would therefore be preserved in what was an improvement on the traditional aversion to entangling alliances that featured in the creed of pre-war isolationism. The contribution of the US to any sort of international organization, however, would still be minimized within strict technical parameters much like the model of the inter-war League of Nations. Importantly for the Republicans, this version of internationalism differed from that advocated by New Deal and corporate liberals, including corporate moderates like the CED, and strong internationalists in the NAM like Crawford, Sargent, Chevalier and others in the PWC, which called for a full-blooded US commitment to an international order that promoted and extended American values and interests in a wide-reaching intergovernmental body.81 The internal machinations of the Republican Party had their echo in the deliberations of the NAM on post-war affairs.

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The principal annual gathering of its membership was the site for launching NAM’s refreshed and wide-ranging campaign to put corporate conservatives at the center of post-war affairs. For many, the launch was well overdue, especially after the failure to properly reveal its ­post-war program at the first War Congress the previous year. It was the culmination of twelve months of serious and heartfelt examination about the direction the organization was taking and further confirmation that Crawford was determined to haul the NAM out from the periphery and into the center of the growing national debate over America’s future. At the Second War Congress of American Industry on 7–10 December 1943, under the banner heading ‘Production for Victory and for Postwar Jobs’, the NAM leadership pressed over three thousand delegates to take post-war issues more seriously and rolled out a condensed version of the Board-endorsed Second Report—hot off the press and ready for distribution—for their validation.82 The document ‘War and Postwar Program of American Industry’ was submitted to the delegates in a highly confident, even triumphant, tone devoid of the negativity of earlier pronouncements on post-war matters, and showed for the first time on such a grand scale the promotion by NAM of an aspiratory vision of the post-war world instead of one that resembled an idealized past. This new approach was summed up in the line ‘Better America’, the broad title of the proposed 1944 ‘program of action’ of the NAM and the adopted theme of the Congress. It was repeated slavishly by the NAM keynote speakers as a sort of catchphrase that tried to downplay the self-centered whiff attached to calls for the advancement of private enterprise by fusing such advancement with the broader progress of the nation. ‘Victory will be won!’, the program preamble began, ‘even though the road ahead may be hard and long this is no longer open to question. So American Industry – producing for victory – looks to the future. Out of this looking forward has come a program – a program for a better America – one that will be worthy of the sacrifices that are being made by our men on the fighting fronts, and one on which all citizens can unite’. Enlisting a version of its earlier slogan, ‘Opportunity, Jobs, Freedom’, the NAM argued these objectives were attainable only by enabling business to operate without inhibition: ‘Free, private, competitive enterprise is American Enterprise! It is the way of doing business that brought the world’s highest standards of living to America. And when peace comes, American Enterprise can do it again’. This latter assertion was based on the belief that after the war,

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there would exist a combination of factors advantageous to US business, namely a ‘vast backlog’ of demand, new products and processes, raised national productivity, and ‘the tremendous potentialities of domestic and world markets’.83 To ensure the adoption of ‘Industry’s Program’, NAM principals showered the conference with impassioned speeches that stressed the towering wartime achievements of industry which ‘with leadership and self-confidence’ had ‘done the job’ and now must turn to the equally complicated task of winning the peace. In common with the liberal business planners, NAM speakers did not harp on post-war slumps, price inflation or shortages. Entreaties to ‘industrial statesmanship’ were packaged alongside a summary of the adopted ‘program’ and released in May 1944 as a large booklet entitled A Better America. The most complete description of the reasoning behind this latest ebullient shift in the outlook of the NAM was supplied in the lengthy address to the gathering by Crawford: ‘The American people have a profound respect for the war production of industry. They have seen the leadership we have provided and have watched us perform. The greatest opportunity in years now confronts industrial management, because the public is turning again with confidence to business leaders’. The menace of the liberals was not far from his pleas. Crawford raised the bogey of ‘regimentation’ from liberal planners if American business did not take the initiative and ‘find ways to help the public to understand and appreciate’ the system of free enterprise but with a program that was ‘not “the same old stuff” or a return to the “good old days”’. This program, Crawford bellowed, ‘must be for all!’. Weisenburger offered a similar picture of what was needed of industry, beginning his address with ‘America’s infant, but most prolific industry, is post-war planning’. He countered those planners ‘who feel themselves qualified to think for a whole nation’, with NAM’s program of ‘action’ based upon what he believed were ‘the basic facts of our common American experience’. It was a program, Weisenburger insisted, which was ‘not just for business’, but for ‘all the people’.84 The most telling contributions at the meeting were those from the NAM old guard, which showed they had finally grasped the true potential of the post-war order to radically improve the standing of free enterprise in a period no longer beset with countless ‘problems’ but only endless potentialities. Alfred P. Sloan asked managers to seize the ‘opportunity to capitalize in the long-term interests of the country as a whole [on] a set of circumstances that in all probability will develop out of the

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war…If such a challenge is met it will re-establish, in a fundamental way, free and competitive enterprise as the pattern of the American economy for the long-term position ahead’.85 Another NAM grandee, Henning Prentis, Jr., who was chief of the ‘Better America Committee’, intoned on the ‘definite, positive, and constructive’ program forwarded by the NAM which only required management ‘to take it to the people and get them to approve it’. Prentis used terms familiar to his audience to make sure his point was understood, asking that managers ‘take this program for a Better America and merchandise it effectively. That job – just as would be the case with any product in your own business – involves: first, advertising, second, sales promotion, and third, selling’, the latter function falling to the NAM to help management flog these policies to the public and to Congress.86 Others from outside of the NAM inner circle were just as exulting about the power of American industry. Addresses by military and production bosses alike applauded the supreme effort of their industrial audience, perhaps none more so than Tom M. Girdler, Chairman of Republic Steel and Chairman of Consolidated Vultee Aircraft Corporation. For him, ‘American industry has given in this war a smashing demonstration of its tremendous vitality and its vast potentialities. There was a time not long ago when it was fashionable to pretend that private enterprise was outmoded and about to topple of its own weight. But industry’s performance in the war has given the lie to that kind of talk’. Girdler was confident that the American people in deciding whether to ‘preserve or to scuttle’ American enterprise would choose the former. ‘Our war’, he continued, ‘is the best possible basis for building a strong and virile postwar economy. We can look ahead to opportunities such as we have never known; new frontiers that challenge the best in American initiative and enterprise. There is no limit to what we can do or where we can go as long as Americans think in terms of increasingly higher standards of living…I am confident that we can achieve a lasting unity – a unity which will bring America a bright era of postwar prosperity and power’.87 The only downbeat message came from Charles E. Wilson, Executive Vice Chairman of the War Production Board. He took for granted that ‘we know we are going to win a complete victory in this war, if we work at it hard enough; and we believe we can make a better postwar world if we work at that hard enough’. But Wilson, a known corporate moderate close to the NAM, was more concerned about what he saw as the danger to America that lurked within, and made a bold statement to his

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audience of business conservatives: ‘I tell you frankly that I am deeply alarmed today over the possibility that a right wing reaction may draw some sections of capital so far away from our traditions as to imperil the entire structure of American life as we know it. This above all is a time when the industrial leaders of America owe it to their country and to themselves to exercise temperate judgment – to practice the arts of compromise – and to withhold encouragement from dangerous men who preach disunity’.88 This ‘shot-across-the-bows’ of hard-nosed traditionalists in the NAM by a federal appointee was understandable given the organization’s long and bitter history of negativity and opposition toward government. Yet Wilson’s cautionary tone was out of step with the mood of the gathering and with the latest adjustments in the outlook of the NAM. This was best illustrated by one of the headline sessions at the Congress, a panel discussion on ‘Jobs in Peacetime’ between Crawford, Paul G. Hoffman of the CED, Philip Murray of the CIO, and William Green of the AFL. Billed as a ‘public discussion’ between ‘two chiefs’ of organized labor and two of organized business (Johnston of the USCC was invited but had a prior engagement), before an audience of more than three thousand industrialists, the panel was another example of Crawford’s effort to raise the profile of the NAM by reaching out across the ideological divide and proving that it had really changed.89 In his introductory remarks, panel moderator H. L. Derby, Vice President of the NAM acknowledged the event was ‘something unprecedented’ for the NAM. Certainly, to have labor leaders invited to address such a huge gathering of businessmen by an organization historically antagonistic to trades unions was a novel turn. But just as significant was the presence of Hoffman from the CED. Barely a year old, the CED was still trying to define where it stood on the major issues of the day, especially the larger question of the role of government in the economy, occupying as the group did a unique and yet-to-be-defined space for business activists between the New Deal liberals and the arch conservatives. The CED shared members with the NAM and the USCC as well as the BAC and the NPA, and openly stood for ‘free enterprise’, but not in the sloganistic sense of the corporate conservatives. The CED had yet to determine for itself what ‘free enterprise’ meant in real terms for a ­post-war America. Hoffman’s closeness to the Commerce Department and to government employees working in the high reaches of the CED would certainly have made the NAM uncomfortable, but Crawford, a

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modernizing conservative already sensing that the ground was shifting to a point somewhere between the conservatives and the liberals, chose to extend an arm of acknowledgment to the new corporate ‘kids’ on the block, to check them out or even to influence them. In terms of demonstrating the business credentials of the NAM, the panel was a success. But the discussion offered little in the way of illumination of the key problems facing the US after the war, or how each party would handle them. Responding to a small set of basic questions about post-war needs, they all agreed on the obvious desire to make the transition to a peacetime economy as smooth and painless as possible for all concerned, and the need to maintain the highest levels of production as the economy would allow—which all believed was substantial and unparalleled. Still, beyond the platitudes, pleasantries and superficial harmony of the event, with each representative trying their utmost to show they were ‘pulling for the team’, subtle differences between Hoffman, Crawford and the labor leaders could be discerned. Over the course of five questions on managing the transition, Crawford devoted most of his response time to demanding the speedy retraction of government regulation that would ‘free this inherent power of the greatest people on earth’. Littering his comments with the word ‘free’ as much as he could (an obvious shorthand for ‘free enterprise’), Crawford made clear his priority was to rid the US economy of government interference after the war.90 Hoffman’s answers, on the other hand, were more nuanced, revealing a more sophisticated, scientific grasp of the task ahead. He argued that only by achieving the right level of extra production—which he calculated was an extra one-third—would the country avoid ‘either too much unemployment or too much Government employment’, warning that either scenario ‘will put our whole free society in jeopardy’. Hoffman also urged haste as war contracts were already being terminated, forcing some companies to prepare in earnest for the post-war era even before the Axis had been defeated (he argued that for many ‘T-Day’ will occur long before ‘V-Day’). To reinforce his point, Hoffman cited a recent British Times editorial which, he said, surmised that ‘all hopes for a better world rested upon an increased level of business activity in the United States following this war’. In all his pleading, Hoffman was careful to avoid the question of whether, or to what extent, government would be needed to ensure the smooth post-war transition of the economy, and tactfully avoided making any outright attacks on government or artlessly invoking the word ‘freedom’ to an audience well accustomed

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to such language. Hoffman deftly avoided committing to labor’s call for some type of ‘unemployment insurance’ after the war, which Green and Murray believed was a ‘social obligation’, by conceding it was ‘a complex subject’ which had ‘no easy answer’. Yet Hoffman demonstrated his willingness to avoid platitudes and tackle the hard questions when asked what was meant by the much-used term ‘full employment’: ‘The question is somewhat embarrassing for me’, Hoffman began, ‘because I hate to be the one to destroy that perfect harmony which has existed here at the head table’. To Hoffman, the word ‘full’ should be replaced by ‘high’, as it was physically impossible, and politically reckless, to assert any more than that. This would have suited his conservative audience, which rejected the term ‘full’ as a liberal ruse to have government provide jobs. ‘Furthermore’, Hoffman continued, ‘if I dare say so, I don’t believe it is even socially desirable to have jobs for every man and woman who may want a job’. In his dismantling of what was a frequently heard slogan among labor and business alike, Hoffman weakly conflated retirees, students and veterans who might be forced to take up a job they did not want, with those who were fit enough to work and wanted to do so but could not find any. As for women, Hoffman laid bare his prejudices: ‘I dare venture even in the presence of women, here, to assert that perhaps the country will be far better off if some of the women who may think they want to stay in factory employment will go back home or to a different kind of employment. That is a very daring statement to make. I am making it’. The man from the CED may have been splitting hairs, but his point was that unemployment was a more or less permanent feature of the US economy and should not be legislated away, as labor leaders and many liberals wanted. This detail was lost on the panelists, yet all agreed on his theory regarding women workers.91 Crawford’s panel did not resolve anything, nor was it mean to. It was an attempt to put the NAM on the ‘map’, to show it could reach out across the class and political divide, and perhaps bring the organization a little further in from the sidelines. The pledges of the Second War Congress were met with qualified praise from across the Atlantic. In its short report, the renowned British business weekly, The Economist, was complimentary toward the PWC, stating that the NAM’s position on international affairs ‘has proved more constructive than its stand on domestic issues’. The call of the PWC for some form of international organization to deal with future aggressors and certain economic problems, and for the reconstitution of

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the permanent court of international justice also met with the support of the weekly. However, The Economist noted that the call by Sloan for a revision of the post-war tax system in favor of private enterprise was met with ‘even more eagerness’ by the assembled delegates, adding mockingly that ‘Mr. Sloan was probably typical of big business in the enthusiasm with which he regarded post-war opportunities’.92 And it was becoming increasingly clear that the opportunities referred to at the War Congress were likelier than ever to be realized. Based on end of 1943 figures, the NAM reckoned the chances of post-war prosperity were pretty good. It estimated that with a deferred demand of $22.5 billion, there would be more need for construction (employing 6.5 million), for 10 million automobiles and 20 million radios, increased steel capacity of nearly 25 percent with overseas demand for the export of 17.5 million tons, and an increase in electrical power of 25 percent over 1939 levels.93 Across the board, 1943 had been a peak year for the NAM. This was in no small part down to the considerable energies of Crawford, who for the NAM appeared to be the right man in charge at the right time. This forward-thinking executive realized that to combat the socially focused strategies of the liberal planners and win Americans from the comfort and security of federal protection after the war, the NAM had to embark on a broad-based and upbeat campaign to recast the image of corporate conservatives. The NAM began to engage positively with the federal bureaucracy and shifted from narrow calls for business freedom to loudly—and often with more than a little hyperbole— identifying American values with those of private enterprise bound by destiny to provide a future of limitless prosperity. Post-war studies, and not just improved propaganda, were therefore an integral part of Crawford’s overall strategy to make the NAM more relevant and bring it in from the cold. By the end of 1943, the NAM had its gaze set fully upon the future and the entire breadth of the organization was engaged in cultivating, promoting or advancing post-war studies. The NAM had also, thanks to the moderating influences of Crawford, Colgate, Sargent, Sykes, and Weisenburger, broken from its traditional short-term, functional mindset of singularly representing the narrow interests of its members and embraced a wider, ‘socially-responsible’ concept of business leadership like that being proposed by the corporate liberals and moderates. Indeed, this effort was directed not only at manufacturers, nor

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just businessmen, but to all Americans. After a slow start in 1942, during 1943 the NAM vastly improved the packaging of its post-war message. Mostly absent were references to slumps in production or lows in employment. With over thirty thousand copies, the Second Report achieved a wider circulation than its predecessor.94 The future was definitely going to be brighter. Under Crawford, the NAM was busier, louder and more widespread in presenting what was intended to be a more sophisticated message to the nation. Fundamentally, however, beyond the new packaging the content of the message was largely the same as before the war. As Crawford had promised, principles would not be sacrificed, only the way they were sold. Notwithstanding its involvement in a range of federal agencies, the scaling down of ‘big government’ was still the primary target for the NAM, and on labor the closed-shop was resisted in all its manifestations despite membership of the NWLB. Even in the area that had experienced the most progressive leap forward and demanded the greatest soul-searching of its leadership, international affairs, the NAM ­hard-liners would not relinquish the tariff mechanism and embrace fullblooded liberalized trade. For example, after an ‘extended discussion’ following the War Congress on 10 December 1943, the PWC Steering Committee rejected the NAM Executive Committee revisions to the PWC recommendations on ‘International Economic Relations’. The differences were of ‘such a magnitude’ that the PWC wished a meeting with the Executive Committee to see ‘whether an agreement can be reached’.95 On 30 December 1943, the Executive Committee was willing to recognize that ‘national economic self-sufficiency is not a sound ideal in the modern world’, and opposed trade discrimination by nations or individuals, but rejected the wishes of the PWC for a stronger stance on tariff reduction.96 For the discerning worker or overseas trader, the NAM charm offensive on the superiority of the ‘free enterprise system’ might struggle to persuade. Even so, the NAM strategy was better trained and more refined than that of its allies in Congress. The conservative coalition had scored an impressive list of victories against the administration. Yet for all their apparent success, the ‘stamp’ that conservatives might have wanted to impress upon the post-war future of the country was decidedly faint. Conservative windfalls at the ballot box were expended in resuming the ‘old’ war against the New Deal, and in a mostly negativistic, ‘slash and

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burn’ fashion. After a binge of gashing and gutting of their m ­ ost-hated federal programs, many purely for their association with the New Deal agenda rather than for any real threat to ‘free enterprise’, the conservative coalition had very little to show in terms of constructive l­aw-making. The most significant material advance in the interests of corporate conservatives was made by the passing, over the president’s veto, of the Smith–Connally Labor Disputes Act in June 1943. According to Gable, Smith–Connally was the only major legislation enacted between 1933 and 1945 which the NAM found ‘acceptable’.97 The decision by the Republican Party to back a stilted type of internationalism after the war was significant but was ultimately a concession to pragmatism informed as much by the practicalities of winning the White House as it was the realities of post-war economics. The lack of significant, measurable advances for supporters of free enterprise in 1943 meant that it was not at all clear whether the boost that Congressional conservatives had registered thanks to a spike in popular frustration with the administration, which enabled a dismantling of remnants of the New Deal but little more, was truly indicative of a broader rejection of federal regulation of the economy and an endorsement of the system of free, private enterprise. Aside from Smith–Connally, conservatives had not encroached far on the rights of labor, or liberated business from the regulation of prices and markets, lifted taxation on corporations, or guaranteed better treatment of private capital when the emergency was over. Likewise, many of the New Deal agencies that the conservatives so ruthlessly vanquished were either near to redundancy owing to the war effort, such as the CCC and WPA, or were innocuous exercises in window-dressing, like the Office of Civilian Defense. Even the beacon of New Deal liberalism, the NRPB, had been left by Roosevelt to ‘wither on the vine’. The removal of purposeful agencies, like the National Youth Administration (which supplied training for the defense industries), the Board of Economic Warfare (which dealt mainly with Latin America), and the hobbling of the Farm Security Administration, only rendered more elusive the efficient running of the war. The witchhunt of odious personnel elsewhere in the administration ended in their replacement, not with conservatives, but with moderate alternatives. At best, it seemed, New Deal liberalism had been temporarily contained. It certainly did not mean that ‘free private enterprise’ was automatically the benefactor, or even the next choice. Americans had registered

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their ‘protest vote’ against the administration and seemed antagonistic to any enlargement of the New Deal project, but that did not mean they wanted to embrace ‘free enterprise’. Indeed, moderated or ‘mixed’ forms of political economy that combined federal and private enterprise were already being explored by business planners in the CED and elsewhere. The default position of many Americans, the NAM had discovered in its several polls, was that central government had a long-term duty in providing social security and managing the economy after the war. This was an ideological circle that conservatives badly needed to square. In this regard, the NAM was committed to keeping up the momentum established under Crawford into 1944. As its guide for 1944 explained, the NIIC was primed for ‘aggressive action’ to influence ­post-war decisions before it was too late, as ‘the years immediately following the war’ would be ‘the real test of a free economy’. It was planned to reach 80 percent of all daily newspapers with eight advertisements projecting a ‘realistic and aggressive business program for a Better America’, the new slogan for 1944. An important target for the NIIC was to provide guidance to local managers, the ‘effective missionaries’ to millions of wage earners. During 1943, the NIIC received over $1.5 million in subscriptions, but spent only just over $1 million.98 For 1944, the NIIC intended to release twenty-one publications, fifteen of them on post-war matters.99 Despite its clash with the NAM leadership, and as well as opting to reject changes to its stance on tariffs, the PWC voted to expand and intensify its post-war studies for the coming year. The corporate liberal and moderate groups, such as the young CED, were about to begin their busiest period of material output of the war. There could be no slowing down of the intensity of the NAM’s post-war preparation operations. The PWC looked to improve the coordination of its efforts by widening its links with the rest of the NAM through the formation of a new subcommittee on ‘Cooperation with other NAM Committees’. It would ‘review with major committees of the NAM their postwar recommendations’ (especially those dealing with taxation, employment relations and economic security), in order to supply ‘analysis of long-range postwar economic essentials’. The Transition Period Subcommittee of the PWC was also to be expanded into five divisions dealing with contract termination, disposition of government-owned plants, war controls, demobilization of veterans and war workers’ and the release of materials

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to civilian production. For 1944, the PWC wished to enlarge its worldwide interests by identifying several additional areas for determination by the International Relations Subcommittee, to include the monetary system, the world bank and international currency, colonies and colonial policy.100 As the war entered its last full year and a presidential election loomed, the NAM was in fine shape to continue its full-spectrum battle with the liberal planners.

Notes







1. See LaFeber et al., The American Century, p. 22; and Winkler, Home Front USA, p. 19. 2. Blum, V Was for Victory, p. 234. 3. From March 1943; quoted in Klein, A Call to Arms, p. 677. 4. Crawford had long-running disputes with the CIO and the NLRB, an agency ‘worthy of Hitler’s Germany’, during the 1930s and 1940s. Sanford M. Jacoby devoted an entire chapter to the company union model set-up by Thompson Products and the firm’s battles with organized labor in his Modern Manors: Welfare Capitalism since the New Deal (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), Chapter 5. For profiles on Crawford, his fights with the NLRB and influence on the NAM, see p. 144; pp. 196–197; and pp. 230–232. ‘Humanizing’ is from Crawford’s speech ‘Let’s Tell America’, 3 March 1947, Box 65, Folder 1729, Crawford Papers, WRHS. A copy of his booklet Humanizing Labor Relations (1944) can be found in Box 65, Folder 1727. Jacoby reckoned that Crawford ‘practiced “human relations” long before he knew it had a name’ (p. 155). 5.  ‘President’s Report’, 26 February 1943, Box 7, Folder 199; and ‘Notes of Discussion with Secretary Hull’, Box 7, Folder 200; both in Crawford Papers, WRHS. Crawford travelled 14,000 miles and made seventy-seven addresses in his first six months as president; from ‘President’s Report’, 25 June 1943, Box 7, Folder 200, Crawford Papers, WRHS. 6. This intervention by Crawford is dealt with in Workman, ‘Manufacturing Power’, p. 289; and Jacoby, Modern Manors, p. 197. Crawford also served on the management-labor council of the WPB under Nelson; see Jacoby, Modern Manors, p. 199. 7. ‘President’s Report’, 26 February 1943, Box 7, Folder 199, Crawford Papers, WRHS. 8. Mentioned in Jacoby, Modern Manors, p. 217.

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9. Op. cit., ‘President’s Report’. The new commissions were run by Prentis and Donaldson Brown, respectively. Crawford later remarked that ‘Everyone seems to be post-war planning’; ‘President’s Report’, 25 June 1943, Box 7, Folder 200, Crawford Papers, WRHS. 10.  Extracts of Crawford’s speech before the Chamber of Commerce of Providence, RI, were released in NAM Press Service, ‘F. C. Crawford Wants Desires of Fighting Men Considered in Plans for Postwar World’, 21 January 1943, 290/I. 11. NAM Press Service, ‘Noel Sargent calls for International Cooperation to Insure World Peace’, 5 January 1943, 290/I. The speech was aired over Station WQXR. 12. ‘Economic Reconstruction in the Post-War Period’, talk by Robert R. Wason, 19 January 1943, 287/I. Booklet is in 290, same series. 13. Detailed in Clawson, New Deal Planning, pp. 181–186. 14.  ‘Public Wants Postwar Planning Now; has Confidence in Private Management’, NAM Public Opinion Bulletin, Volume 2, Number 1, February 1943; and NAM Press Service, ‘Public Convinced Postwar Planning Should Begin Now’, 14 February 1943, both in 290/I. 15. NAM Press Service, ‘NAM Subcommittee Announces Intensive Postwar Survey’, 3 March 1943, 289/I. 16. See NAM Press Service, 12 March 1943, 289/I. 17.  ‘Some Highlights of the President’s Postwar Program, with Some Hurried Comments by Noel Sargent’, 12 March 1943, 289/I. 18.  NAM Press Service, ‘NAM Postwar 92-Man Committee Outlines Principles for America’s Postwar Prosperity’, 26 March 1943, 289/I. 19. Ibid. 20. All from Jobs, Freedom, and Opportunity: Preliminary Views of the Postwar Problems Committee of the NAM (New York: NAM, 1943), 287/I. 21.  Colgate also held a special press conference ‘designed to afford an opportunity for discussion of the questions which have been prompted’ by Jobs, Freedom, Opportunity. Invited were representatives from the New York Times, New York Post, Herald Tribune, New York Sun, Daily Mirror, Associated Press, Newsweek, International News Service, Journal American, United Press, Journal of Commerce, and the Christian Science Monitor; see ‘Attendance at Bayard Colgate Press Conference at Hotel Biltmore’, 12 April 1943, 287/I. 22. ‘Digest of Reactions to NAM booklet “Jobs-Freedom-Opportunity”’, 7 July 1943, 287/I. 23. Ibid. 24. The US signed nineteen bilateral trade agreements between 1934 and 1939. One of the most important and hard-fought was the 1938 Trade

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Agreement with Britain, see Charlie Whitham, ‘Seeing the Wood for the Trees: The British Foreign Office and the Anglo-American Trade Agreement of 1938’, Twentieth Century British History, Vol. 16, No. 1 (March 2005), pp. 29–43. For origins of the RTAA, see Cordell Hull, The Memoirs of Cordell Hull: Volume One (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1948), pp. 352–365. 25.  NAM Press Service, ‘Crawford Tells Industrial Conference United States Has Outgrown Economic Nationalism’, 14 April 1943, 289/I. Crawford was addressing the Fifth Annual Northern California Industrial Conference. 26. ‘Statement by E. H. Lane on the RTAA Before the House Ways & Means Committee’, 22 April 1943, 289/I. The support of the NAM for renewal of the RTAA met with the ringing endorsement of The Wall Street Journal which, under the heading ‘Not Free but Freer Trade’, reported Lane’s ‘exceptional’ testimony as the ‘broadest and fairest discussion of the subject that has yet been made’, see ‘Editorial from The Wall Street Journal’, 27 April 1943, 289/I. 27. See Workman, ‘Manufacturing Power’, p. 290. 28. Quotations from NAM Press Service, ‘Industry Sees Postwar Evolution to New High Living Standards’, 16 April 1943; and Peacetime Plans of Industrial Companies, NAM (April 1943), both in 289/I. 29.  The PWC report directly linked the ‘goals’ of US industry to the Constitution and the ‘rights, freedoms and opportunities which it guarantees’. That was because ‘Economic liberty’, the PWC contended’, ‘cannot be separated from any other kind of liberty’. The PWC wanted business to ‘plan now’ for the end of hostilities, as ‘10,000 little plans growing from the bottom will do more for postwar prosperity than one big masterplan for everybody’. Business should also ‘encourage employees to recognize that they are part of the enterprise and that it is in their interest to make suggestions for the improvement of methods and working conditions’, from ‘Business Program for Postwar Prosperity’, 24 May 1943, 288/I. 30. The bill also outlawed union contributions to political campaigns. That latter condition hurt Roosevelt more than any other; see Lichtenstein, Labor’s War at Home, pp. 167–168. 31. ‘It Can Be a Better World Afterwards’, Speech by Crawford before the Economic Club of Chicago, 6 May 1943; and NAM Press Service, ‘Churchill-Like Statement Needed to Dispel Postwar Uncertainty, Crawford Says’, 7 May 1943, 288 and 289/I respectively. Annotated copy in Box 39, Folder 898, Crawford Papers, WRHS. 32.  All quotations from Alfred P. Sloan, Jr., Post-War Jobs: Address at Opening Fall Session of the Economic Club of Detroit, 11 October 1943

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(New York: NAM, 1943), 844/III. Sloan rehearsed some of this message before the NIIC in May, see NAM Press Service, ‘Alfred P. Sloan Calls on Management to Assert Leadership in Postwar Era’, 28 May 1943, 288/I. 33. Cited in ‘NAM and International Relations’, 17 August 1948, 76/I. 34.  NAM Press Service, ‘NAM Urges Government Use Businessmen to Assist in Solving Postwar Problems’, 4 June 1943, 288/I. His plea was based upon a 4 May 1943 resolution of the NAM Board, which asked equally that business leaders ‘make their experience and ability available to the government in the conversion period’. 35.  ‘President’s Report’, 25 June 1943, Box 7, Folder 200, Crawford Papers, WRHS. 36. Ibid. 37. See ‘NAM Membership—Number and Dues’, 225/XVI. 38. Mentioned in ‘Comments on the Postwar Activities of the NAM’, 24 April 1943, 288/I. Also listed in the NAM Information Division circular In Focus on 25 February 1943, 5/I. 39.  NAM Press Service, ‘NAM Launches Postwar Conference Series in Cincinnati, 21 June’, 18 June 1943, 288/I. 40. From NAM News: ‘Postwar Preparation’, 26 June 1943, 288/I; and NAM Press Service, 18 June 1943 (same box). An address to the Cincinnati conference by William P. O’Neil, vice-chairman of the NAM Corporation Peacetime Planning Committee, is in 5/I. 41. ‘Post War Problems That Can be Handled Now! An Address by Murray Shields’ (circa 1943), 5/I. 42.  NAM Press Service, ‘NAM Postwar Planning Head asks Parties to Declare for Enterprise if Government Won’t’, 21 June 1943, 288/I. 43.  From leaflet for Southern Ohio Postwar Conference, 21 July 1943, 209/XV. 44. Questions and Answers about Postwar Problems: As Developed in Panel Discussions at NAM Postwar Conferences, 13 December 1943, 288/I. Others cited were E.C. Brelsford, D.R.G. Cowan, Gustav Egloff (inventor and world oil expert), and Lewis Haney. When asked if the development of manufacturing overseas would be harmful to American manufacturers, Whitney replied that the biggest export customers of the US—Britain, Canada, Germany and Japan—were advanced, industrialized and prosperous countries. ‘You make more money’, he said, ‘by dealing with prosperous people’. 45. All from The Postwar Prospect: A Series of Seven Newspaper Articles, by Wilfred Sykes, July 1943, 209/XV. Sykes claimed ‘every opinion poll during the past few years, prewar and wartime’, showed public support for private enterprise over government operation of the economy. The Fortune poll was taken in February 1943.

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46.  Let’s Look at these Bugaboos: An Address by Frederick C. Crawford (NAM, 1944), 218/XVI. It was delivered before the Philadelphia Executives Conference on Public Relations, 19 October 1943. 47. ‘Soldiers of Production’ (instructions on how to organize a rally), circa 1943, 847/III. Also Fones-Wolf, Selling Free Enterprise, p. 27. 48. ‘Your Plant and “Soldiers of Production”’, circa early 1944, 845/III. 49. ‘Soldiers of Production’ (instructions on how to organize a rally), circa 1943, 847/III. NIIC’s ‘platform personalities’ were initially Allen A. Stockdale, John L. Davis, Neal Bowman and Colyer Snyder. Stockdale, a pastor, was on the NAM staff since 1937, see ‘The NIIC Program in Action’, circa mid-1944, 845/III. 50. From Let’s Look at these Bugaboos. The last quotation is from ‘Editors Note’. This pamphlet was released ‘to meet the many requests’ for copies of his speech. In 1943, the NAM began sponsorship of an annual national conference of business public relations executives, which continued into the 1950s. Material on these conferences can be found in 90/I. 51. See ‘Business Program for Postwar Prosperity’, 24 May 1943, 288/I. 52. ‘Minutes of Steering Committee of the PWC’, 26 May 1943, 235/XIII. 53. Crawford left as vice-chairman to become 1943 President of NAM. 54.  From ‘Memorandum on Objectives of the Postwar Committee and Particularly Its Steering Committee’, 8 June 1943, 287/I. 55. ‘Extract from In Fact of 5 April 1943’, 289/I. A section from the same edition, entitled ‘NAM and Fascist Tie-Up’, linked one of the economists, Willford King, to the Committee for Constitutional Government, which In Fact described as ‘one of the leading fascist organizations of the country’. 56.  ‘Comments on the Postwar Activities of the NAM’, 24 April 1943, 288/I. Wason and Wilson were granted ex-officio status on the PWC. 57.  Other new members were Bard, Ray, C. C. Conway, John Holmes (NIIC Board), and William B. Warner (NIIC Board). 58. All from ‘Memorandum on Objectives of the Postwar Committee and Particularly Its Steering Committee’, 8 June 1943, 287/I. 59. ‘Memorandum of Discussion at April 15 Meeting with Reference to Individual Proposals for the Transition Period’, 15 April 1943, 288/I. Records of committee discussion of individual proposals on 29 March, 12 April and 16 April are in the same box. 60. Ibid. 61. From ‘Minutes of Transition Period Subcommittee of PWC’, 20 May 1943, 235/XIII.

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62. All from ‘Report of the Transition Period Problems Subcommittee of the NAM Postwar Committee’, 25 October 1943, 287/I. The War Controls Group had recommended all controls over prices, rationing, materials, wages and salaries be ended no later than two years after the end of hostilities; see ‘Minutes of Wartime Controls Group of Transition Subcommittee’, 15 April 1943, 289/I. 63. Members were Lyman Hill, H. K. Lane, C. F. Stanley, James A. Welch, Llewelyn Williams and George K. Ripley. Advisers were Alfred T. Falk, Robert J. McFall, Ray Robinson, Norwood Weaver, Paul W. Stewart and H. V. Pelz. 64.  From ‘Objectives and Trends relating to the Postwar Distribution of Goods and Services: Proposed Report by the Distribution Subcommittee of the NAM Postwar Committee’, 15 October 1943, 287/I. 65. See ‘Minutes of Distribution Subcommittee Meeting of NAM Postwar Committee’, 15 October 1943, 287/I. 66. Members included James H. Robins, Reginald G. Coombe, David H. Lane, Richard H. Patch, Albert Penn, H. L. Prestholdt and Dr H. F. Van Walsom. 67.  All quotations from ‘Proposals and Principles for Establishment and Maintenance of External Order Essential for Domestic Postwar Prosperity: Submitted by the International Relations Subcommittee of the NAM PWC’, 19 October 1943, 287/I. 68. Ibid. The conditions for Lend-Lease were expressed in Article VII of the Mutual Aid Agreement signed by all aid recipients. 69. ‘Minutes of the Postwar Committee’, 25 October 1943, 287/I. 70. From ‘Sub-Group of Transition Period Subcommittee of NAM Postwar Committee considering Termination of War Controls’, 12 July 1943, 289/I. The Transition Subcommittee had been split into two further subdivisions, one dealing with termination of government wartime controls and the other with the disposal of government-owned plants and equipment. The Wartime Controls Group was led by W. Keith McAfee. Members of the War Controls Group were Airey, A. B. Anderson, Kerr and Wulsin, with Charles Young as advisor. 71. ‘Extract from Minutes of Board of Directors’, 27 October 1943, 287/I. Discussion of the Distribution Subcommittee report was deferred to the next Board meeting. 72. See ‘Extract from Board Minutes of 19 November 1943’; ‘Minutes of Drafting Committee of PWC’, 29 November 1943; and ‘Minutes of NAM Executive Committee’, 30 November 1943; all in 235/XIII. The Drafting Committee noted that the PWC had voted 38-8 in favor of the draft report as it stood.

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73. The agency had its budget cut until it was closed-down in 1945. For further reading, see Matthew Dallek, Defenseless Under the Night: The Roosevelt Years, Civil Defense and the Origins of Homeland Security (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). 74. Detailed in Blum, V Was for Victory, pp. 281–284. 75. Mentioned in Leff, ‘The Politics of Sacrifice on the American Home Front in World War II’, p. 1299. 76.  Roosevelt to Crawford, 11 November 1943, Box 8, Folder 229, Crawford Papers, WRHS. The author found no other Roosevelt replies in this collection, or in that of the NAM Records in Hagley. 77. From NAM Press Service, 27 December 1943, 288/I. 78.  Second Report of the Postwar Committee of the NAM, 1 December 1943, 288/I. 79. Ibid. 80. Ibid. The Second Report only repeated the proposals for worldwide adoption of the ‘most-favored-nation’ clause in commercial treaties and a ‘general international accord’ of a codified system of agreements. 81.  Detailed in Robert Divine, Second Chance: The Triumph of Internationalism in America During World War II (New York: Atheneum, 1967), pp. 130–133. The meeting was also about ousting the outspoken internationalist Wendell Willkie from candidature for the 1944 presidential race. 82. A full congress program can be found in Box 7, Folder 202, Crawford Papers, WRHS. 83.  From ‘Today…Production for Victory: Tomorrow…Opportunity, Jobs, Freedom: The War and Postwar Program of American Industry: Proposed for Adoption by the Second War Congress of American Industry’, December 1943, 209/XV. 84. A Better America: Industry’s Program and Excerpts from Addresses by Crawford, Prentis and Weisenburger, at the Second War Congress of American Industry, December 1943 (NAM, May 1944), 115/I. 85.  The Challenge: Address by Alfred P. Sloan, Jr., before the Second War Congress (NAM, 1944), 223/XVI. 86. Op. cit., A Better America: Industry’s Program. 87. Industry and Victory: Addresses by Charles E. Wilson, Joseph B. Eastman, Major General L. H. Campbell, Jr., Rear Admiral W. H. P. Blandy, and Tom M. Girdler, delivered at the Second War Congress of American Industry of the NAM, December 1943 (NAM, January 1944), pp. 27–28; p. 31, 217/XVI. 88. Ibid., p. 4 and p. 11.

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89. Jobs in Peacetime: A Panel Discussion (New York: NAM, 1944), p. 3, 843/ III. Johnston’s supportive message was printed: ­ ‘Management-labor round table invaluable in better understanding’. Hoffman was wrongly attributed to the fictional ‘Committee for Industrial Development’. Derby was president of the American Cyanamid & Chemical Corporation. 90.  Jobs in Peacetime, p. 17. 91. Ibid., p. 5; 7; 10; and pp. 14–15. 92. ‘Excerpt from The Economist, ‘NAM and the Future’, 18 December 1943, 288/I. 93.  All statistics from Postwar Conditions and Trends: Analysis by Noel Sargent, 31 December 1943, 288/I. This was a collection of thirty-one pictorial charts identical to those used by Ralph Robey in his address to the War Congress of Industry in December 1942. The booklet incorporated a very slim ‘analysis’ by Sargent and was aimed at individual company planners for general information and therefore offered no program, policy suggestions or barracking of government, or even the suggestion that ‘free enterprise’ was the key. It simply bolstered, through ‘objective’ statistical analysis, NAM’s contention that after the war business would flourish. 94. See ‘NAM and International Relations’, p. 25, 76/I. 95.  ‘Minutes of Steering Committee of the Postwar Committee’, 10 December 1943, 287/I. 96. ‘Appendix F: International Economic Relations’, 30 December 1943, 288/I. 97. From Gable, ‘A Political Analysis of an Employers Association’, p. 136; and Gable, ‘NAM: Influential Lobby or Kiss of Death?’, p. 270. The Act was not very effective in restricting labor, see Lichtenstein, Labor’s War at Home, p. 153. The Act also potentially granted more power to the executive, which invited criticism from both conservatives and liberals; see Wilson, Creative Destruction, pp. 216–217. 98. From ‘Digest of NIIC Activities’, 1944; and ‘The NIIC Program in Action’, circa mid-1944, both in 845/III. 99. ‘What’s Ahead: Spring 1944’ (leaflet), 224/XVI. 100.  The rest were cartels and patents; entrance requirements for foreign ships into US harbors; conditions for foreign loans; international machinery for migration; government abstention from efforts to restrict marketing of raw materials and food stuffs; expansion of trade terms provided under Lend-Lease termination to other nations; raw materials; international investments; and international double taxation; all from ‘Minutes of Steering Committee of the Postwar Committee’, 10 December 1943, 287/I.

CHAPTER 6

Out of the Shadows, 1944

The clocks of war are slowly unwinding. Each measured throb of time brings peace closer. American industry is no idle watcher. Its machinery and manpower, its ingenuity and skill that move the lathes and assembly lines of free enterprise, that turn its turbines, are the hum and beat of the timetable for victory – the rhythm of America at work. And now the eyes of America are on industry and its ability to plan and pace the challenging climb to new peacetime peaks. Industry is facing the challenge to prove its leadership by mapping out the economic terrain for a free and Better America. Industry working at war, is keeping its sleeves rolled up overtime to lay out the timetable for a national future of economic peace, prosperity, and freedom. (From introduction to ‘Producing for Victory—Preparing for Peace’, at the Chicago Executives Conference, 25 May 1944)

For over a year the New Deal experiment had been ‘held at bay’.1 Roosevelt had consciously avoided, often to the dismay of his liberal acolytes, proposing or supporting measures that might have roused a largely conservative Congress in order, as he saw it, to keep the wheels turning on the greatest war machine ever assembled. Where necessary, ‘Dr. Win the War’, as Roosevelt now called himself in a telling replacement of his former sobriquet ‘Dr. New Deal’, had sidestepped direct confrontation with his opponents on the Hill either by folding departments, ­re-branding them, replacing personnel or downgrading their duties and responsibilities. The White House remained in charge of the war effort, at least on paper, through an array of loosely connected and overlapping © The Author(s) 2020 C. Whitham, Corporate Conservatives Go to War, Palgrave Studies in American Economic History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43908-8_6

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bureaus and influential personalities which, despite themselves and a vengeful Congress, were managing to get the job done.2 Beyond Washington, there was a creeping weariness as the end of the war drew into sight that was accelerated after the Allied landings at Normandy in June 1944. In the words of historian William O’Neill, ‘everyone smelled victory and saw no need to keep their noses to the grindstone’. Defense orders were slowly being cut after the production peak of 1943, the harvest was good, and disposable income was high. Consumption of what few durable goods existed began to rise, leading to what O’Neill observed was ‘the paradox that, as the war entered its bloodiest phase, at home the good times were rolling’.3 For 1943, the production of consumer goods was higher than it had been for munitions, and some claimed that the standard of living was one sixth better than in 1939.4 The war had brought prosperity back to America, but anxiety mounted during 1944 over how the vast war economy would be converted for peace. Many remembered how a badly organized transition after World War I led to a major economic slump due mainly to the abrupt demobilization of the armed forces and a swift contraction of the armament industry. This time, government, military and business representatives were of one mind on the need to avoid a repeat of the last war. And it was in this area that Roosevelt, himself a political veteran of the last post-war recession, chose to rely most wholeheartedly on business expertise. In January 1944, the report by Bernard Baruch on how best to organize the reconversion was submitted to Roosevelt and was widely influential on the administration. The guiding premise of the Baruch report was that the reconversion necessitated taking ‘the Government out of business’.5 Further reassurance, if qualified, to business came in Roosevelt’s appointment of cotton broker, prominent free-trader and member of the NPA, BAC and CED, William L. Clayton to lead a new Surplus War Property Administration in February 1944. The elimination of price controls and the termination of war contracts were of obvious concern for all businesses, but for corporate conservatives their greatest fear was that the huge government-owned facilities swiftly erected for military production would be sold to create giant monopolies—especially in the core materials of aluminum, oil or synthetic rubber—which would hamper the ‘free market’, or worse still remain in public hands in direct competition with the private sector.6 Corporations hoped that in dispensing his duties Clayton would follow the recommendations of the Baruch report to the letter. Over the coming year, several of the

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main war control regulations were due to expire, and vital legislation to guide the reconversion would be framed.7 Nevertheless, even with these pro-business appointments and a conservative Congress, the NAM did not slip into complacency in what would be a critical year in deciding the contours of the immediate post-war period. The alertness of the NAM to the instruments of the reconversion was, of course, informed by wider concerns. The winding-down of the military production effort also focused the minds of Americans more sharply on how a post-war America should look. The presidential election of November 1944 would inevitably serve as a battleground for competing visions of that future. If 1943 had been the year of the conservative resurgence, Roosevelt planned for 1944 to be the year of the liberal comeback. To win the White House for an unimaginable fourth term that November, Roosevelt aimed to rally his liberal troops and the aspirations of millions of workers, youth and servicemen and women on whom he depended for votes, by focusing on a post-war social program which guaranteed security and prosperity for all. Roosevelt’s ‘second Bill of Rights’ was unveiled in January 1944, and was an extension of the unrealized core objectives of his second New Deal of 1935–1936. Americans would have the right to ‘useful and remunerative’ employment, decent housing, income that allowed adequate food, clothing and recreation, good education, and protection from poverty in sickness, old age, and unemployment. The pledge to deliver this bundle of ‘rights’ to all Americans followed the steady passage through Congress, begun in the fall of 1943, of a bill sanctioned by Roosevelt that would provide wide-ranging social benefits to veterans. What became known as the ‘GI Bill of Rights’ was approved by rigidly conservative veteran’s groups and attracted broad support across Washington in what was a calculated move by Roosevelt to ensnare Congressional conservatives into supporting comprehensive social benefits for at least one section of the population. Democrats hoped the GI Bill would build momentum for the generalization of social and economic rights across the nation. The awakening of New Deal liberalism as the end of the war loomed faced corporate conservatives with a difficult choice. Do they revert to their traditional comfort zone of mercilessly smashing the edifice of what looked like another ‘New Deal’, or do they fashion an alternative response which speaks to the raised post-war aspirations as well as the enduring anxieties of Americans who worried that the ‘good times’ would end? The challenge to the NAM came not only from the

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administration, but from a variety of well-organized academic and corporate planning groups, all vying for the attention of Washington or the ear of the general public. The head of the PWC estimated that by March 1944 there were ‘almost two hundred independent groups planning the postwar world’.8 It was a highly congested field, but for its part the NAM exuded supreme confidence that its program, and the authority of free enterprise, would prevail after the war. Since June 1943, the NAM had pressed the two major political parties to ‘proclaim’ in support of free enterprise in the next election if the government failed to declare for it beforehand, and would increase that pressure during 1944.9 At a record number of forty persons, the NAM Board was ready to take the fight to the people.10 During 1944, the NAM—and its partner the NIIC—was bolder, more assertive and more forthright in showing that private enterprise was America’s trusted friend, not its shifty adversary. It launched a major long-term initiative to capture leadership of the post-war transition and conducted several daring actions to achieve the ‘big splash’ the NAM wanted to make in 1944. The promotion of its post-war strategy, especially in the international sphere, was integral to that aim. The Second Report of the PWC was being distributed at a greater pace than the first report Jobs, Freedom, Opportunity.11 However, with both reports nearing a respectable 60,000 copies dispatched, these numbers barely matched the outputs of the other main corporate planners which were sold, not given away.12 Presumably because the main report was so large, or perhaps to increase circulation,13 it was decided to release three pamphlet ‘extracts’ of the Second Report in March 1944. The first, Industry’s View on Postwar Problems was designed as an overview of the larger Second Report, highlighting what PWC chairman Wilfred Sykes made clear in his foreword when he stated that the entire Second Report was intended to deal with ‘the great overall problem: “How will government let go of private enterprise, so that it may again be free?”’. Industry’s View on Postwar Problems began with the reassurance that although postwar economic readjustments would be necessary ‘a postwar depression of widespread character is quite unnecessary’.14 This was an element of positivity quite absent from NAM’s first pronouncements on the matter. The second extract, Postwar Distribution of Goods and Services, underscored NAM’s (wholly accurate) contention that this area of business activity was largely neglected by post-war planners. For the NAM, however, this was a vital area of study: ‘Salesmanship…must bear the brunt of the postwar

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challenge to the American system of free competitive enterprise. The sales force of America must become the postwar “army of attack” against those who would destroy the American way of life’.15 The final extract from the Second Report was the most significant, and the largest. Sound International Relations represented the first time the NAM had dedicated an entire publication to the subject. The pamphlet, which comprised the full section printed in the Second Report, added more wordage (twenty-two pages long) but no changes of substance to the outline presented in the original. This was because the PWC still believed that the fluid war conditions made it ‘impossible’ to discuss the details of future international cooperation. Neither did it contain any reference to the contentious and still irreconcilable question of tariffs. In effectively dodging this issue, the NAM leadership was able to temper what was otherwise a resounding call for internationalism. Publicity material emphasized that the pamphlet ‘merits careful study not only because it is broadly conceived and forward looking but because its idealism is deeply rooted in practical and specific suggestions’.16 By the latter was meant the vague calls for a world peace organization and an ‘International Board of Trade’. Essentially, Sound International Relations was notable for presenting in singular form a very general case for conservative American industrialists to accept what corporate liberals and a growing number of moderates had already accepted, namely the unavoidable truth that the economic health of the US was inextricably bound with that of the rest of the world: Our national self-interest must take into account the interests of other peoples as well as ourselves. We cannot be prosperous by attempting to stay aloof from the problems of the rest of the world…In such a world as that in which we now live, the actions of separate national governments acting separately cannot maintain reasonable world order. Only by concerted international study and action, on a permanent basis and of a continuous nature, can we realistically hope to meet the important and complex international problems of the Twentieth Century postwar world.

Such was the desire of the NAM to convert its conservative brethren to finally embrace global entanglements that an act of considerable revision was necessary: ‘The fact that we have had wars despite efforts at international cooperation should not lead to a belief that international cooperation is not worthwhile. It should, on the other hand, lead us

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to consider whether past efforts went far enough or were attempted in the right way’. It is impossible not to consider US refusal to join the League of Nations in the inter-war period (a position heavily backed by the Republican Party) when the PWC listed as potential recent failings the propensity of governments to ‘ignore’ controversial problems, the ‘faltering participation’ or failure of some states ‘to participate at all’ in international organizations, and the ‘refusal’ of leaders ‘to enforce principles and provisions to which their nations had subscribed’.17 The lack of a wholehearted commitment to post-war trade liberalization in the Second Report—and particularly its abstinence on the tariff question—was poorly received by American businessmen located in Britain. The viewpoint of Wallace B. Phillips, president of the American Chamber of Commerce in London, illustrated the complexities of determining a foreign economic policy that would suit the interests of all American business. Phillips wrote to the new NAM President Robert M. Gaylord (Ingersoll Milling Machine) complaining that the report’s discussion of Britain’s Lend-Lease obligations at the end of the war did not go down well in the UK, and did not reflect the conditions already agreed upon in the Mutual Aid Agreement of July 1942, which stipulated a commitment by both the British and US governments to eliminate all forms of trade discrimination and to reduce tariffs and trade barriers. On this latter point, Phillips believed that the PWC report had not gone far enough to declare its support for reducing trade barriers, which the British feared would be used by the US to exact repayment in a highly one-sided fashion in the immediate post-war period. Phillips argued that in this atmosphere the British needed reassurance from the US or they might be inclined to erect a high tariff wall of their own. British industrialists, Phillips claimed, were in ‘no doubt’ that after the war the US would be ‘holding enormous power for good or for ill in politics and in trade’, and that Britain would not be able to compete with the US in a ‘free-for-all’ fight for world markets.18 Study of the international dimension of post-war planning continued apace during 1944. A list of proposed subjects for consideration by the PWC for the year was heavily skewed toward foreign affairs. It included such matters as colonies and colonial policy, international investments, world aviation and transportation, the entrance of foreign ships into US ports and the conditions for foreign loans. In April 1944, the PWC added the investigation of the ‘general principles and problems of international cooperation’ alongside the study of international organization

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and international economic relations. To this end, the PWC sought to enlist the help ‘from an outstanding group of authorities in general international relations, and from several special groups of experts in such specific fields as monetary controls and foreign investments’.19 The deceleration of war production led the PWC to separate consideration of transition period problems into four full committees. They were a War Contract Termination and Disposal of Government Owned Plants, Equipment and Supplies Committee; Inflation Control Committee; War Control Termination Committee; and the Renegotiation Committee.20 This reorganization followed the release in January 1944 of the Baruch report to government on demobilization and reemployment plans for the reconversion. A comparison between the Baruch findings and the views of the NAM toward reconversion, including those of the PWC, found that much similarity existed between their recommendations, especially as many of them called for heavy legislative oversight in the overall process. The report’s emphasis on removing public enterprise from the post-war economy was very encouraging, but the problem for the NAM existed not in the recommendations of the report, but in how they would be applied. There was no guarantee that a revitalized Democratic administration after the November elections would respect the findings of its experts or the will of Congress. Although the NAM applauded the level of cooperation between executive and legislative bodies in producing the report, it concluded that ‘major controversy’ would ‘probably develop around political aspects’, such as where the centralized authority charged with overseeing the reconversion would be based, and its relationship to Congress and the executive. In short, ‘to what extent will government by executive directive or by legislations impede or accelerate the healthy restoration of a peacetime economy’.21 The decision to expand the scope and size of the PWC, and to ­re-release the Second Report in segmented form, was an indication of the seriousness with which the NAM regarded its profile on post-war affairs. The momentum generated under Crawford, who was now Chairman of the Board, was set to continue. These steps were accompanied by a series of determined, and in some cases bold and unprecedented interventions by the NAM into the national debate over post-war planning. The outings were less to do with formulating detailed policies as they were about raising the national profile of the organization and becoming a legitimate—if not the leading—player in the making of critical decisions about the post-war economic transition.

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The first, and perhaps the most audacious, of these operations was an attempt to create a national decision-making forum outside of Washington incorporating the main economic branches of the country. The National Post-War Conference program was a shrewd experiment by the NAM to advance conservative leadership over the reconversion away from the influence of the corporate liberals and from government, where conservative influence was at its weakest. For the NAM, the conferences ‘had to be launched as a possible contribution to the restoration of the private economy’, as in its judgment ‘the public interest now requires all segments of the economy to unite on a program to solve the transition and postwar problems’.22 Time was also fast running out. Labor, agriculture and business had all spoken openly about the need for cooperation after the war, but as the end of the conflict drew nearer the NAM feared that unless their differences could be reconciled ‘voluntarily’ it would fall to the government to settle them. The recent announcement of Congressional plans to legislate on the demobilization and reconversion of American industry was dubbed by the NAM as ‘a life-or-death sentence on the system of free enterprise in the postwar world’, with the potential for Congress ‘to turn the economy over to political government bureaus with no practical experience’.23 This was, the NAM believed, ‘the last call for a free economy’, and the conferences its latest attempt to seize the initiative.24 Even so, the NAM could only succeed in bringing these divergent groups together, where others including the government had failed, if it scaled-down the gravity of the meetings. Hence the conferences were designed simply to enable delegates from business, agriculture, labor, banking and commerce to listen to the views of the ‘principle segments’ of the American economy in order to inform the individual ­policy-making initiatives of the various groups. Off-the-record, closed sessions with no resolutions, observers or press gallery (only agreed communiqués offered after each session), this was an exercise in ‘cooperative thinking’ rather than gritty decision-making which merely allowed delegates to ‘listen to one another as men have seldom listened in such numbers before’.25 It was, nevertheless, an alternative platform away from government interference upon which the NAM could expound its message, raise its credibility and demonstrate its leadership. Sixteen organizations were invited to send up to five delegates to the inaugural conference in Atlantic City on 18–19 February 1944. None of the business groups, however, could be classed as ‘liberal’. The list

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included the main conservative business groups (NAM, USCC), the moderate CED and the National Foreign Trade Council (which comprised many NAM member firms), the main banking and farming organizations, and the CIO and AFL.26 In Atlanta, the conference chair was handed to Clinton S. Golden, assistant to the president of the CIO and Vice Chair of the WPB, but as chief sponsors and organizers the overall chairman of the conference program was NAM Board member and former NAM President, Walter Fuller. New PWC chairman Wilfred Sykes (Inland Steel Corporation), former PWC chairman Bayard Colgate and now PWC advisor Robert Wason accompanied the Vice President of the NAM, Cloud Wampler (Carrier Corporation), and NAM member and former USCC President W. Gibson Carey, Jr. (Yale & Towne Manufacturing Company), as the NAM delegation to Atlantic City. Discussion was based around topics suggested by two or more organizations, which boiled down to the broad themes of long-range problems, domestic, international and transition period problems, and it was acknowledged that on these subjects it would be ‘impossible to arrive at definite and precise agreements’. Still, for guidance the NAM listed under each topic several subheadings for discussion which betrayed the ideological bias of the organizers. The ‘restoration of free enterprise, based on private ownership and management’, and ‘free labor instead of government employment’, the need for a ‘balanced economy’, and ‘to what extent will or should the government function as a directing and controlling agency with respect to our economic system’, were questions drawn straight from the NAM hit list.27 Unsurprisingly, some ‘antagonism’ was registered at the first conference. One such instance, recorded in handwritten notes roughly taken by a NAM delegate (most likely Colgate), quoted Robert Watt, international representative of the AFL, as saying: ‘Are you NAM willing to have a works director to handle the reconversion problems? He’ll ruin the economy for years! Don’t talk about industry committees (which are purely front) which want to keep us out of control…’. This trashing of the industry committee system, a long-standing NAM war initiative, was countered with an AFL proposal for the establishment by Congress of a ‘reconstruction commission’ to represent employers, labor and farmers, a notion that avoided further government involvement and therefore met with the support of the NAM delegates. As John Fennelly of the CED was recorded as saying: ‘We’ve demonstrated different creeds but it looks like we’re all seeking the same goal’.28

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So, disagreement was not enough to disrupt the proceedings or deter the fifty-one delegates from issuing a closing statement that would have satisfied the NAM and seemingly validated the conference tactic. The delegates confirmed their ‘joint responsibility’ for ‘preventing mass unemployment, ruinous farm prices, violent ups and downs of business, monopolistic practices in any field, socialization of business, and a government-planned economy for the nation’. ‘If we fail to do all these things together’, they concluded, ‘then the task will fall upon the government’.29 The first conference, as was to be expected, made little headway in agreeing solutions to the basic problems of the transition and had committed the parties to nothing except a vague pledge to create a post-war America of ‘plenty’ and ‘opportunity’ for all. The conclusions were necessarily broad and non-binding, but although the parties had committed officially to nothing, the NAM had tapped a common aversion by all the groups to the growth of federal involvement in their affairs. And the NAM, having ‘made history’ at Atlanta, had proved that there was at least an appetite for talking. As NAM News reported: ‘It was the first really intimate contact among leaders of many groups that were generally considered to be in conflict…such supposed opponents mutually discovered they were not scoundrels’.30 The delegates agreed to meet again, but how far the conservatives could plumb this shared animosity toward government was yet to be seen. The NAM trod carefully so as not to ruin the new-found recognition of its peers. To avoid accusations that it was dominating proceedings, the NAM handed organizational authority for future conferences to a steering committee representing all the participating groups (though NAM retained the chair). On 19–20 May 1944, the second National ­Post-War Conference was held in New York City. The conference, which had enlarged to represent twenty-two groups in business, finance, agriculture, labor and ‘patriotic interests’, was expected to ‘attack an agenda of specific problems involved in getting back to a free economy and a democratic system of government – not to be lost in winning a total war’. In New York, the delegates confronted the same list of complex issues they faced in Atlantic City, namely contract termination, disposal of war plant and equipment, demobilization of armed forces, agriculture, ending of wartime controls, taxation and equity capital.31 The result was to call upon Congress, not the executive, to manage the post-war transition. This was another satisfactory result for the NAM, which must have

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been pleased with the New York Times report—one of thirty press correspondents now allowed at the open sessions32—that the ‘general feeling among all groups’ at the conference was that ‘an expanding economy of plenty be encouraged, a free economy and a democratic system of government be preserved and dictatorship be avoided in this country’.33 At the New York conference the participants decided to ‘enlarge the function’ of the gatherings to allow the National Post-war Conference to exist as an ‘agency’ between sessions ‘through which participating organizations may exchange the technical and practical studies of ­ post-war problems which the various organizations are now making independently’.34 This was a promising development from which the NAM could potentially derive considerable benefit in its quest to influence the post-war direction of the economy. The NAM post-war conference program, designed to effectuate the conservative post-war agenda, was linked to a parallel, and in some areas just as forthright, effort to spread the NAM credo sponsored by its publicity collaborator, the NIIC. The activities of the NIIC in 1944 were the most ambitious it had yet undertaken. In May 1944, the NIIC announced that it felt ‘the symbol of free enterprise has been successfully sold, and that the time is now ripe to show the public how business management, operating under the free enterprise banner, can lead the way into a peaceful era of new opportunities and higher standards of living’.35 NIIC made a serious effort to prove this was the case. In 1944, the NIIC held nine meetings in conjunction with state and regional business associations to improve the public relations practice of some nineteen hundred local managers across the country. These ‘public relations conferences’ brought ‘top management together with specialists in the field for a frank exchange of experience and thinking’.36 The NIIC also ran a conference program entitled ‘What Can Industry Contribute to a Better America after the War’ to showcase the leadership skills of the business community to the wider public. As NIIC saw it, they were necessary because ‘American industry in the postwar period faces the biggest responsibility it has ever had’, and the conferences were being staged to bring about ‘understanding and cooperation’ between all segments of society.37 Each day-long conference, paid for by the NIIC and the NAM, was designed specifically for one of five social groupings—management, labor, investors, consumers and women’s organizations—with each group facing an identical arrangement of presentations from each group capped by a panel discussion involving the

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day’s presenters. Guidelines offered an outline agenda for the presentations, all with an item called ‘social objectives’ tagged onto the end. The agenda for b ­ usiness-management presentations, for example, included ‘dangers of bureaucracy’ and ‘vision of the future’. Despite the obvious rigidity of the meetings, the NIIC appeared genuine in its attempt to engender ‘a frank and clear expression’ from the group leaders and foster debate at the grassroots level. Conference organizers were told that questions from the floor for the panel discussion were ‘encouraged’ as ‘active participation can bring about a realistic, dramatic, lively discussion of points raised’, adding that the two hours allowed ‘will probably prove too short!’. NIIC provided materials, organizational support and media advertising for each conference, and where possible live radio broadcasts of the proceedings (or re-enacted for later broadcast). Attendees would receive transcripts of the talks and the panel discussion, relevant booklets for ‘further investigation’ of topics, and information about conferences taking place elsewhere.38 The importance of schools and other educational establishments in disseminating the conservative message was plainly recognized by the NAM, as the ‘textbook controversy’ of 1941 potently demonstrated. During 1944, the NIIC produced a series of ‘information leaflets’ to relate post-war issues to the education sector for discussion at the various Education and Industry Conferences it held around the country. The second in the series was issued in February 1944 and addressed ‘The Problem of the Postwar Transition Period’. The NIIC acknowledged the burden of post-war employment fell upon business and government, but that ‘public comprehension’ of the issues was helped by the education system and as everywhere schools ‘will need to repair wartime damage to their efficiency’ and ‘prepare their long-term program of education for democratic citizenship’. The NIIC was aware of the anticipated p ­ ost-war leap in school and college enrollment based upon rising birth rates and the retraining needs of millions of veterans. It was therefore vital for the NIIC that ‘democratic citizenship’ embraced the values of decentralization, freedom of opportunity and the ‘principle of incentive’. The NIIC wanted educators to provide instruction in such branches as market research, package design, advertising and salesmanship that would ‘open up many opportunities in the postwar world’. For the NIIC, the objective of the nation’s educational leaders was to produce ‘good citizens’ and ‘to reconstruct our battered school system so that it can fulfill this function’. Indeed, the NIIC portrayed the relationship of education

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to the economy in the crudest of ways: ‘For our schools to prosper, it is vital that the American people realize what a big return our schools pay on our investment, and what a greatly expanded service they render in the modern world. This is a “selling job” of primary importance. It is one which educators and businessmen can do together, once businessmen themselves are shown the close relationship between American schools and America’s progress’.39 The NIIC also added to its successful booklet You and Industry, which since its release in 1940 had been supplied free ‘on request’ to teachers to the tune of more than 2.7 million copies to help them explain ‘the part played by free competitive enterprise in America’s development and prosperity’. The booklet How We Live—a ‘crystal-clear and opinion free treatment of the American economic system’—was earmarked for dispatch to twenty-thousand secondary school libraries and five thousand industrial relations directors.40 The NIIC was so impressed by its workplace propaganda campaign ‘Soldiers of Production’, that it was extended into 1944 believing it had possession of a winning formula. ‘No other employee program’ in its lifetime, NIIC contended, had been ‘so favorably received by both employers and employees’. According to the NIIC, the key to its success was the ‘individualized nature of each rally, highlighted by a twenty-minute talk by an outstanding NIIC staff speaker trained in ­ employee psychology’, coupled with the opportunity provided by the rallies for the company executive ‘to talk directly to his employees under the most favorable circumstances’. Between July 1943 and December 1944, ‘Soldiers of Production’ rallies had been held at over three hundred companies which included such hallmark names as Boeing, Consolidated Steel, California Shipbuilding, Dow Chemical, General Electric, Kaiser Shipbuilding, Pan American, US Rubber and Westinghouse Electric. Even Army and Navy procurement plants sanctioned the rallies because of the ‘increased production and lowered absenteeism that normally follows the inspirational messages’. During 1944 alone, the events were estimated to have reached a ‘visible audience’ of almost half a million employees and a radio audience nearing three million.41 In the fall of 1944, the NIIC expanded the size and scope of the ‘Soldiers of Production’ program. As war production began to slow down and victory edged nearer, the emphasis of the campaign shifted from being about endearing workers to management and instilling the principles of free enterprise to the linking of those principles to the goal

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of post-war prosperity. ‘While naturally “production for victory” has been stressed…more and more emphasis will be placed on the industrial and economic problems which must be cooperatively solved if Americans are to be able to earn more, buy more, and have more in the future’. The NIIC added three more staff speakers to the original quartet of Allen A. Stockdale, John L. Davis, Neal Bowman and Colyer Snyder, and appointed four ‘field men’ to assist the two full-time administrators at the NIIC headquarters. Responsibility for the development of the program was assigned to a newly created ‘national advisory committee’ led by Wampler which comprised Lammot du Pont, Glenn L. Martin (Martin Aircraft Co.), Alden G. Roach (Consolidated Steel) and Norman W. Wilson (Hammermill Paper Co.). Using a more systematic approach distilled from their experience of the previous year, the team aimed to vastly expand the rally format through the efficient ‘cultivation’ of the leaders of the top one hundred corporations in the US.42 The shop-floor emphasis of the NIIC education campaign extended beyond managers and workers. By the end of 1944, NIIC staff speakers had addressed twenty-five thousand foremen’s groups as part of its recognition of ‘the strategic position’ that foremen enjoy ‘as that segment of management closest to the American employee’. The NIIC had also refined its ‘Service for Plant Publications’ clipsheet, which was devised to communicate ‘management’s viewpoint’ more effectively in the in-house publications of more than three thousand corporations with a circulation ‘in excess of’ thirty million. Also during 1944, the NIIC expanded its Group Relations Department to better support the programs of the NAM Committees on Cooperation with Agriculture (Sayre), Churches (Crane), Education (Fuller), and Home and Industry (Bohen). These committees, NIIC understood, embraced groups which possessed ‘decisive influence in molding American public opinion’, which included women. To convey the ‘relationship’ of private enterprise to the ‘future and security of the American home’, the NIIC arranged ­twenty-one regional conferences in twenty states reaching ‘more than 3,000 leaders of women’s organizations and more than 1,000 businessmen’. This marked a ‘considerable expansion in the use of the conference method’.43 The NIIC might well have believed that the ‘symbol’ of free enterprise had been won, but that did not slow its commitment to spreading the ideological message across the nation, in old and new formats, throughout 1944. The NIIC enjoyed a rise in usage by ‘hometown’ newspapers of its weekly ‘clipsheet’ of news and illustrated features

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that ‘spread the story of industry’s achievements’. Papers that used the Industrial Press Service, as NIIC called it, reached more than 50 percent of the total family population in twenty-two states, and more than 25 percent in forty states. On the radio, NIIC also increased its activity. The series ‘Businessmen Look to the Future’, a pre-recorded, fi ­ fteen-minute long round table of business leaders discussing post-war problems, was aired on 302 stations in forty-eight states to an estimated five million listeners a week. The NIIC noted that during 1944 this program had been accepted by stations ‘normally lukewarm toward transcribed programs’. Two-thirds of the country’s radio stations broadcast material from the weekly NIIC releases of industry’s viewpoint in ‘Briefs for Broadcasters’.44 The NAM secured regular Saturday night appearances on a new fifteen-minute panel broadcast by the major national network ABC, called ‘Its Your Business’, and its speakers appeared on other radio forums like ‘America’s Town Meeting’ and ‘People’s Platform’, throughout the war.45 One of the most sophisticated ventures of the NIIC in propagating the conservative message was its flirtation with movies. ‘Wartime experience’, the NIIC observed, ‘has proved the effectiveness of motion pictures as instruction aids in helping both young people and adults to learn rapidly, easily and retentively’. Americans visited movie theaters in their droves during the war and Hollywood boomed. Admissions rose by more than a third totaling over ninety million visits a week with an annual turnover of a billion dollars.46 In June 1944, the NIIC released its first movie, a thirty minute ‘featurette’ called Three to be Served. It was based on Crawford’s ‘widely-hailed’ Reader’s Digest article called ‘American Triangle of Plenty’, and was produced in Hollywood by Paramount’s Educational Films Division under the directorship of Academy Award-winner Leslie Roush. The short, a ‘dramatization of free enterprise at work’, was highly regarded by its sponsors, who thought it combined ‘unusually high entertainment value with the most direct “message” that NIIC has ever incorporated in a film’. Guests at the Hollywood premiere thought the movie was ‘an important contribution to postwar thinking’. The target audience, however, was the ‘thought-moulders’—women, farmers, clergy, teachers, students and social service groups—who were subject to a mail campaign ‘suggesting’ they view the film at a cinema in one of two hundred and seventy-five chosen towns before being offered the chance to show a 16 mm version of the film to their own groups. This two-phase promotional

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drive (costing $46,500) was anticipated to yield an extra ­fifty-four hundred showings in the original locations by the end of 1945. Audience polls at selected first-run theaters revealed 90 percent satisfaction with the film, with 83 percent saying that it gave them a ‘better understanding of business fundamentals’, and 40 percent admitting that the film ‘changed their ideas’ about these fundamentals. By the end of the year the movie had been shown six hundred and ninety-five times at seventy-two major theaters of ‘key industrial cities in fourteen states’ to an audience of 307,588.47 But the ultimate goal for the NIIC was to achieve an audience total of over ten million by the end of 1948. This could only be met through the success of its second-phase drive to generate small group viewings, the real focus of its energies. To this end the NIIC supplied a ‘discussion guide’ which offered a simple structure around which the group organizer could both introduce the movie, initiate and lead any debate that followed, and then close out the session. It was also a telling glimpse of the overt nature of the NIIC effort to propagate the NAM credo. Offering precise wording, the organizer was asked to remind the group before the showing that its story would be related afterward ‘to the pressing economic problems of today’, and the prompts for the discussion itself involved praising ‘enterprisers’ and ‘job-creators’, and highlighting the ‘dangerous trend’ of asking government to ‘solve our problems’. As a possible closing remark, the organizer was prompted to state: ‘Since each of us, in very human fashion, demands the greatest possible return for his labor or his investment, and the greatest value in exchange for the monies spent, I think we can agree that it is up to management to balance our demands in order that all may benefit equally’.48 In sum, during 1944 the NIIC showed nine of its films to 6866 different audiences, totaling 1,561,865 viewers.49 By 1944, the NAM was acutely aware of the rise in national expectations regarding the post-war world, reflected in the mounting outputs of other corporate organizations. From 1943 to the middle of 1944, the TCF, NPA and the CED released over thirty publications on a wide range of post-war matters, notably Postwar Plans of the United Nations (TCF), Reconversion of Industry to Peace (NPA) and Production, Jobs and Taxes (CED). The liberal TCF and NPA forecast a leading and determinative role for the US government in post-war international and domestic affairs which focused on high taxation and federal spending to maintain production. The moderate CED, in common with the conservatives, preferred lowering taxes and raising corporate and disposable

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consumer income to stimulate growth but viewed increased corporate spending as a companion to government spending. Unlike the NAM, the CED accepted the Keynesian notion that a balanced budget must not be sought at all costs and that a degree of national debt would be necessary to maintain post-war jobs and production.50 In all these prescriptions for post-war prosperity, the essential and guiding role of government over that of private enterprise was acknowledged. The need to compete with these advanced treatments of increasingly urgent post-war issues was clearly behind the launch by NIIC of a scheme to promote ‘A Brand New Postwar Program’ through the airwaves. Radio stations were asked to air a series of pre-recorded five-minute talks by prominent NAM members, such as representatives of this ‘new industrial and business leadership’ like explosives and plastics baron Lammot du Pont, under the heading ‘Industry Looks to the Future’. The NIIC promised listeners that these men would ‘disclose the broad panorama of what our world of tomorrow will be like – a world of great inventions, new materials, new products…wondrous new chemicals, new plastics, new machines, new radios, new cars, and the thousands of other new products we dream of for the better world we are fighting for’. For the NAM, the idealized post-war world was one of bountiful consumerism, a vision of unfettered market capitalism. A society built upon plenty. As the publicity bluntly phrased it, the five-minute radio talks were ‘about the many wonderful new things we’re going to be able to buy after the war’.51 It did not contain any of the social idealism espoused in various degrees by the corporate liberals, just a simple conviction that material consumption was all Americans needed to care about. Alongside the adventurous NIIC program, in July 1944 the NAM ‘Better America Committee’ launched its own campaign to educate and enthuse businessmen about post-war prospects. The ‘round tables’ followed on from the release in May 1944 of the booklet A Better America based on the Second War Congress of December 1943 where the initiative was first revealed. The principal difference from the NIIC program was that these one-day round tables were targeted exclusively at industrial managers in the principal industrial centers of the country with the sole aim of ‘educating’ them on certain of the NAM’s policies. Chicago executives were warned in May by NAM headliners promoting A Better America that ‘the eyes of America are on industry and its ability to plan and pace the challenging climb to new peacetime peaks’.52 Sponsors of the round table program believed that ensuring managers

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followed the NAM party line was necessary so they ‘will be equipped to relay industry’s common views on these subjects to representatives in government and various segments of the public including employees’. Indeed, the round tables or forums were to be ‘promoted as serious working sessions at which management is “briefed” for its job of merchandizing industry’s story to the public’. A ‘typical meeting’ comprised a morning talk by ‘an outstanding industrialist’ who would ‘urge businessmen to focus their attention’ on ‘rallying behind NAM’s specific recommendations for national policy’ such as capital formation, taxes, labor relations and administrative law. The afternoons were devoted to the ‘public relations process which must be followed to attain industry’s objectives’, with sessions run by the NIIC on methods of advertising and ‘Employee Education’. Though the NAM billed the round tables as ‘give and take’ events that invited audience participation, the NAM was confident it would have a controlling hand on the content of the meetings, as ‘any differences in all probability either could be ironed out or if necessary those particular points omitted from the speeches’ if the local NAM organizers so wished. In addition, access to the afternoon session—the only segment of the round table devoted to open discussion—was denied to the press.53 The practical, board-room component of the NAM’s post-war planning drive was fortified with the publication during 1944 of a series of five Guides to Corporation Postwar Planning to be released during the year. The short booklets were designed to give practical guidance to business managers on a range of post-war corporate subjects, providing further evidence of the NAM’s conviction that post-war planning should be as concerned with devising concrete, practical measures of immediate consequence as with the long-term macro-economic strategy of the nation. Indeed, it was the estimation of Norman W. Wilson, chairman of the Corporation Peacetime Planning Committee of the NAM, that the two approaches were vitally connected: ‘The effectiveness of management in meeting these problems [of post-war adjustments)] will determine not only the competitive positions of individual companies, but to a large extent the smoothness of our transition from war to peace’.54 The desire to raise the credibility of the NAM led to some rare moments of association with its immediate peers outside the conference hall. One such act took place on 28 March 1944 when twenty-five conservative economists attended a Conference of Business Economists in Washington, DC called by the USCC. The meeting was chaired by

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Emerson P. Schmidt of the NAM Committee on Economic Policy, who was one of six NAM personnel out of the nineteen attendees of the meeting. In a conference that passed no specific recommendations, the most notable feature was the degree of unanimity among those present on the evils of government. This was despite the best efforts of USCC chairman and corporate moderate Eric Johnston to convince them otherwise. In an opening address that managed to completely avoid mentioning the war, Johnston focused on restoring free capitalist enterprise in the US in the new conditions of heightened federal involvement: ‘When obstacles are put in the way of industrial expansion and high levels of stable employment, I appeal to your inventiveness to discover ways and means to offset the hurdles. We need a new spirit of daring prognosis and prescription to meet the new sociological and economic conditions of a modern, volatile, democratic state’.55 Two more visitations during 1944 revealed a growing confidence in the NAM relative to its competitors that was indicative of the shifting sands beneath the feet of the nation’s business planners. Speaking at a ‘luncheon meeting’ of the rising corporate moderate champion, the CED, on 11 April 1944, NAM President Gaylord spoke graciously of his guests which he said had ‘attracted such an unusual representation of the nation’s businessmen to the vital problems of the postwar’ and ‘everywhere I go I have encountered the enthusiasm and the strong leadership that the CED has engendered’. However, this faint praise was as far as Gaylord was willing to go, stressing that in answer to the question of whether or not the NAM and the CED were competitors, the answer was ‘yes’ and that this competition was ‘good’ and ‘desirable’. ‘The hundred and one organizations engaged in postwar planning will refine and clarify our thinking’, he claimed, just as the competitive model worked in the economic field. The two organizations already cooperated in the National Post-War Conferences, and he aimed to strengthen their relationship, but he rejected calls for business to combine into one organization or present a ‘single program’. He was encouraged by the findings of a recent survey by the NAM adviser Claude Robinson from his Opinion Research Corporation, which found that 80 percent of respondents supported the primacy of free enterprise after the war and that war controls should last no more than a year after the armistice. No wonder the bulk of Gaylord’s speech was taken up with extolling the primacy of free enterprise and fulminating at the dangerous ‘fallacy’ that government and business can guarantee jobs which ran the risk of generating public

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‘disgust’ with ‘our economic system before it can get over the transition hump successfully’. A bullish Gaylord, clearly aware of the sympathies of his liberal-moderate audience, also chided the Keynesian philosophy: ‘I believe this new name for government participation in business is called “compensatory economy”. I believe it is “compensatory baloney” – based on the assumption that in the United States there is a mature economy afflicted with hardening of the arteries incapable of the venturesome expansion which characterized its youth…’. Failure to believe in the power of competitive enterprise, Gaylord claimed, was tantamount to surrender, and his message was for ‘stark realism’, as American people ‘can stand the facts. Instead of promising the primrose path to an effortless future, we should be pointing the road to postwar realism’. Contradicting his earlier statement against merger, Gaylord insisted that business come together, as ‘somewhere along the line business must wash out its differences in postwar thinking and come before the public and government with a sound, workable business postwar plan’. On labor, Gaylord was again mindful of public perception: ‘We know that the cultivation of the fallacy that capital and labor are natural enemies, destroys the harmony of industrial production. A national labor policy fair to all but favoring none is an indispensable postwar “must”’.56 The meeting with the CED appeared less to do with building bridges with other business groups than with reasserting, and confidently so with the poll results, the supremacy of conservative principles directly to those who were voicing a willingness to entertain moderate levels of government participation in the transition, such as over job creation, labor relations and so on. Gaylord had a chance to prove his theory about relations between management and labor two days later when he spoke at a ‘Postwar Forum’ sponsored by the AFL in New York City. Again, Gaylord unflinchingly deluged his opposite numbers on the topic of ‘Free Enterprise in the Postwar Period’, in which he mostly repeated the message he delivered to the CED about the centrality of free enterprise and the pitfalls of government intervention. It was a confident and unapologetic performance. He advised that if all were to benefit from American productivity then ‘we must each do our part to make it operate more effectively, and make it conform more nearly to the ideals of the free enterprise system’. The key to solving post-war problems, reasoned Gaylord, was in making the stark choice between working under private enterprise ‘as free men’ or under public enterprise ‘where the state

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is dominant’. Gaylord warned that the post-war transition period would be ‘tough going’ and that dislocations in employment would be ‘unavoidable’, but counseled against being ‘deluded by the dream-planners’ promise of jobs-for-everyone’, as inevitable disappointment would result in stronger calls for government action and ‘the enterprise system might never get its chance to function successfully’. But the hardship would, he contended, be worth it: ‘We must not through soft-thinking about temporary hard sailing throw away the greatest potentiality America has ever had. We have all the ingredients present for unusual prosperity; we must put them together correctly’. The NAM president did not shy away from delivering his hard ‘truths’ to the union chiefs, and showed no signs of moderating his stance on management-labor relations.57 While Gaylord was asserting the centrality of free enterprise in the post-war recovery to his moderating counterparts, NAM dignitaries like Crawford were in Washington seeking to influence legislators on the mechanics of the reconversion. The NAM particularly wanted to impress upon Congress the need for a swift and just settlement of war contracts and the rapid disposal of government-owned property. On 18 April 1944, Crawford spoke before the House Special Committee on Post-war Economic Policy & Planning which had been established that January. This, and a parallel committee in the Senate, was a belated attempt by the Congress to have an input on the mountain of legislation on the reconversion that would be sent its way in the coming months.58 The ‘Colmer Committee’, chaired by Democratic Congressman William M. Colmer (Mississippi), had business input from its director, Marion B. Folsom of the moderate CED, and a team of economic consultants that included advisor to the PWC, H. B. Arthur.59 Colmer made it clear from the outset that American business had little to fear from his committee when he informed the House that he intended to end ‘war-time regimentation of the people and to guarantee the continuance of free enterprise’.60 The committee invited a multitude of government, agriculture, labor and business representatives (including the CED) to speak at numerous public hearings throughout 1944 and 1945, and was an excellent platform for the NAM to impress legislators and counter the influence upon the committee of the moderate CED. For its first report due in May 1944, the committee asked Crawford to speak for US manufacturers. He emphasized that the primary task of Congressmen was to decide how to raise enough capital at the end of the war to provide for enough jobs. ‘Capital’, he insisted, ‘is the answer to 90 percent of our transition

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and postwar problems’. ‘Remember’, he continued, ‘we want 25 percent more jobs out of this war – you might even call that part of the price we are asking for mixing in this bloody conflict – so consequently we must have 25 percent more capital out of this war’. After all, he added, ‘we’d like to come out of this war twice as big as we went in it’. He made no suggestions as to how the extra capital could be raised.61 Indeed, the actual transcript of his testimony, which included questions from the committee, revealed that the Congressmen were reluctant to hand the reigns of the post-war economy to private enterprise through the cutprice disposal of war plant, the reduction of taxes and the swift ending of price controls.62 Crawford suffered a worse grilling the next day at the hands of Democratic Senator James E. Murray (Montana) when he testified before a subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Military Affairs dealing with contract termination. Murray, who would later sponsor a bill to allow government to underwrite full employment after the war, pressed Crawford over his insistence that only unshackled business would ensure peacetime jobs when it had failed to do so even with federal stimulus during the Depression.63 Shortly after, Sargent, with NAM Board member Norman D. MacLeod (Abrasive Tool Machine Co.) and former Board member F. F. Sommers (Rainfair Inc.), appeared before the Senate Special Committee to Study Problems of American Small Business, chaired by Democratic Senator Tom Stewart (Tennessee). Sargent claimed that 75 percent of NAM’s eleven thousand members were classed as small business (employed less than five hundred), and called for a revision of the tax regime for small businesses.64 Elsewhere the NAM was trying to extend its influence within certain inter-government agencies dealing with Latin America. In May 1944, the NAM sponsored a meeting of the governmental Inter-American Council, formed in May 1941 in Montevideo by forty-six Latin American trade organizations. At the meeting the NAM secured the acceptance of a number of its members to sit on the US Committee to the Council, which initially included only the USCC and the National Foreign Trade Council.65 Also, in May 1944 a four-day conference was held in the Waldorf-Astoria by the Permanent Council of American Associations of Commerce and Production ‘to discuss postwar economic plans’ of the entire Americas. Nelson B. Rockefeller, Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs in the Executive Office of the President, was the primary government representative speaker alongside former NAM President William P. Witherow and Eric Johnston of the USCC. The conference, of four

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hundred persons from twenty-two countries, was the first of its kind to have representatives from North, Central and South America ‘meeting cooperatively of their own free will’. The NAM, USCC and the National Foreign Trade Council were the only organizations representing the US. Curtis E. Calder (American & Foreign Power Co. Inc.), who would later become involved in framing the NAM’s foreign economic relations policy, addressed the conference on ‘The Economic Future of the Western Hemisphere’.66 In June 1944, members of the NAM interested in post-war exports to Latin America were invited to speak at a luncheon (sponsored by the NAM) of the government’s Inter-American Development Commission, headed by Rockefeller. NAM speakers were Colby M. Chester (General Foods), Eugene E. Wilson (United Aircraft Corporation), W. W. Cumberland (Wellington & Co.), H. C. Beaver (Worthington Pump & Machinery Corporation) and G. C. Hoyt (International Harvester).67 In addition, the NAM hosted two conferences in 1944 with the All-India Manufacturers Association and other Indian businessmen, and ‘similar conferences’ were held with Chinese industrialists.68 However, for the NAM, the term ‘conference’ could denote something as small as an informal face-to-face of individuals, so it may have been the case that these were not particularly large gatherings. The summer charm offensive by the NAM must have been smoothed by a ‘management poll’ held by Fortune on 1 May 1944, which listed the NAM as being the ‘most helpful to the business community in preparing for the reconversion period’. NAM polled 29.5 percent, with the USCC at 15.7 percent and the CED 13.5 percent. The NPA and TCF were not included in the poll, and the Commerce Department attracted a measly 3.4 percent.69 This may have explained why there was some, very rare, interest in the opinion of the NAM from government circles. In June 1944, the NAM was approached by Bernard F. Haley, Director of the Office of International Trade Policy of the Department of State and his Chief of the Division of Commercial Policy, William A. Fowler. They wanted the NAM to comment on international trading practices, such as patent agreements and cartels, and answer queries on how current practices favored or hampered US companies overseas.70 Despite these liaisons with government-backed organizations or outright federal agencies, the traditional antipathy of the NAM toward government was still very strong. Gaylord, for example, turned down membership of a new WPB Committee on Civilian Policy in 1944. This was due not only to his disdain for the agency for its mishandling of the war effort, or because its

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leadership was dominated by the moderate BAC, but his desire to retain for the NAM its independence of action. And during 1944 the NAM was confident that, through its Post-War Conferences and grassroots programs, it was succeeding in building a plausible counterweight to the government and business planners. The confidence of the NAM that the tide of the country was moving at last in favor of the conservatives was evidenced by its decision to make a direct plea to the two major parties competing for the White House in November. Penned just days before the Allied landings in Normandy, the NAM circulated a ‘Proposal of a Suggested Platform for Political Parties in 1944’ which offered a rough outline of the NAM’s post-war objectives. The NAM called for ‘assurance now’ that federal government would completely withdraw from its management, ownership and control of enterprises in the national economy, including the elimination of wartime controls ‘as rapidly as consistent with military needs’, and emergency labor controls replaced by a ‘fair’ national labor relations policy that corrected ‘the inequities that exist in the Wagner Act’. On international affairs, the NAM acknowledged that peace was ‘essential to extended prosperity’ and that American interests would not ‘be best served by an attempt to stay aloof from the problems of the rest of the world’, though suggested only ‘an extension and perfection’ of world agencies already in existence.71 The appeal to the parties may have been a long shot, but in Congress the post-war interests of American business were finally being respected. Despite Crawford’s rough handling by the special Congressional committees, in July 1944 the Contract Settlement Act was passed which enabled quick settlement of war contracts just as the NAM had pleaded. This was followed in October 1944 by the enactment of the Surplus Property Act. This legislation, using phraseology which could easily have been borrowed from NAM News, decreed that disposal of government property must ‘give maximum aid in the reestablishment of a peacetime economy of free independent private enterprise’, and discourage monopoly by favoring small businesses and veterans.72 The high energy assault of the NAM in the factories, across the airwaves and in the halls of Washington during the summer of 1944 was at last paying dividends in material benefits for American private enterprise. The end of the year was capped by another grand initiative by the NAM to demonstrate its capacity for business leadership and to confirm how much the organization—and corporate America—had risen

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in stature since the war began. On 10–18 November 1944, the NAM co-sponsored what the official record described as ‘the largest international business conference ever held’ in Rye, New York. The mammoth, eight-day meeting of ‘the cream of business leaders’ at the Westchester Country Club brought together organized business representatives from fifty-two nations to ‘establish a better basis for world relations and world trade’ between allied and neutral countries alike after the war. It had been nineteen months since Sargent first put the idea of such a meeting to Crawford in April 1943 and Sykes, a month later, had written Secretary of State Hull with a suggestion that the US host a gathering of organized business from ‘friendly nations’ across the world. Hull consented, but on the recommendation that the NAM invited other US business organizations to co-sponsor the event. The result was, after a process which took several months of ‘preliminary negotiations’, the hitherto unlikely partnership of the NAM with a collection of organizations dedicated to realizing the Hullian vision of liberalized world trade through international multilateral institutions. From an organizing committee comprising the USCC, the National Foreign Trade Council, the American Section of the International Chamber of Commerce and Sargent as chairman, invitations were sent to ‘topflight businessmen’ across the globe in June 1944—just three weeks after the Allied landings at Normandy. The organizers declared they had called the conference in recognition of two simple principles: that there would be ‘no permanent military peace in a world of international economic conflict’, and that ‘there can be no high level of prosperity and jobs in this country or in any other country until international trade is restored and expanded’. The conference was viewed as the economic leg of three ‘stages’ toward victory and the winning of the peace, the other two being military and diplomatic. The organizers also expressly intended that the meeting was non-governmental and represented only ‘world business, not world politics’, the first of its kind during the war. Invitations were sent to ­‘businessmen-in-exile’ from Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Greece, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland and Yugoslavia, as well as the newly liberated French and Italians. However, despite its emphasis on inviting practitioners of ‘free enterprise’, the organizing committee also asked that a representative of the USSR be sent given that ‘no survey of world trade could be made’ without Soviet participation. Moscow, which had declined to send delegates to the government-sponsored

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Chicago aviation conference held the previous week, obliged by sending five observers from the Amtorg Trading Corporation.73 In their opening remarks, the principal organizers each underscored the importance of business leaders playing more of a role in establishing peacetime economic harmony between the foremost trading nations ‘upon which a lasting political peace’, Gaylord advised, ‘must be predicated’. ‘In the world of tomorrow’, Johnston of the USCC counseled, ‘business men must be vocal; they play a much larger part in world affairs’, and, according to Eliot Wadsworth of the International Chamber of Commerce, business ‘will be in a position to give advice and counsel to their governments, which inevitably will play an important part in the post-war international economic and trade picture’. Eugene P. Thomas of the National Foreign Trade Council went so far as to pronounce that ‘the delegations present may in reality be a precursor of a world-wide Commercial League of Nations’ and establish there a ‘temporary secretariat’. This was highly ambitious and apparently not an objective shared by Thomas’s co-organizers. But the desire to earnestly rally the enthusiasm of world business on the subject of post-war planning and to inspire its deliberate, organized involvement in the shaping of government policy toward the peace was the overriding message of the conference. So, in terms of content, the gathering was not intended to produce any resolutions, policies or ‘formulate a precise, economic, postwar millennium’, only to establish, through open debate of committee reports written over several days, ‘a realistic survey of the eight principal factors on which nations have disagreed’. These were predetermined by the organizers as being commercial policy, currency relations, investments, new industrialization, transportation and communications, raw materials and foodstuffs, cartels, and ‘private enterprise’. By confronting their main differences in the economic realm and reflecting on possible solutions, the organizers hoped the international business community could take these ideas back to their own countries and influence the various intergovernmental meetings scheduled for the future to bring about a ‘reshaping of government policies’. As the conference record stated: ‘It was nothing less than a preliminary survey of the economic basis of peace. It was a responsible start toward clearing up the tangled war growth of economic confusion so that there may not burst out of it some new dispute’.74 Whatever its motives or claims to success, the conference was taken seriously by the NAM, with a NAM representative on each committee (or ‘section’) dealing with the eight subject areas, overseen by the

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NAM’s George Ray, Jr. It was also a large affair. With up to six delegates present from every continent (of whom many had undergone weeks of arduous travel over dangerous territory), and numerous technical and administrative staff, the conference swelled to nearly four hundred persons, spilling out from the Westchester Club into nearby hotels and the private homes of willing locals. A ‘reception committee’ of some forty US businessmen (seven from the PWC) led by Thomas Watson (International Business Machines), Thomas W. Lamont (J. P. Morgan) and NAM Board member William P. Witherow (and including Nelson Rockefeller, Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs) showed the foreign visitors around ‘famous’ US car, film and tire factories to help them ‘study American industry’. The delegates were also treated to a greeting sent by President Roosevelt which extolled the liberal creed that a post-war expansion of non-discriminatory world trade ‘free of excessive barriers and restraints’ was ‘essential to the economic welfare and to the security of every country’.75 The conference, if nothing else, was a powerful show of force of American business. It was an unprecedented, audacious and not a little conceited (the war was not yet over after all) ‘private enterprise’ response to the ‘big government’ restructuring of the post-war order. It was also further evidence that the NAM had embraced an internationalist philosophy close to that of the liberals, which at the very least recognized the centrality of the US in organizing the post-war world economy. It was a version of internationalism that was also being steadily accepted by leading Republicans as the end of the war drew closer and the true potential for US commercial expansion was realized. This included firebrand Old Guard conservative Senator Robert Taft, who, unlike ‘one world’ liberals, favored a ‘legalistic’ approach to world order (like that under the League of Nations), which permitted a minimal rather than extensive engagement of US power in post-war world affairs.76 This ‘cautious internationalism’ rejected the abrogation of American independence that conservatives felt was implied in the Hullian plan for the creation of multilateral international agencies. But the ‘free trade’ aspirations of Hull, which opened the potential for a vast expansion of US exports, now steadily allied the Democratic Secretary of State ‘inadvertently and uncomprehendingly with much of American business’.77 In that sense, the gathering was instructive of the level of accord among international business over the broad contours, if not all the details, of the emerging post-war economic order as indicated at the

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recent intergovernmental meetings at Bretton Woods and Dumbarton Oaks (see next chapter). In general, at the conference there was strong support for the worldwide restoration and expansion of free, private enterprise as soon as the war emergency subsided, and a ringing endorsement of free and open access to raw materials, foodstuffs and goods under an internationally coordinated regime of liberalized trade, commerce and finance. The size of the conference undoubtedly owed much to the recognition by most of the visitors that the US would occupy the high-ground in any post-war economic arrangement. The NAM later boasted that this conference was the first time an international trade organization was publicly suggested anywhere in the US. The views of the assembled world businessmen were published shortly after in a single collection of ‘final reports’ from each of the eight subject sections of the Conference. The section that debated the ‘commercial policy of nations’ made direct reference to Article VII of the Mutual Aid Agreement which obliged Lend-Lease recipients to offer preferences for US exports after the war in return for their aid. Article VII, which was agreed after bitter negotiations with the British at the end of 1942, represented for Hull ‘a long step’ toward achieving his goal of persuading the major nations to establish liberal international commerce after the war.78 The businessmen at Rye were in full harmony with the aims of Hull. They recommended the adoption of a ‘Multilateral Trade Convention’ which committed signatory nations to the ‘progressive lowering of tariff barriers, the elimination of quotas and import embargoes, the incorporation of the Most-Favored-Nation-Clause in all commercial treaties, and the abandonment of discriminatory trade practices’, identical language to that contained in Article VII. And the group was acutely aware of the propitious timing of such a policy: ‘governments should seize the opportunity presented at the conclusion of hostilities by the world-wide demand for goods and services to establish through a liberal trade policy conditions which will lay the foundations of a broad and expanding world trade, and by taking action in advance of an expected upward movement in the trade cycle to mitigate many of the difficulties of the transition period from war to peace’. The widespread backing of the business delegates for a global, coordinated framework of capitalist expansion was evidenced in several other section reports. The section dealing with ‘private enterprise’ unsurprisingly arrived at a consensus that this system was ‘the best-known means of bringing about effective world prosperity and employment’. Given the audience, however, dispensation had to be

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granted to those countries where ‘state control of certain enterprises has long existed’, and that in the post-war period under times of ‘extraordinary emergency it may in all wisdom be proper to control the free play of Private Enterprise and initiative’. Still, the participants acknowledged that such a ‘violation’ of free enterprise should be only of limited duration and ‘should never be permitted to annul or be substituted for the basic requirements of a continuing system of Private Enterprise’.79 It was also ‘unanimously’ suggested that in order to ensure the expansion of private enterprise across the world an ‘international organization’ be created that would put business in the driving seat along the lines suggested by the NAM, perhaps using as its ‘nucleus’ the International Chamber of Commerce and the Permanent Council of American Associations of Commerce and Production.80 The International Business Conference was a tour de force by the NAM, further underscoring the organization’s rising stature as a major player in the national discourse about the post-war economy. It also showcased the growing commitment of the NAM to world affairs, an area that received closer scrutiny and policy elaboration by the PWC during 1944. The rekindling of the NAM’s internationalist origins is significant given its ideological opposition to federal intervention in the commercial affairs of private capital. The basic conundrum that faced conservative champions of ‘free trade’ overseas was the requirement this demand placed upon the government, as both the protector and advocate of world market penetration by US commercial interests, to assume a large, even commanding role in economic affairs, such as in negotiating treaties and deals, supplying effective diplomacy, and where necessary applying military force. In short, being ‘big government’. This problem was raised in a long memorandum written by Old Guard conservative Edmond Lincoln in July 1944, which outlined his assessment of what the international trade policy of the US should be after the war. It was a simple, backward looking summary based upon a pre-1939 view of a world organized around the same competing—mostly European— empires. In essence, Lincoln advocated a ‘wait and see’ policy for the US in a post-war period where the Americans would ‘hold most of the cards’ in trade bargaining but would be faced with fierce competition for market share from Britain and the other European powers. In such circumstances Lincoln preferred the US government not to enter hastily into post-war agreements that might ‘give away’ long-term American advantage. Lincoln preferred to ‘keep them “guessing”, rather than

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to let them push us about’, yet somehow ‘try to bring foreign nations more nearly into our own way of thinking, rather than softly to concede, without a struggle…’. Predictably, Lincoln demanded ‘the minimum of Government interference’ in foreign trade matters, as ‘we cannot be half slave and half free. We cannot have Government control of our foreign trade without having more Government control of our internal trade’.81 Lincoln succinctly identified the paradox at the heart of the desire to maintain freedom of action for private capital both at home and overseas without losing the controlling edge that American power will inevitably bring at war’s end. The growth in American responsibility in all matters across the globe was an eventuality fully embraced by liberals who were keen to place private capitalism and the world economy under stricter control through international agencies under US leadership. To be sure, the centrality of the international economy to American domestic prosperity was fully recognized by the PWC and was being espoused by the top echelons of the NAM, as testified in the increasingly internationalist statements of numerous speakers throughout 1943 and 1944. In this regard they all agreed with the liberal business planners and the administration that the expansion of US trade, commerce and investment in the post-war era was a vital post-war objective, and should be organized for immediately and certainly not left to happenstance. Whatever their disposition, the central and necessarily expanded role of government in the task of promoting US corporate power abroad was viewed as inevitable and, with few caveats, was becoming increasingly acceptable for the NAM. In fact, in some areas the NAM actually encouraged the expansion of government involvement in overseas affairs. On 25 October 1944, the NAM Board, acting on the recommendation of the PWC Advisory Group, called for the founding of a ‘Commission on Mandates’ to assume control over the former League of Nations mandates system of dependencies dotted throughout the world. The explicit aim of the new international body was to ensure greater access to the territories of US companies: ‘The best interests of American manufacturers and exporters demand that the area open to the initiative of American business should not suffer further restriction. Any effective plan for promoting the prosperity of the world and hence of ourselves through free access to raw materials, and through opportunities for trade and investment must include dependent peoples as well as those that are self-governing’.82 Increased penetration by US companies of colonial territories was also expected. On 21 November 1944, the PWC submitted to the Board its

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position on post-war colonial trade policy. Compiled by its International Relations Subcommittee, the PWC document was a frank appraisal of America’s stake in establishing and advancing an environment of free and open trade in the colonial world which was stripped of the ideological wrappings associated with liberal tracts arguing the same approach. This was pure, unadulterated economic pragmatism: ‘American industries want a stable postwar world for their economic development’ and the ability ‘to buy, sell, or make investments under favorable conditions in all colonies without discrimination and with as little interference as possible’. In short, the PWC reckoned that the unique conditions of the post-war period, with its war-ravaged territories and disrupted channels of trade, would allow US industrialists to massively improve upon their hitherto small share of pre-war colonial trade. Furthermore, the demand for colonial raw materials would be matched by a rise in colonial demand for finished goods based upon ‘the desire for a higher standard of life’ which was ‘borne out of contact with western civilization’. ‘It is up to American industrialists’, the PWC affirmed, ‘to get a share of this trade’. There would also be ‘fruitful’ investment opportunities for US capital in the more war damaged territories, such as those occupied by Japan. The PWC was confident that, even though it believed the political arrangement of the post-war colonial world would look much the same as that which existed before the war, many colonies were in ‘a stage of transition’ toward ‘greater freedom’ over their affairs. The PWC, however, was in no hurry to speed up the process of decolonization—it considered the British system as ‘excellent’—and preferred instead to allow those who have ‘learned by experience’ to chart their own route toward granting independence, spurning all of talk of ‘internationalization’ of dependencies after the war as commonly voiced by liberals. Rather, the PWC recommended the creation of an ‘International Colonial Advisory Board’ made up of the colonial powers and nations ‘that have a special interest in colonial trade and enterprise’. The Board would be charged ‘to study methods of colonial administration in their bearing on world peace and international trade’, but with only the power to recommend it was hoped that ‘the force of public opinion and the economic advantages’ that would arise would be enough to ensure their adoption. The PWC also advised that ‘special attention’ be paid to the case of Africa, where ‘American influence has increased greatly since the war interfered with former trade relations’. For Africa, the PWC suggested the adoption of what amounted to a version of the Open Door policy followed by the

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Western powers toward Asia in the nineteenth century. It was suggested that an ‘African Charter’ be signed by both colonial and independent states on the continent to maintain a ‘free economic policy’ which would prevent the region from being divided into ‘economic offshoots’ of the colonial powers, and ‘discourage independent states from imposing their own tariff systems which would hamper the free flow of products’.83 It was increasingly clear that taking advantage of post-war dislocations to expand US economic interests overseas was one issue upon which conservatives, moderates and liberals were able to converge as peace dawned. Some in the NAM were willing to actually join ranks with non-conservatives in calling for a wholehearted policy of internationalism for the US after the war. In June 1944, the PWC got sight of a copy of ‘World Trade and Employment’ written by the Advisory Committee on Economics, part of the Committee on International Economic Policy established in cooperation with the moderate-influenced Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.84 NAM heavyweights Crawford, Gaylord and Prentis, Jr., were on the larger Committee on International Economic Policy, and PWC seniors Sargent and NAM economist Emerson P. Schmidt joined James Shotwell, chief of the Carnegie Endowment and recent recruit to the PWC Advisory Board, on the Advisory Committee. They joined with several liberals and moderates from the CED and the National Foreign Trade Council to endorse a document that was entirely liberal internationalist, with support for multilateralism, world economic organization and supreme optimism for post-war prospects. As its summary declared: ‘Employment after the war is an international problem. If adequate and productive work at decent living standards is to be available, world trade must be restored and expanded. The slate will be clean when the war ends. An unprecedented opportunity will occur to organize a trading system which will give scope to enterprise on a basis of equal opportunity’.85 The NAM decided that international trade and ‘its relationship to prosperity’ in the US should be the organizing topic of the third National Post-War Conference, held in New Jersey on 7–8 September 1944.86 In a gathering that included conservatives, moderates, business and labor, according to one observer ‘it was generally accepted that prosperity will not be achieved, here or elsewhere, unless world trade is restored and expanded’.87 Further evidence that the NAM looked to the White House to secure better access to foreign markets after the war came in October 1944, when the NAM took aim at government proposals for settling the

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policy of Lend-Lease aid to its wartime allies. Even though Lend-Lease was designed to end within three months of the armistice, many business leaders worried that the estimated $35–45 billion worth of material supplied under Lend-Lease to prosecute the war, and especially the 20 percent or so of this amount which comprised transportation and industrial equipment with a peacetime value, would transfer upon recipient nations an unfair competitive advantage in post-war markets. In a special foreign trade supplement to NAM News of 21 October 1944, it was pointed out that business had not been formally consulted about this important problem and that even government officials normally disposed to business advice were ‘under strictest orders from above not to give private business any inkling of the exact details of their plans’. In fact, the NAM claimed to have identified the existence of a rift within government circles between those seeking a ‘business-like’ solution to ending ­Lend-Lease and ‘liberals’—the so-called ‘give-away boys’—who favored either a complete writing-off of Lend-Lease accounts or some form of reincarnation of the scheme after the war. ‘Hundreds of thousands of businesses in all countries of the world’, the NAM complained, ‘will be affected, for good or for bad, by the outcome of the struggle between these two groups – not to mention the American taxpayer’. The NAM was squarely for what it reckoned was already ‘fairly generally agreed’ among officials as the most likely solution. This was based upon the US receipt of a hefty quid pro quo in return for a generous approach toward Lend-Lease settlements. This included what the NAM construed as Allied consent to ‘join in an international agreement’ on such things as the elimination of cartels, commodity agreements, the lowering of tariffs, and shipping and aviation rights. Of particular note given the prevailing mood regarding post-war US economic penetration of the colonies, was the insistence that any Lend-Lease settlement with Britain should incorporate the ending of the Imperial Preference system (which favored British trade within the Empire), the practice of which, the NAM believed, had been recently assisted using materials supplied under Lend-Lease, causing ‘considerable irritation in trade circles’.88 It was with some thanks to US business opposition that at the Second Quebec Conference in October 1944 between Roosevelt and Churchill it was agreed that Lend-Lease aid would not be used to ease the British economic conversion at war’s end. Instead, a ‘grant-in-aid’ of around $3 billion would be offered ‘as a suggestion emanating from and sponsored by American business’, although the NAM did not appear to like

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this option either.89 The NAM was cheered by the later announcement of the administration that it was seeking a ‘reasonable, business-like settlement’ over what to do with the $110 million worth of machine tools lend-leased to the British. Under the proposed arrangements, the machine tools would be sold to the British at what the US estimated was their ‘peacetime value’, a value the British complained was twice as high as their own estimate. The American negotiators countered that their calculations were based on the superior design and efficiency of the US tools (some fifteen years ahead of the British), and that ‘a lively demand’ for US tools existed ‘throughout the world’. The NAM appreciated these hardball tactics by the American negotiators, and ‘that the ­“give-away” boys in the FEA [Foreign Economic Administration], the State Department and the White House have lost their fight for a complete write-off of all Lend-Lease’.90 The firm line of the NAM toward the settlement of Lend-Lease was also revealing of the limits of convergence between the corporate conservatives and others on foreign economic policy, such as the liberal ‘give-away boys’. On the desire to reach the post-war liberalization of international trade all business planners were only more or less united. The unapologetically self-interested posture of the NAM, and of conservatives in general, was in contrast with the less ideologically crude presentations of the liberals and moderates, which favored a generous approach to foreign partners to secure their support for wider and longer-term American aims. This variance among the business planners over the degree of internationalism and its practical application would widen as the countdown to peace began. The annual meeting in December 1944, labeled the War and Reconversion Congress of American Industry, was more concerned with international matters than with the technical aspects of the transition. This may be partially explained by the fact that two major planks of the reconversion process, contract settlement and liquidation of ­government-owned property, had been legislated to the satisfaction of the NAM. After months of sustained vigilance and cautious optimism, it was apparent that the interests of private industry were uppermost in the reconversion process, a fact borne out by the close adherence of the reconversion agencies to the recommendations of the Baruch report. The main government bodies dealing with these areas came in force to the meeting to provide a ‘one-package information service’ for manufacturers. The Surplus War Properties Administration and the Office of

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Contract Settlement, along with their subordinate agencies from the likes of the Army, the Navy, the Foreign Economic Administration and the Treasury Department, supplied an exhibit and personnel to field queries from businessmen on the fields ‘most troubling’ manufacturers.91 Businesses were urged to ‘sell-sell-sell’ and to prepare for a surge in demand when the war ends, as ‘statisticians tell us the mere resumption of prewar volumes will not provide enough jobs nor sustain our ascending scale of living’.92 Even so, a report of business analysts in August 1944 revealed that the reconversion timetable for the most important products reinforced the NAM contention that the transition period, and therefore controls, would last for no more than a year after the end of hostilities.93 The most noteworthy policy initiative to emerge from the annual meeting was, and appropriately so given the primary focus of the NAM throughout the year, the launch by Weisenburger of ‘the most comprehensive national plan of management that has ever been developed in this country’. Under the heading ‘Speak Up, Management!’ the NAM-NIIC public relations machine sought to go one level further in equipping business managers with the information necessary to convince workers of the merits of free enterprise. In this way the NAM could widen the dissemination of its message without relying on being invited to an organized event that might not be as feasible to run or as appealing in some workplaces. Armed with the correct message, managers could initiate meetings with employees whenever it suited them. It was ‘designed to resell America to Americans’, Weisenburger dramatically announced, ‘for the lack of faith in industry has been really a lack of faith in the nation – a faith now partially regained in the crucible of war’. A speaker’s booklet and a NIIC Fact Book were distributed to ‘stimulate’ managers ‘by every means to join the campaign in person’. Weisenburger invited management to ‘Come out talking. Quit being big shots in Who’s Who and become big friends with the public, telling them what’s what’. Weisenburger’s explanation for this approach was extremely candid: Instead of smiling derisively at the politician’s art of pleasing the public, let’s ape it, not down to the surrender of a single principle, but at least let’s doll up our story in salable form, minus the forbidding habiliment of dull economics, so that the taxicab driver and the housewife can see themselves reflected in the mirror of enterprise which you hold up…This nation today

200  C. WHITHAM is face to face with an ideological struggle begun in economic depression and intensified by war. It is about to decide the destiny of its traditional freedoms for generations to come.94

The speaker’s booklet, Speak-Up Management—Tell the “Folks”, supplied an in-depth collection of ‘basic facts about our American Private Enterprise System’ to help managers satisfy an array of potential questions from their employees. Declaring that ‘our free enterprise system and the managers of enterprise are face-to-face with the most serious challenge in their history’, the booklet implored managers to ‘tell and retell the public’ that ‘lasting prosperity lies in our private enterprise system’. To this end, the manager’s task was to provide ‘living, convincing proof’ of the soundness of free enterprise by bringing to the individual firm ‘demonstrations of good motives and good objectives, of real interest in the workers, and genuine concern for the public warfare’. The booklet contained finely crafted answers to the main questions that managers were likely to face, including two of the most discomforting for champions of free enterprise. The first related to the US war production ‘miracle’, an obvious reference point in showcasing the worth of free enterprise and one that ‘should certainly have removed all doubts’ about the reliability of private enterprise to deliver. Still, the booklet tackled the awkward fact that production reached such unparalleled heights thanks to massive government spending by responding that ‘money and orders and wishful thinking do not turn out the weapons of victory. It takes men and machines and managerial “know how” to produce’, and ‘Our American enterprise system…did the job despite a dozen years of depression. It proved its vitality – its competence’. The most strained explanation, and the one which demanded the greatest leap of faith, was reserved for perhaps the most uncomfortable question faced by free enterprisers. To those who might suggest that it was unregulated free enterprise that caused the Great Depression to occur in the first place, it was advanced that new techniques invented since for preventing monetary and credit inflation, applied with ‘intelligence’, could ‘eliminate this depression cause’. All that was needed was a ‘better understanding of the way our economy functions’. Accordingly, ‘depression does not arise out of the way in which the economy is organized; but out of the way in which men act. While some fluctuation of business activity is probably unavoidable, we need never again sink into depression…By the pursuit of

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clearly indicated policies and by the exercise of self-restraint we can avoid depression without sacrificing our free way of life’.95 After years of defensiveness, Weisenburger calculated that the stock of private enterprise was such that it no longer had to dodge the hard questions. The NAM entered the final stretch of the war period in strident mood. The momentum established in 1943 had gathered pace during 1944 in a series of bold initiatives of unprecedented scale for the NAM. At the level of national policy, the NAM approached individual groups, Congress and government to further the interests of private enterprise, which appeared to bear fruit in the mechanisms for reconversion. By the end of the year, most of the important practical questions related to the transition from war to peacetime production had been settled to the satisfaction of American business and, although not guaranteeing the supremacy of private enterprise in the post-war economy, nevertheless removed key governmental obstacles to its performance. As Wilson concluded in his discussion of the surplus property question, the decision to sell-off $15 billion worth of public assets to private concerns—some 20 percent of US manufacturing capacity—was ‘more of a political victory than an economic one’.96 Government was steadily withdrawing from the post-war economic arena allowing, the NAM hoped, the vacuum to be filled by the representatives of private enterprise. The National ­Post-War Conferences were a part of this strategy. With the nation seemingly drifting in a positive direction, there was no incentive for the NAM to alter its key policies, such as on labor, over which it was in combative mood. Furthermore, as the war had made plain, considerations about the post-war era extended well beyond purely domestic economics. During 1944, various important questions about the peacetime international role of the US in the political, economic and military realm were being asked by a growing number of people. Hence the focus of the PWC during 1944 was primarily that of demarcating America’s place in the new post-war international order. The Second Report registered the NAM’s support for a loose variant of a liberalized post-war economic arrangement, and put the NAM ‘on record’ for supporting a ‘world organization’ and an ‘international board of trade’.97 The International Business Conference signaled the NAM’s intention to rally world business around the flag of free enterprise in any post-war settlement. The PWC issued four reports in 1944 dedicated to foreign economic policy covering colonial trade, the control of mandates, overseas investments and international taxation.98 There is no evidence to explain

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why the PWC did not submit an annual report for 1944. Certainly, at the policy level, the PWC was quiet in comparison with its first two years, offering only the odd embellishment of positions laid out in its Second Report. It is likely, therefore, that a decision was made that no annual report was necessary as nothing substantially had changed and the general stance of the NAM on many post-war matters, especially on the reconversion, was established. Regardless, the NAM was able to deliver a show of force, in the workplace, the boardrooms, and in Washington on an exceptional scale, moving the organization ‘out from the shadows’ of political obscurity to national relevance. The NAM sought to convert the momentum of the last two years into meaningful influence in the final months of the conflict. It was time to take the offensive.

Notes









1. The phrase was used by Blum, V Was for Victory, p. 234. 2. Federal management of the war effort was generally regarded as ­wanting. As Sherry wrote: ‘No one agency or individual except FDR himself ever controlled the vast apparatus of economic mobilization’; see Sherry, In the Shadow of War, p. 70. 3. William L. O’Neill, A Democracy at War: America’s Fight at Home and Abroad in World War II (New York: Free Press, 1993), p. 393. Also, corporate profits after taxes had risen by more than two-thirds of their 1940 level; see LaFeber et al., The American Century, p. 5. 4. Figures from Klein, A Call to Arms, p. 676. 5. Waddell, The War Against the New Deal, p. 131 and pp. 212–122. 6.  Covered by Koistinen, Arsenal of World War II, pp. 299–300; and Wilson, Creative Destruction, pp. 243–244 and p. 250. The US government spent $20 billion on manufacturing facilities and machinery during the war, more than double that invested by the private sector (p. 62). 7. That included the Emergency Price Control Act and the Wage and Salary Stabilization Act (both 30 June 1944), the most denigrated by corporate conservatives. Others were the First War Powers Act of 1941 (due to expire 6 months after war or earlier if Congress/President saw fit); Second War Powers Act of 1942 (December 1944 or earlier); Public Law 274 (Requisition Act, expired 30 June 1943); Public Law 829 (Requisition Act, expired 30 June 1944); Selective Training and Service Act of 1940 (15 May 1945 or 6 months after war ends); and the Soldiers and Sailors Civil Relief Act of 1940 (15 May 1945); from ‘Termination Dates of Major War Control Bills’, 13 March 1943, 289/I. See also plans

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for reconversion for 1943–1944 in Vatter, The US Economy in World War II, pp. 84–85. 8. From Foreword to Industry’s View on Postwar Problems, 31 March 1944, 288/I. 9. NAM Press Service, ‘NAM Postwar Planning Head asks Parties to Declare for Enterprise if Government won’t’, 21 June 1943, 288/I. 10. Mentioned in NAM News, 26 February 1944, 208/I. 11. Mentioned in ‘NAM and International Relations’, p. 25, 76/I. 12. Publications of the TCF and NPA numbered the tens of thousands by 1944. For example, the most successful TCF release, The Road We Are Travelling (1944) by Stuart Chase, reached 30,000 copies in one year alone at the cost of one dollar; see Whitham, Rise of the Corporate Moderates, p. 121. Numerous figures for the other groups are in the same book. 13. The author found no other explanation for that decision. 14. See Industry’s View on Postwar Problems, 31 March 1944, 288/I. 15.  Postwar Distribution of Goods and Services: From the Second Report of the Postwar Committee, March 1944, 288/I. 16. ‘What’s Ahead: Spring 1944’ (leaflet), 224/XVI. 17. Sound International Relations: from the Second Report of the Postwar Committee, March 1944, 288/I. The sections on the World Court, settlement of post-war claims and Lend-Lease contained much technical discussion. The TCF and the NPA had both published on the centrality of international economic relations by 1944; for list see Whitham, Rise of the Corporate Moderates, p. 197. 18. Phillips reckoned that the Second Report would have been ‘more favourably viewed’ in London if it had suggested a practical means for solving Britain’s fundamental post-war problem of raising its dollar exchange; see Phillips to Gaylord, 15 March 1944, 288/I. The NAM appeared well aware of the predilections of British industry and its anxiety over the country’s post-war trade prospects: see ‘Extract from February 1944 Report of the International Trade Policy Committee of the Federation of British Industries’; and ‘Comment in the London Economist of February 1944 on the recent committee report of the Federation of British Industries’, both in 288/I. 19.  All listed in ‘Proposed Subjects to be considered by 1944 Postwar Committee’, 24 March 1944; and ‘Activities of Postwar Committee’, 17 April 1944, both in 288/I. 20. Ibid., ‘Proposed Subjects to be considered by 1944 Postwar Committee’. 21. ‘Comparison of Baruch Report and NAM Views’, 28 February 1944, 288/I.

204  C. WHITHAM 22.  ‘How the National Postwar Conference Was Launched’, 23 February 1944; and NAM News: ‘Postwar Session’s aims held—Result: Conference to Continue’, 19 February 1944, both in 208/XV. 23. NAM News: ‘Postwar Preparation’, 15 January 1944, 288/I. 24. ‘The Inside Story: How the National Postwar Conference Was Launched’, February 1944, 208/XV. 25. From NAM News: ‘Postwar Preparation’, 7 February 1945, 293/I. 26. The original sixteen were the NAM, USCC, CED, CIO, AFL, National Foreign Trade Council, American Bankers Association, Investment Bankers Association of America, National Council of Farmer Cooperatives, American Farm Bureau Federation, Association of American Railroads, Aeronautical Chamber of Commerce of America, Rotary International, American Legion, National Grange, and Kiwanis International; see ‘List of Members of Organization Committee of National Postwar Conference’, circa February 1944, 208/XV. 27.  See ‘Memorandum to Organizations Participating in Atlantic City Postwar Conference’, 3 February 1944; and ‘Agenda, 18 February 1944’, both in 208/XV. 28. The rest of this sentence was undecipherable (this is an approximate translation from hard to interpret writing). It was taken from brief handwritten notes on several speakers at the back of the official handbook supplied by the NAM for all the delegates to the Atlantic City Conference, 18–19 February 1944, 208/XV. There is no mention of Watt’s outburst in the main history of the AFL during the war, only that the conference conclusions were ‘typically conservative’ but ‘meshed’ with the post-war objectives of the AFL on full employment, social security and housing; Andrew E. Kersten, Labor’s Home Front: The American Federation of Labor During World War II (New York: New York University Press, 2009), p. 209. The CIO’s contribution to the conferences is not even mentioned in the major history of the organization, Lichtenstein’s Labor’s War at Home. 29.  ‘How the National Postwar Conference Was Launched’, 23 February 1944; NAM News: ‘Postwar Session’s Aims held—Result: Conference to Continue’, 19 February 1944; and ‘Statement Approved by National Postwar Conference’, 18–19 February 1944, all in 208/XV. 30.  NAM News: ‘Postwar Preparation’, 24 June 1944, 200/I. 31.  ‘National Postwar Conference: St. Moritz Hotel, New York, 19 May 1944’, 208/XV. 32. See Hugh O’Connor (Public Relations Advisor to the Conference) to Sargent, 17 January 1945, 208/XV. 33. ‘Reconversion Rule by Congress’, New York Times, 21 May 1944, copy in 288/I.



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34. ‘National Postwar Conference: Press Statement, 19 May 1944’, 208/XV. 35. From NAM News, 27 May 1944, quoted in Gable, ‘NAM: Influential Lobby or Kiss of Death?’ p. 265. 36. The conferences were held in Atlanta, Boston, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, Portland, St. Louis, Salt Lake City, San Francisco and Seattle; see ‘Interpreting Free Enterprise to Grassroots America: A Summary of NIIC Activities’, circa early 1945, 845/III. A ‘proceedings’ of each conference was published in book form. 37. ‘Conference on the Subject of “What Can Industry Contribute to a Better America after the War”’, NIIC pamphlet, circa 1944, p. 4, 843/III. See also guidance pamphlet in 218/XVI. 38. Ibid., pp. 5–17. 39. ‘The Problem of the Postwar Transition: Background Material’, NIIC Leaflet, 2 February 1944, 288/I. Much of the leaflet was a simplified version of the post-war mantra now emanating from all channels of the NAM head office, which asserted confidently that educators ‘stoutly’ opposed federal control over their projects, that ‘practically every element of American society now shares the conviction that competition is a necessary and desirable part of our economic life’, and government should withdraw from the economic sphere as quickly as possible after the war to allow ‘a freer economy for our postwar world’. 40. From ‘Interpreting Free Enterprise to Grassroots America: A Summary of NIIC Activities’, circa early 1945, p. 11, 845/III. 41. Ibid. Also ‘Companies which have held “Soldiers of Production” rallies, 2 July 1943–1 December 1944’, 845/III. For images of early rallies see pamphlet ‘Soldiers of Production’, 1943, 847/III. Some companies, such as Boeing, Kaiser and DuPont, rallied multiple times. 42. Figures in NAM: Achievement for Industry in the Year of Victory, 1945 Annual Report, p. 9, 225/XVI. 43. From ‘Interpreting Free Enterprise to Grassroots America’ and ‘The NIIC Program in Action’. 44. Ibid., ‘The NIIC Program in Action’. 45. See Fones-Wolf, ‘Corporations and Radio Broadcasting, 1934–1954’, p. 233. 46. Figures from Winkler, Home Front USA, p. 42. 47. See ‘Interpreting Free Enterprise to Grassroots America’ and ‘The NIIC Program in Action’. Also ‘Plan of Distribution for the NIIC Film “Three to be Served”’, circa June 1944, 847/III. A press release can be found in 208/XV. 48. ‘Discussion Guide to be used with the film “Three to be Served”’, circa 1944, 208/XV.

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49. From ‘Interpreting Free Enterprise to Grassroots America’ and ‘The NIIC Program in Action’. 50. See Whitham, Rise of the Corporate Moderates, pp. 120, 124 and 106 respectively. The TCF and NPA booklets were released in November 1943, the CED in June 1944. 51.  ‘A Brand New Postwar Program: Introducing Industry Looks to the Future’, circa 1944, 209/XV. For stations that agreed to air the talks, the NIIC offered free promotion throughout the NAM membership and their employees. Other speakers listed were Amory Houghton, Cloud Wampler, Melvin Baker, Harry Bullis, and John Zinsser. 52.  From introduction to ‘Producing for Victory—Preparing for Peace’, Chicago Executive Conference (agenda), 25 May 1944, 288/I. Crawford, Gaylord, Sykes and Robinson were speakers. 53.  ‘Proposed Round Tables on Economic Objectives: Management Lays the Course for Peacetime Prosperity’, 27 July 1944, 200/I. Round tables were scheduled for Rochester, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Indianapolis and Detroit in September 1944, and Houston, Birmingham, Atlanta, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Hartford, Providence, New York and Chicago in October 1944. Others on the Committee were Marvin Bower, Colman O’Shaughnessy, F. Sparre, R. P. Healy, Joseph O. Allina, T. L. Briggs (business counselor), William H. Ingersoll and P. W. Meyeringh. 54. Quotation from NAM Press Service, 31 January 1944, 288/I. The first Guide to Internal Organization for Corporation Postwar Planning offered a step-by-step program based upon the collected experiences of over 350 manufacturers. The Guides that followed were Guide to Postwar Sales Planning; Guide to Postwar Product Development; Guide to Cost Study in Corporation Postwar Planning; and Guide to Postwar Corporate Financial Planning. Copies in 209/XV. 55. ‘Report of Meeting of Business Economists called by the Chamber of Commerce of the USA’, 28 March 1944, in The Papers of Alexander Sachs, Correspondence File, Box  15 (‘Conference of Business Economists’), Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, Hyde Park, USA. Johnston’s full address was published as ‘Economists and the Economy’, The Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 52, No. 2 (June 1944), pp. 160–163. The other NAM members were Henry Arthur, W. W. Cumberland, Murray Shields, Bradford Smith, Rufus Tucker and Charles E. Young; see ‘List from memorandum circulated to Conference members on tenth anniversary of its formation, 24 June 1954’, same box. 56. ‘Postwar Job-Making’, speech before CED, 11 April 1944; and NAM Press Service, 11 April 1944, both in 288/I. 57. ‘Free Enterprise in the Postwar Period’, address by Robert Gaylord before Postwar Forum of AFL, 13 April 1944, 288/I. See also NAM Press

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Service, 13 April 1944, same box. Gaylord’s attendance is not mentioned in Kersten’s discussion of the forum, only the AFL’s attack on Eric Johnston (USCC) for his ‘reactionary’, pro-free enterprise speech; see Kersten, Labor’s Home Front, pp. 206–209. 58. The Senate committee was led by Democratic Senator Walter F. George (Georgia). 59.  Members were Jere Cooper (TN), Francis E. Walter (PA), Orville Zimmerman (MO), Jerry Voorhis (CA), John R. Murdock (AZ), Walter A. Lynch (NY), Thomas J. O’Brien (IL), John E. Fogarty (RI), Eugene Worley (TX), Hamilton Fish (NY), Charles L. Gifford (MA), B. Carroll Reece (TN), Richard J. Welch (CA), Charles A. Wolverton (NJ), Clifford R. Hope (KS), Jesse P. Wolcott (MI), and Charles S. Dewey (IL). Other consultants were Vergil D. Reed, C. A. Sinkiewicz, and T. C. Yarnall. 60.  Quoted in Randall Bennett Woods, A Changing of the Guard: ­Anglo-American Relations, 1941–1946 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), p. 159. 61. NAM Press Service, 18 April 1944, 288/I. 62.  Crawford’s address is in ‘Hearings before the Special Committee on ­Post-War Economic Policy and Planning’ (GPO, 1944), copy in Box 40, Folder 922, Crawford Papers, WRHS. 63.  An official transcript of Crawford’s address is in Box 5, Folder 136, Crawford Papers, WRHS. 64.  NAM Press Service, 28 April 1944, 288/I. Also text of ‘Statement to Senate Small Business Committee on Postwar Problems of Small Business, by Noel Sargent’, 28 April 1944, in same box. 65. From ‘NAM and International Relations’, p. 27, 76/I. 66. From NAM Press Service, 4 May 1944, 288/I. 67. NAM News: ‘Postwar Preparation’, 24 June 1944, 200/I. 68.  ‘NAM and International Relations’, p. 28, 76/I. They met with the Indian representatives again in 1945, 1946, 1947 and 1948. 69. ‘Extract from Fortune Management Poll’, 1 May 1944, 288/I. The second highest group was ‘a local community committee’ with 18.1 percent. 70. The State Department asked, for instance: ‘What features of foreign patent trade market commercial company laws are found in practice to create the greatest difficulty to American industries in foreign trade?’, with specific reference to Latin America, the Far East, Europe, the Soviet Union, and ‘colonial dependencies’; see Memorandum from Haley, 9 June 1944, 287/I. 71. ‘Proposal of a Suggested Platform for Political Parties in 1944’, 14 June 1944, 287/I. A draft of 1 June 1944 (little altered) can be found in the same box. There is also a near identical version dated 6 July 1944 in 200/I.

208  C. WHITHAM 72. Quoted in Wilson, Creative Destruction, p. 254. 73. ‘The Story of the International Business Conference, 10–18 November 1944’, 81/I. 74. Ibid. 75. Ibid. 76. Explained in Blum, V Was for Victory, pp. 272–273. 77. Ibid., p. 309. 78. See Cordell Hull, The Memoirs of Cordell Hull: Volume Two (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1948), pp. 1151–1153. For Hull, Article VII laid the ‘foundation’ for US post-war economic planning. 79.  Final Reports of the International Business Conference (IBC, 1944), 194/ XII. A large ‘addendum’ was attached to the ‘Private Enterprise’ report from American George W. Wolf that underscored US primacy in conducting free enterprise. 80. Ibid. The section that reported on ‘Raw Materials and Foodstuffs’ also came out strongly in favor of multilateralism: ‘in the general interests of world trade, the aim should be to make the elimination of trade barriers and of all discrimination, a cardinal point of national and international policies’. The group that discussed ‘Encouragement and Protection of Investments’ generally endorsed the recent proposal at Bretton Woods— then in its infancy—for an International Bank for Reconstruction and Development. 81.  ‘Outline of Suggested General Post-War Foreign Trade Policy of the United States Government, by Edmond E. Lincoln’, 31 July 1944, 288/I. 82. From ‘Proposed Setup of a Commission on Mandates (as approved by the Board of Directors, 25 October 1944)’, 288/I. In October 1944, the PWC Advisory Group was H. B. Arthur, I. F. Baker, D. H. Bellamore, Mitchell B. Carroll, W. W. Cumberland, G. W. Fennebresque, Manley O. Hudson, Ellsworth Huntington, Howard Huston, Donald S. Morrison, Joseph E. Pogue, George W. Ray, James H. Robbins, James T. Shotwell (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace), Edgar W. Smith, Samuel Van Valkenburg and F. Cecil Baker. 83. ‘Postwar Colonial Trade Policy: As Approved by Postwar Committee for Submission to NAM Board of Directors’, 21 November 1944, 288/I. 84. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace was established in 1910 to push for the abolition of war and was a loud advocate of a post-war world organization. 85. ‘World Trade and Employment: Report from the Advisory Committee on Economics’, 28 June 1944, 294/I. Other signatories were Robert L. Gulick, Robert D. Calkins (CED), Alexander V. Dye (NFTC), Calvin B. Hoover (CED), Wesley Mitchell, Ralph Barton Perry, and John H. Williams. The larger Committee included Will Clayton (CED), Paul Hoffman (CED), and Eric Johnston (USCC).

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86.  The agenda topic was decided ‘after considerable discussion’ by the organizing committee of seven led by NAM’s Fuller with Sargent and Dye. It was decided that, to allow free discussion ‘on controversial topics in the midst of a political campaign’, no press releases would be issued for this conference; see ‘Memorandum covering meeting held 28th June, New York City to plan agenda for National Postwar Conference’, 208/ XV. The final agenda and delegate list are in same box. 87. Wilbert Willard, President of the Bankers Association for Foreign Trade. His ‘observations’ are in 208/XV. Unfortunately, no conclusions from this conference were present in the archives. In his paper to the conference, Calvin B. Hoover (CED) was convinced that manufactures, of great importance for US export trade, were ‘likely to be in heavy demand, during the postwar period’ by the advanced and newly industrializing nations; see ‘Manufactures in our Foreign Trade: Submitted by Calvin B. Hoover, representing the CED’, 208/XV. 88.  NAM News on Foreign Trade, 21 October 1944, 199/I; see also NAM Press Service, 23 October 1944, same box. 89. NAM Press Service, 27 November 1944, 199/I. The press release covered an article on that topic in NAM News. 90. NAM Press Service, 13 November 1944, 288/I. 91. Announced by NAM Press Service, 14 November 1944, 288/I. 92. NAM Press Service, ‘Planning for Postwar Markets: Address by Howard Blood’, 9 December 1944, 288/I. 93. From United Business Service Special Report, 28 August 1944, quoted in ‘“Soldiers of Production” Plan: Fall 1944–Spring 1945’, 847/III. The categories were (Immediately) air transport, aluminum, brewing and distilling, chemicals, cotton textiles, drugs, electric irons, farm machinery, foods, glass, magnesium, paints and varnish, paper, petroleum products, plastic, rail equipment, rayon and nylon, shoes, tires and tubes, trucks, woolen goods; (Within 3 months) sporting arms, auto parts, floor coverings, furniture, copper, lead products, jewelry, metal containers, metal housewares, radios and parts, steel, stoves; (Within 3–6 months) automobiles, building materials, electric refrigerators, office equipment, vacuum cleaners, washing machines; (More than 6 months) aircraft, air conditioning, shipbuilding (pleasure craft), small electric motors, and tin. 94. ‘Speak Up, Management! An Address by Walter B. Weisenburger before the War and Reconversion Congress of American Industry’, 7 December 1944, 844/III. 95. All from Speak Up Management—Tell the “Folks”, NAM (December 1944), 845/III. Understandably, the booklet offered the familiar NAM line with no variation on such matters as labor relations and government regulation.

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96. Wilson, Creative Destruction, p. 255. Most of the government-owned plant was sold to the major military contractors, but Wilson added that federal anti-monopoly policies prevented further concentration of ‘big business’; see p. 261. 97. ‘NAM and International Relations’, p. 25, 76/I. 98. They were ‘Principles Governing Foreign Investments’; ‘Proposed Set-Up of a Commission of Mandates’; ‘Postwar Colonial Trade Policy’; and ‘International Double Taxation’.

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Image 1  Advertisement for ‘A Better America’ program in NAM News, 18 December 1943 (Crawford Papers, Western Reserve Historical Society)

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Image 2  From pamphlet ‘Your Plant and Soldiers of Production’, 1943 (NAM Records, Hagley Museum and Library)

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Image 3  From booklet ‘Interpreting Free Enterprise to Grassroots America’ by NIIC, 1944 (NAM Records, Hagley Museum and Library)

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Image 4  From pamphlet ‘NAM at Work on the Pacific Coast, 1944’ (Crawford Papers, Western Reserve Historical Society)

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Image 5  NAM Board Chairman Frederick Crawford (right) inspecting battlefield reclaimed US rifle in France, November 1944 (Crawford Family Photographs, Western Reserve Historical Society)

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Image 6  American industrialists with General Patton at Nancy, France, November 1944. Left to right: Brig. Gen. Browning, Duncan Fraser, Charles Kendrick, Stuart Cramer, Lt. Gen. George Patton, S. E. Skinner, Frederick Crawford (Chairman of the Board, NAM), and Clarence Stoll (Crawford Family Photographs, Western Reserve Historical Society)

CHAPTER 7

On the Offensive, 1945

The year 1945 is a hallmark because it is the year in which industrial management forsook the defense and went on the offense. (Ira Mosher, NAM President, December 1945)

The return of Roosevelt to the White House for a record fourth time in November 1944 denied the executive to the Republican Party yet again but otherwise altered naught the political balance of the country. Even though Democrats still held majorities in both the House and the Senate, the defection of the Southern Democrats to the side of Republicans on many issues ensured that the ‘conservative coalition’ retained its grip on Congress. As the final year of the war opened political business in Washington picked up much where it had left off. The 1944 election after all, as Blum wrote, ‘was only an episode in the long continuum of the wartime national mood’.1 In his slimmest victory yet, compromise still served as the president’s best ally in maintaining a steady ship as the war entered its final critical stages. The resignation after eleven years of Cordell Hull at the State Department left a big hole that Roosevelt filled with business-friendly appointments like new Secretary of State Edward Stettinius, Jr., and his assistant secretaries William L. Clayton and Nelson Rockefeller. Liberal diehard Henry Wallace replaced conservative Jesse Jones at the Commerce Department, and although Congress failed to prevent his confirmation it was able to neuter the power of Wallace by removing the lending capacity of the department.2 © The Author(s) 2020 C. Whitham, Corporate Conservatives Go to War, Palgrave Studies in American Economic History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43908-8_7

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Relations between business and government were also strained at the end of 1944 over the pace of the reconversion. The rapid advance of the Allies through Western Europe after June 1944 naturally hastened the transition to peacetime production, but popular expectations that the war would be over by Christmas were dashed when the Allied forces met stiff resistance on the approaches to Germany. Roosevelt sided with the military who argued the reconversion process should be slowed to keep their forces adequately supplied, a decision that worried military suppliers anxious to avoid losing any competitive edge in having their reconversion timetable delayed.3 To try and win business over, the War Department arranged for a handful of industrialists to inspect the battlefront themselves. Crawford and one other Board member, Stuart W. Cramer (Cramerton Mills), together with four other corporate executives conducted a six-day tour of the Western Front near Aachen, France, in November–December 1944. They inspected supply installations and witnessed life at the front line in the soggy conditions of winter and learned first-hand how quickly the materials of war were being depleted in what had become a new war of attrition after the swift Allied advances that followed D-Day. The exercise worked, and in a press conference hastily convened just before they returned to the US, Crawford said he ‘deplored’ the optimism about the war prevalent in America since the Normandy landings, and spoke for the party when he declared that each of them ‘would try to impress on management and labor alike that the war, far from being over, had entered a new and more difficult phase’. Sherrod Skinner (General Motors) stated plainly what the service chiefs wanted to hear: ‘all talk of reconversion post-war planning has to be put aside until we can give the boys everything they need to do the job’.4 The momentary alignment of the NAM with the administration’s policy on delaying the reconversion did not lessen its resolve to face-down any resurgence of the New Deal. The NAM, in league with outraged Congressional conservatives, began its own year-long battle of attrition at the start of 1945 to vanquish the liberal-backed ‘full employment’ bill sponsored by Senator James E. Murray (Montana), which if passed would establish the principle of federal responsibility in providing employment after the war to ease the transition, if necessary using deficit-spending. The issue of post-war unemployment played heav­ ily in the 1944 election, with so many workers, in some areas as much as nine out of ten, being involved in war work. The NAM denounced the Murray Bill as a program of ‘government guaranteed’ jobs, but,

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in a reversal of its habit of returning only negativistic opposition to initiatives it disliked, put forward an alternative ‘Full Employment – Plus’ idea which emphasized production over employment and was ‘based on optimism and confidence in the American system of enterprise’ to provide jobs, not government.5 The NAM claimed that it ‘spearheaded’ the successful opposition to the Bill which, after more than a year of mauling by conservatives, was passed as the Employment Act in February 1946. A mere shell of the original submission, the term ‘full’ was removed and the commitment of the Act to ‘foster and promote free private enterprise’ inserted. A Council of Economic Advisers was created to assist the president in assessments of employment levels, which for some liberals at least established the principle that ensuring employment was an executive function. Still, most New Dealers thought the Act had been rendered meaningless.6 The death of the mighty Roosevelt in April 1945 did nothing in the short term to alter the basic contours of the US political and economic scene. The war still needed to be concluded, and beyond its main instruments the reconversion was in need of further refinement. His replacement, Harry S. Truman, was to an extent an unknown quantity. He was a New Dealer who believed it was government’s responsibility to resolve social and economic problems, but was a fiscal conservative who cherished a balanced budget and admired business people but not big corporations. And his three-year experience as head of the Congressional committee to oversee war contracts, which most people judged as being run quite fairly, familiarized Truman with the US economy.7 Whatever the character and expertise of the man, Truman was gravely handicapped by the failure of the Roosevelt administration to lay solid plans for the reconversion.8 The industrial phase of the transition peaked before the German surrender in May 1945, and all war contracts were terminated just weeks before the collapse of Imperial Japan. Initially this was good news for employment and the stability of business, all of which was helped by the infusion of millions of dollars from the ‘GI Bill’ which kept some veterans out of the job market with government loans for education or to start their own business. However, by the end of the year nearly all the civilian war agencies had closed shop, and demobilization of the millions of veterans gathered alarming pace. As the seemingly ­out-of-control transition charged forward and the brief ‘honeymoon’ period he enjoyed evaporated as the fighting came to a dramatic close in August 1945, Truman was faced with contending demands from labor and from

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business over how the spoils of victory would be disseminated. Industrial unrest came to blight his early years at the helm.9 The NAM entered 1945 ready to take the offensive. After all, there was no question that the spirit of free enterprise had been revitalized in the US. If the recent surge in stock prices was anything to go by, investors had every expectation that the wartime prosperity would live on.10 But was their conviction strong enough to withstand the turmoil of an unraveling world war? And how far had Americans really traveled in support of free enterprise? The economic realities of the transition from war to peace forced the NAM, along with all post-war planners, to confront what had until now been merely educated guesses about how the ­post-war world would look. And it was a very congested field. A November 1944 Fortune article claimed that one hundred and ninety-seven separate organizations (158 non-governmental) were ‘at work on the brave new world’, not counting the numerous business managements engaged in post-war planning for their firm.11 The pace of developments in the closing months of the war demanded the attention of business planners in areas of both national and international relevance, bringing clarity and shape to their post-war policies. This process of alignment would involve considerable structural adjustments and ideological questioning for the NAM during 1945 as the organization readied itself for the post-war era. In several areas, NAM policy was tested. Its stance on labor relations was brought into sharp relief in an unexpected clash with the NAM’s erstwhile allies in the USCC. The expected timeline for the expiry of wartime controls and the contours of foreign trade relations also underwent uneasy revision. And the battle over the Bretton Woods proposals, on international trade as well as monetary stabilization, would continue well into the early post-war period. In all these areas, moderates were pitched against Old Guard conservatives in a struggle for the heart of the organization. As we shall see, the policy framework of the NAM, which had been so successfully embellished and heavily transmitted in 1943–1944, would be put under considerable stress in 1945. Since the publication of its post-war manifesto in the Second Report, the NAM had used 1944 to spread its message to managers, workers, legislators and community groups in every significant population center of the nation. In all, during 1944 the NIIC held more than one thousand conferences in communities across the US, large or small, and distributed almost two million pieces of literature on ‘management’s thinking’.12 The performance of its signature program, ‘Soldiers of Production’, was such

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that it was continued into 1945 and was expected to reach two million employees and a radio audience of fifty million by the spring.13 Yet for some this was not enough. Weisenburger, whose effort to moderate the NAM stance had been momentarily boosted under the presidency of Crawford, decided in late 1944 that the organization’s public relations strategy was not working. Despite having a staff of almost two hundred, a budget of $1.7 million and much freely donated advertising space, Weisenburger felt the NAM was lagging behind public opinion, which cherished economic security over abstract appeals to freedom and the near certainty of some pain—however temporary—which constituted much of the NAM’s publicity message. In short, it was becoming increasingly difficult to sell the conservative philosophy to the American public. At the end of 1944, Weisenburger, along with chief of the National Industrial Information Committee, Clifford E. Harrison, made a ­formal move to restructure the public relations machinery of the NAM that would have profound long-term implications for the outlook of the organization. They wanted to avoid the current duplication of effort by merging the NIIC and the NAM public relations efforts to create a single entity that would be controlled by a sub-unit of the NAM executive away from the broader leadership.14 As it stood, NAM publicity emanated from both the Weisenburger-run NAM Public Relations Department and the quasi-independent NIIC, which operated an ‘all-business program’ that incorporated the views of any business interest, not just manufacturers. A single entity that could focus solely on the issues affecting manufacturers and free of interference from the Board was viewed by the public relations experts as a way of keeping hard-line NAM conservatives at bay and allowing Weisenburger et al. to deliver a more effective message to the country. What that message entailed was outlined in their memorandum ‘A New Public Relations Policy for NAM’, in which Weisenburger and Harrison, based upon their findings of the last three years, put their case for reform in the bleakest of terms. They charged that unless the NAM obtained the ‘active support’ of public opinion, it would fail in its fundamental objective to secure and promote a national climate in which business could thrive. Unfortunately for the NAM, public opinion at that time still supported restrictive laws and regulations upon private enterprise, which, if perpetuated, the duo argued, ‘can sap the vitality of the free enterprise system to a point where it will serve the public so

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ineffectually that its very continuance may be in jeopardy’. The public had agreed these ‘unwise’ sanctions upon business, however, not ‘out of any urge toward collectivism’, but because they believed ‘that they would make the free enterprise system function more in the public interest’. It remained, therefore, for the NAM to ‘convince’ the public that free enterprise ‘acknowledges, and has assumed, full responsibility for operating as much in the public interest as in the private interest’. This change in strategy was necessary because previous attempts to depict onerous government regulation of the economy as the slippery road to collectivism had failed since, ‘even if true, that contention cannot be sold’. Attempts to discredit liberalism in this way were either too technical or ‘philosophical’ for the ‘man in the street’ to ‘possibly comprehend and digest it’. Besides, the duo continued, the idea that ‘basic control of economic policy’ rests with the government is ‘permanently established’, and a public relations campaign aimed at unseating this concept ‘is destined to fail’. Rather, the two experts recommended that the NAM, if it was to free business from excessive government controls, ‘must first convince the public that they are entitled to that leadership’. This would require, the pair concluded, the immediate adoption of ‘a vigorous, positive, progressive public relations policy which will emphasize leadership and economic vision’ by publicizing, positively and with the minimum of negativity, the extent of economic planning within industry as ‘evidence of the leadership which industry offers’.15 The qualities of leadership, positivism and ‘vision’ identified by the duo as lacking in the NAM program, and especially that of optimism which had been stressed by Weisenburger on countless occasions, testified to the success of the liberal agenda—however under siege it had been in recent years—in cementing public belief in the ­‘security-blanket’ of regulation. More pointedly, conservatives were failing to win Americans to their vision of the post-war world, which promised prosperity and abundance but clearly not enough guarantees against a slowdown and financial anguish. Americans were simply not willing to make the personal sacrifices that corporate conservatives were asking of them to maintain the ‘freedom’ of private capital. The deductions of Weisenburger and Harrison were also significant for acknowledging, at least for the first recorded instance if not ‘officially’, that government responsibility for national economic policy was now ‘permanent’. ­Post-war planning was therefore crucial to determining just how far that responsibility extended after the reconversion.

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After a year of heightened public relations activity, the scale of which the NAM had never before undertaken, there was obvious frustration among NAM modernizers at the slow return so far on their investment. As the war proceeded to a conclusion, the NAM was still far from occupying a position of decisive influence upon the post-war transition. The ‘flagship’ initiative, the National Post-war Conference, was a good example. Already on its fourth meeting with nothing of substance to show for it, the NAM proposed to elevate the status of the conferences. This decision was taken after another disappointing meeting at Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, on 18–19 January 1945, which gathered under the theme ‘Providing Postwar Jobs’.16 After ‘considerable discussion’ on whether business should be exempt from most if not all forms of taxation, the ‘preponderance of business opinion’ and all of the trade unions (which advocated more taxation of business), managed to agree only that a bland ‘substantial reduction’ of taxes be sought. Though frustrated, the NAM refused to abandon its national showcase. The debate over taxation showed that ‘the diverse segments of the American economy are determined to get along, despite occasional differences and challenges’. The delegates agreed to continue the Post-war Conference series and approved breaking the silence over its proceedings by releasing a public statement and establishing a Committee on Issues to identify and ‘to formulate’ the key subjects raised at the conference. After four groundbreaking yet inconclusive meetings, and with the war about to end, it was time the conference transitioned from talking to action.17 A public relations report of the first year of the Post-War Conference program registered a similar note of impatience with the lack of material progress arising from the meetings. There was nothing concrete upon which to comment about the first four meetings, except to record positively that at least the various organized sections of the US economy were still talking. Despite ‘differences and challenges’ among them, however, the ‘immediate hope’ of the conference program was ‘not unity so much as coherence’. This was at least something, especially as it was felt that ‘the country is in more danger from ignorance of the postwar operations into which we are drifting, than from malice in handling them’.18 The anxieties of Weisenburger and Harrison were borne out by fresh data that showed much of what they argued about the fragility of the public mood toward business was accurate. In early 1945, the NIIC commissioned the New York public relations firm Kenyon Research Corporation to survey a variety of wartime polls taken between 1943

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and 1945 (including one contracted by the NPA), to provide answers to thirteen questions about post-war matters, including ‘What is the public’s attitude towards governmental controls and restrictions in business after the war?’, and ‘is the public sympathetic towards the requirements set down by business in defining a healthy climate to create jobs?’ Unsurprisingly, the survey revealed that the problem of post-war unemployment was ‘foremost’ in the minds of Americans, although more revealing was that they were ‘generally pessimistic’ about the prospects of it being solved. The survey concluded that the American public ‘will turn to that group – industry, labor or government – which holds out the greatest promise of solution’. More alarmingly for business, the survey noted that ‘at the present time’ people favored government to deliver as they showed ‘little confidence’ in industry (and even less for labor), possibly because ‘a large group of people do not believe management’s motives are sincere…putting “property rights” above “human rights”’. However, post-war planning was viewed ‘as evidence of industry’s good motives’ and this fact, it was concluded, offered ‘an opportunity for management to instill confidence in their motives’. In a further glimmer of hope for business, the survey concluded that Americans were generally ‘sympathetic’ to ‘giving business a freer hand’ and ‘believe in the encouragement of private enterprise after the war’, though few understood the complexities involved in financing reconversion, believed industry had made enough cash during the war to carry them through and exhibited a ‘tendency’ to look toward government for solutions.19 Time was fast running out for the NAM to capitalize on its efforts to win the hearts and minds of the American public. The alarm sounded by the public relations chiefs was enough to rouse the NAM grandees to appoint a special ‘task committee’, led by Vice President Cloud Wampler and including Board heavyweights Walter D. Fuller and J. Howard Pew (also on the NIIC Governing Board), and William M. Rand (Monsanto Chemical) and Charles J. Stilwell (Warner and Swasey), to investigate the Weisenburger-Harrison proposals in December 1944. However, the proposed overhaul of the NAM publicity engine was stalled when ­arch-conservatives B. E. Hutchinson (Chrysler Corp), Charles E. Wilson (General Motors) and NIIC Board member S. C. Allyn (National Cash Register), sampled with dismay a booklet for a new campaign devised by the Kenyon advertising agency and sponsored by Harrison. The hardliners balked at the assumptions in the free booklet that ‘everyone should have a job’ and that there would be a ‘growing labor movement’.20

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Moderate voices within the NAM clearly faced dogged opposition from conservative leaders as 1945 dawned and the end of the war drew nearer. It seemed that the NAM leadership needed further convincing of the need to soften its traditional line, at least on the issues of federal intervention and labor policy that were flagged by Weisenburger, and was content to enter the post-war period as resolutely opposed to government regulation of the economy as it was before the war began. But it was not long before the NAM moderates enjoyed a boost thanks to a stern challenge to the legitimacy of the NAM as the true leaders of US industry. The challenge came not from within the NAM, or from the liberal TCF, NPA, or the moderate CED, but from ‘fellow’ corporate conservatives in the USCC. Of all the policies of the NAM which most identified the organization as truly conservative, and for which the NAM had become most celebrated in its dogged pursuit, labor reform was the area least likely to face the moderator’s touch. On labor issues, the NAM had been relatively consistent, with its stance only slightly tempered for the war effort. From the start of the defense build-up after 1939, labor’s right to collective bargaining received only the ‘limited approval’ of the NAM, and not the ‘guarantee’ of those rights. Hence modification of the Wagner Act, as opposed to its complete removal, became the new focus of the NAM.21 Just after Pearl Harbor, the NAM issued its f­our-pronged war production labor policy which aimed to stop all strikes that hindered war production and to guarantee the right of workers not to join a union.22 The NAM stood firm on these issues despite its s­elf-imposed exile from meaningful discussion over war labor policy after the fateful Labor-Management Conference of 1941 and its refusal to join the NWLB. Crawford began a thawing process toward labor by joining the NWLB in 1943 and was supported by fellow enlightened conservative Eric Johnston of the USCC, who in the same year moderated his outlook on labor relations.23 The NAM Industrial Relations Policy Committee reached out in late 1943 to the USCC to explore the ‘possibilities of agreement’ on government labor legislation for the war and beyond, but it was November 1944 before any formal meetings took place. Replacing the hated Wagner Act was a core objective of conservatives since the 1930s. By the time of their third meeting in January 1945, the two groups had agreed to hold a joint conference with leaders from organized labor and to work out ways of rallying support among employers at the community level.24

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The wartime policy of the NAM toward labor was thus essentially unchanged in seeking no advancement in the rights of labor to join unions or to collectively bargain beyond the terms of the NWLB, and in opposing outright the closed shop. The NAM resolve on these policies, however, would come under severe pressure in the early months of 1945. The ensuing drama is worth recounting in detail as it precisely illustrated the ideological crossroads reached by the NAM. With no progress on the joint conference idea or meeting with labor leaders, NAM President Ira Mosher accepted an invitation from Johnston in March 1945 to meet with Philip Murray of the CIO, William Green of the AFL and several other USCC and AFL representatives, for dinner. Mosher was confronted with a ‘Labor-Management Charter’, which the threesome hoped the NAM chief would endorse and present with them to Roosevelt the following day. It seemed to Mosher that he had been ambushed by an unlikely triumvirate of labor leaders and a former conservative ally with whom the NAM had been talking for months about setting up a meeting with labor. Mosher declined to make any commitment at the dinner meeting until he and the NAM executive had properly looked at the document. On analysis, much of the Charter was unobjectionable to the NAM. The CIO/AFL promised to respect the rights of management, oppose the nationalization of industry, comply with the introduction of labor-saving devices and called for a ‘national committee’ of management and labor. The opening passage might well have come straight from a NAM press release: ‘We in management and labor firmly believe that the end of this war will bring the unfolding of a new era based upon a vastly expanding economy and unlimited opportunities for every American. This peacetime goal can only be attained through the united effort of all our people. Today we are united in national defense. Tomorrow, we must be united equally in the national interest’. There was also recognition of the role of foreign trade in ‘stimulating’ the domestic economy, and of the need for ‘expanding world markets’ based on ‘the elimination of any arbitrary and unreasonable practices’. Beyond these declarations, however, the extent of the NAM’s tolerance with the demands of labor was tested over Charter calls to ‘protect the individual against the hazards of unemployment, old age and physical impairments’, which sounded too much like an open-ended commitment for the government to provide unemployment relief, social insurance and welfare schemes. The same wariness was felt over the Charter proviso that the ‘fundamental rights’ of labor to organize and to

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engage in collective bargaining would be guaranteed ‘free from legislative enactments which would interfere with or discourage these objectives’. Such assurances would have ruled out any chances of future legislative assaults on the main pillars of the Wagner Act, a longstanding core objective of the NAM.25 Mosher blamed prior engagements on his inability to meet with the trio until the end of March, but wrote Johnston on 9 March 1945 his intention to submit the draft Charter to the NAM Board meeting on 28 March. In his letter, Mosher suggested that alongside finalizing the draft Charter (the release of which in current form he felt was premature), the USCC and the NAM continue their planning for a joint l­abor-management conference ‘sometime in April or May’, and alongside labor leaders appoint a ‘commission of outstanding national figures in private life’ to study ‘present relationships between labor and management’.26 Eager to present his Charter to the White House, Johnston telephoned Mosher on 13 March 1945 ‘requesting’ he cancel his engagements and join the trio in a meeting with Roosevelt. On 23 March 1945, Mosher wired Johnston apologizing that he could not meet with them as planned on 26 March, adding that he thought ‘you should not wait for us if you believe delays affect your interests’.27 Mosher had therefore offered Johnston an option to proceed with his Charter idea without the NAM. Convinced that Mosher was stalling and would anyway not back the Charter, on 28 March 1945 Johnston, Murray and Green went public with their Charter, unaltered from the 5 March dinner meeting. The NAM now found itself in exactly the position it had tried to avoid: behind events and not in front of them. If the NAM now came out in support of the Charter after showing restraint, it might appear hesitant or weak, and opposition to it risked the NAM being cast even further into the political wilderness as a reactionary diehard.28 The issue of the Charter, which was generally well received across the country, sparked a clash between the moderates and the conservatives in the NAM. Weisenburger, joined by Sargent, a central figure in the postwar operations of the organization, pushed for the NAM leadership to reject its policy of anti-unionism, accept the Charter as it stood and join the committee set-up by Johnston to steer the provisions through Congress.29 As Board member Floyd E. Williamson pointed out using a sporting analogy: ‘We now have a chance to carry the ball instead of running interference’.30 This suggestion was opposed by a hardcore clique around Hutchinson which had coalesced within a hastily convened

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Special Board Committee on Labor-Management Relations on 21 March 1945 to decide on labor policy. It agreed the Charter placed the NAM in a serious predicament, but was convinced it should not be endorsed while it contained recommendations that banished amendments to the Wagner Act. It therefore proposed that Mosher negotiate a revision of the offending articles that would enable the NAM to endorse the Charter and only then join the implementation committee to facilitate the close monitoring, and if need be limiting, of the moderating tendencies of Johnston.31 The NAM executive sided with the hard-liners, and throughout April 1945 Mosher tried in vain to arrange a meeting with Johnston and the labor leaders to straighten out a document which he felt contained ‘certain implications which we are convinced are contrary to the public interest’, but their timings, whether deliberately or not, were never compatible. Johnston appeared in a hurry to ratify his Charter, over which he believed the NAM was being overly cautious. ‘Seems to me’, Johnston last wrote Mosher, ‘that your associates are more disturbed than necessary over the statement of principles because this statement is a beginning and not an end’.32 Despite finally meeting up on 30 April 1945, the refusal of Mosher to agree the Charter or join the proposed joint committee, and the insistence by Johnston that the Charter ‘could not be changed at this time’, meant nothing was achieved beyond setting the date for a further meeting.33 The USCC authorized the un-amended Charter at the beginning of May as did the CIO and the AFL. The outcome of the NAM decision to remain outside of this spell of business-labor activism was predictable isolation. It is difficult to understand how the NAM leadership believed they could persuade the architects of the Charter to bend to their will while remaining outside of the implementation committee. On 24 May 1945, the Board finally resolved it could not endorse the Charter, but in its letter to Johnston refrained from detailing the precise reasons for its rejection to avoid arming the NAM’s enemies, such as pro-labor Senator Murray.34 To avoid further negative publicity, the Board chose to inform members of its decision directly and refrained from issuing a press statement. In his letter to members, Mosher discreetly blamed the lack of cooperation of the USCC, CIO and AFL for the NAM being unable to properly share in framing the Charter before it was declared, and for being unwilling to alter what the threesome had since formally recognized. The vagueness of the Charter wording, the forsaking of ‘corrective legislation’ regarding labor for ‘voluntary agreements’ between conflicting groups, and the

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likelihood that the proposed labor-management committee would carry out nationwide bargaining for all of industry were the principle objections Mosher listed for its rejection.35 The isolation that the NAM had endured during wartime looked set to continue into the post-war era. The concessions to moderation so far made were simply not enough to place the organization anywhere near the driving seat of the country’s economic policy. Even so, as the Charter debate showed, the NAM’s leaders were not willing, or were unable, to let go of their core values about the nature of labor-management relations and the role of government in economic affairs. Their stand was defiant and principled, if no longer shared by other influential sections of America’s political and business class or its public. The ‘free enterprise’ message, as Weisenburger and Harrison had already deduced, was not appealing enough to the wider populace to make any headway against the liberal-moderate offensive which was gathering steam as the war neared its end. Luckily for the NAM, the intransigence of its hierarchy was matched only by that of the AFL, whose leadership latterly decided it could not involve itself in any groupings which included its arch-rivals the CIO. The industrial mobilization had boosted the numbers and the power of both labor organizations, but had also exacerbated sectional differences between the two that originated from their painful split in 1935. The CIO was formed to organize the largely unskilled factory workers that were mostly ignored by the elitist ‘craft’ oriented AFL, a distinction in skill level which assembly-line production increasingly blurred and further stoked their rivalry.36 With the future of the Charter unclear, the NAM was gifted some time to reflect upon what had been a very challenging spell. The NAM had been caught off-guard by the maneuverings of Johnston and the USCC, whose moderate message clearly posed a significant threat to the conservative aims of the NAM. It was now more imperative than ever that the NAM secure leadership of the business community. Mosher and others came to the same realization of Weisenburger and Harrison that if the NAM was to avoid being sidelined on key decisions about the post-war order then it had to adjust to the growing appetite for accommodation among business, labor and government around a compromise form of relations. The moderate challenge—not from the liberal quarter but from the ranks of corporate conservatives—was a decisive moment for the NAM. The fallout from the Charter experience resonated throughout the

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organization. It led to an unprecedented reorganization of the way the NAM conducted its operations and inspired a thorough shift in the general orientation of the organization. However, as will be seen, the reform of the organization had a paradoxical impact on the conduct and scope of its post-war planning. Before this is examined, it is necessary to understand the wider significance of the initiative for the NAM. By a fortunate coincidence, just as the Charter episode unfolded the special committee to examine the Weisenburger-Harrison proposal to renovate the NAM’s image was nearing its conclusion. This allowed a timely moment of reflection for the NAM leadership and better still offered a possible way forward out of the Charter fix. Now, in the wake of the Charter affair, the Wampler committee’s recommendation to accept the scheme to merge the NAM-NIIC publicity apparatus, which had suffered months of delay and uncertainty, was finally granted by the Board on 25 April 1945.37 A new Division of Public Relations would run a program devoted ‘wholeheartedly to NAM policies instead of resigning itself to the compromises that are needed to satisfy n ­ on-manufacturers who might not fully agree with NAM policies’. The NIIC would continue in name only as a fund-raising entity. The content of the new Division would be dedicated to ‘making more and better friends for American business…among all groups of people’, and present ‘the truth concerning free, private, competitive enterprise’. That ‘truth’, Wampler insisted, ‘must be couched in persuasive language, which is to say, that a good “selling job” is a necessity’. Internally, the program would be devoted to furthering in managers ‘an enlightened performance’ along the lines of a ‘Credo for Management’.38 But the Wampler committee went much further than granting Weisenburger his long-awaited publicity overhaul. Of even greater significance was the proposal to reorganize and re-orient the NAM under a new philosophy of simplification and decentralization. This situated domestic industrial policy at the absolute center of NAM’s concerns going forward. Weisenburger would continue in his role as chief administrator for an organization composed of six new divisions: Research and Formulation, Membership Relations, Legislative Relations, Inter-Association Relations, Business Management and Public Relations. Wampler left the top echelons of the NAM—its Board of Directors, Executive and Finance Committee and their Chairmen, and its President and Executive Vice President—unchanged, except for a possible reduction of the membership of the Executive Committee to fifteen.

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A small Public Relations Policy Committee that included Fuller, Pew and Wampler was also established to quicken the response time on all public relations matters between meetings of the Executive Committee.39 The key alterations he advised were to do with rationalizing the investigative and policy work of the NAM, reducing its personnel and devoting more energy to developing the organization at the grass roots. Wampler believed that ‘NAM is attempting to cover too much ground in its committee operations’ and wanted its program to be ‘contracted’. ‘If this is not done’, Wampler counseled, ‘NAM may easily fail – by seeking to be all things to all people – to do outstanding work in the more important areas’. Weisenburger, content that the NAM was now more ‘for itself’, saw these areas as being ‘in the fields that seem more fittingly ours’, such as industrial relations, government finance, government relations and ‘Postwar Industrial subjects’. In these areas, he advised the NAM to conduct ‘a thoroughly impressive job instead of spreading out too thinly’ and to concentrate on ‘our own immediate industrial field’. ‘We find that part of the difficulties of administration arise in trying to take in too much territory on a shoestring set-up’ he contended. ‘To do what we do better and more thoroughly, in a more restricted area of operations, seems to be a wise course to follow’. The Wampler committee viewed with alarm the rapid wartime increase in the numbers of staff working for the NAM, which was accelerating as the war came to a close. The number of NAM staff (including NIIC and the National Industrial Council) had risen from 292 in July 1943 to 464 by December 1944, drawing an annual payroll of more than $1.6 million. From a cost perspective alone, Wampler ventured, this situation was ‘difficult to digest’, but underscored his main point that ‘NAM should have a smaller staff of more competent people’. Much of the existing burden of national promotion, he assumed, was to be undertaken by a willing and well-coached layer of local managers. For Wampler, the ‘overall basic program of NAM (and especially its public relations activities), should be shifted from one that places emphasis upon centralization, to one that places emphasis upon decentralization’. In practical terms, this entailed greater cooperation with and support to state and local groups, trade associations and business groups.40 Thanks to the Wampler reorganization plan, Weisenburger was now administrator of a more streamlined, faster-acting, no-frills organization which he hoped was better able to devise credible, constructive policies and spread a positive image of the NAM to managers and the public that

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would help it succeed in defeating the liberal reformers on key areas of post-war economic policy. That was exactly how Mosher defended the reorganization to members at the end of 1945:The most important decision was to project industrial management into a hard-hitting, constructive force – transforming management from its traditional defensive position of continuously answering the allegations of the collectivists into a progressive, attacking force. Henceforward, NAM’s representation of management will be at its proper station – on the offense – with a direct, positive, constructive approach to every problem that arises. The year 1945 is a hallmark because it is the year in which industrial management forsook the defense and went on the offense.41

The Charter encounter thus had a profound and unexpected effect on the NAM. Rather than compel a reorientation that brought conservatives closer to the moderate center-ground on labor policy, the Charter episode had the effect of stiffening the resolve of the Old Guard in the NAM. This was most obvious in the adoption of a ‘new’ orientation by the NAM toward labor. It took both a negative and a positive form. First, the NAM prepared to undermine supporters of the Charter and ensure it had as much control as possible over the proceedings of the next government-sponsored Labor-Management conference, expected at the end of 1945. This would hopefully lessen the scope for an agreement being reached antithetical to the free-market aims of the NAM. Second, and more significantly, the NAM leadership agreed to a labor relations program that retained the organization’s core objectives but which toneddown the free-market hyperbole of traditional NAM declarations. Taking note of Weisenburger’s characterization of what was needed, the NAM agreed to adopt a more ‘positive’ tone toward labor-management affairs in contrast to the negative approach of the last decade. This was a small, yet significant first for the NAM, but one which left the core policy of the NAM toward weaker labor rights and the closed shop unchanged. It was a step that drew directly from the experience of the post-war planners, who for years had recognized the utility of presenting the future in as favorable and upbeat a fashion as possible. This was acknowledged by the Special Board Committee on L ­ abor-Management Relations created in March 1945. Even though the group rejected the Charter, they committed the NAM to ‘formulating an over-all program to deal positively and realistically with current problems’ in ­labor-management relations.

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The group believed that it was ‘vital’ that the NAM ‘adopt a realistic and positive attitude’ toward labor-management problems and pledged to consult more closely with affiliate trade associations, disseminate more literature and, ‘believing that no further time should be lost in shaping the NAM program’, employ public relations consultants to ‘aid’ the decisions of the Board.42 In an atmosphere of post-war collaboration, a less negative public image became the new pragmatic mechanism whereby the organization hoped to contest for leadership of the business community against the moderate challenge without, it was hoped, compromising its conservative principles.43 Over the remainder of the year, the NAM rolled-out its basic position on labor-management policy in a re-packaged format which placed, according to Workman, ‘the onus of industrial discord on unions for refusing to accept reasonable reforms to protect the public’. The NAM position remained essentially conservative, but with the inclusion of a few well-placed euphemisms, such as the word ‘fair’ when considering revisions of the Wagner Act or ‘public interest’ when referring to the right to strike. Through these minimal concessions to the moderating public relations experts, it was hoped that traditional NAM demands for the recognition of managerial freedoms as well as those of labor would be more positively received.44 The Wampler reorganization had a decisive bearing upon the outlook of the organization, not least its post-war studies. In fact, the restructuring of the PWC was the first to be undertaken. Like in any act of rationalization, there were winners and there were losers. The decision to channel its resources into perfecting its domestic policies and winning the public to its cause inevitably led to a reordering of the NAM research agenda. The rationalization of the NAM’s priorities effectively downgraded any activities not explicitly relevant to the immediate needs of industry, which had a clear impact on the increasingly expansive field of post-war planning. The dense network of post-war committees that were anyhow partly responsible for the surge in NAM personnel inevitably rolled into the cross-hairs of the Wampler committee. As the NAM later admitted, in 1944–1945 the number of committees devoted to the problems of reconversion and post-war affairs ‘was unprecedented in size and scope of activity’.45 But as a very frank memorandum from Weisenburger to Sargent in March 1945 revealed, the reorganizers sought not only a reduction in the scale of its post-war work, but a limit on its ambition: ‘It is not the desire of the Association to build up an

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international activity that will compete in any sense with existing organizations…I believe [committee work] should be confined to the study of top international principles that concern industry, as well as current developments in Washington, on world trade, that would be of interest to manufacturers’. Weisenburger criticized Sargent for spending too much time socializing with foreign businessmen (leftover from the International Business Conference), which he said would be acceptable ‘if we were going to try to function as a major organization in the international field’, but for him was ‘far beyond any activity we want to assume’. Weisenburger noted that some of the international work of the PWC had ‘already been badly misunderstood’ by the NAM hard-liners who would rather these issues were dealt with by others, such as the Latin American Section of the NAM or the International Chamber of Commerce. As Weisenburger concluded:To restate it, I think our participation in this [post-war] committee is the nominal committee type of work without any endeavor to organize for participation in either the inter-Americas or world field in a separate organized sense. My understanding is that the [US] Chamber of Commerce is giving up its activities of this nature entirely in an effort to aid the creation of a strong American Section of the International Chamber of Commerce, and the NAM should be in the same position. I realize your interest and ambition in this direction, but I believe under the circumstances a more limited effort on our part is indicated.46

It was somewhat ironic that the wing of the organization most responsible for introducing the NAM to a more positive way of thinking, and for inventing a new vocabulary of optimism with which to communicate a conservative vision to Americans, was ordered to restrict its operations and lower its aspirations. It was a downgrading of the ‘scientific’ assessment of the post-war field that Crawford had argued was an essential accompaniment to the broader propaganda message of the organization. Post-war affairs were now, it seemed, too much of a distraction for an organization anxious to reassert its conservative credentials at home. After all, international issues raised uncomfortable questions, especially about the role of government in economic affairs, and steered the NAM faithful too close to the shores of the corporate liberals. The minutiae of international affairs were best left to those who welcomed ‘big government’, leaving the NAM free to engage the liberals where

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they felt strongest—domestic matters, the chief, most familiar and most comfortable battleground of the conservatives. Post-war studies were also an area heavily populated by moderates within the NAM. There is no record of Sargent’s response to Weisenburger’s memorandum of March 1945, but it was clear that Sargent, and other leading figures involved in post-war studies, were viewed as dangerously accommodating influences within an organization that was finally trying to ‘right its ship’ after years of soul-searching and indecision.47 The dampening of the liberal-leaning, internationalist voices within the PWC was achieved by moving post-war studies to a place where it could be closely monitored: the very center of the NAM organization. The term ‘post-war’ was dropped, and full NAM committees replaced the branches of the PWC that dealt specifically with domestic areas of the transition period, such as the liquidation of war controls, war contract termination, taxation, and the disposal of government-owned property. To deal with these matters, the NAM created a Reconversion Council (headed by Wason), to coordinate the planning of the twenty-nine standing committees then engaged in various phases of reconversion.48 This left only questions of foreign economic policy and international r­elations, which were dealt with under a new overarching Foreign Trade Policy Committee (FTC) in February 1945. Renamed the Committee on World Trade Policy (CWT) within a few weeks, the realignment of the NAM’s post-war studies toward action on specific proposals that directly affected industry was reflected in the way the CWT was split into four subcommittees which strictly matched the central pillars of the US government’s planned new international economic order, and for which legislation was most likely to be sought. They were International Trade Relations (cartels, trading subsidies, Imperial Preference, commercial arbitration, Reciprocal Trade Agreements legislation), International Financial Relations (currency stabilization, world bank, Export-Import Bank, Lend-Lease), International Cooperation (Dumbarton Oaks proposals, post-war Germany), and International Transportation and Communications (aviation, shipping, subsidies, disposal of US ships, international pipelines).49 The early work of these subcommittees was therefore necessarily dominated by the progress, through Congress or elsewhere, of the various commitments made by the US administration to establish a new structure of world organization around trade, finance, politics and security, principally those made at Bretton Woods concerning economics and trade, and at Dumbarton Oaks regarding international relations. Consequently, the

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various groups had a short life expectancy, lasting only for as long as the legislative journey required. The new ‘post-war’ committees were led and mostly populated by a fresh intake of corporate activists and a sprinkling of personnel left over from the original PWC. Of these, Sargent was the most notable, who managed to stay on as secretary to them all, and former head Sykes (demoted to the Subcommittee on International Cooperation), with Chevalier and Ray, Jr. as continuing members. The CWT was now chaired by Earle W. Webb (Ethyl Corporation) and was informed by a Steering Committee led by Herbert H. Schell (Sidney Blumenthal & Co).50 The CWT was overseen by an Advisory Group, more than half of which was new blood such as Mitchell B. Carroll, a worldrenowned tax expert, but also retained a number of PWC veterans such as Arthur, Bowen, Cumberland, Dye, Huston, Edgar Smith, von Mises and arch-conservative Lincoln.51 The pace of the reconversion naturally limited the scope for deliberation and handed much of the decisionmaking to the Advisory Group.52 The first and most pressing issue before the Advisory Group of the CWT was the plan for an Economic and Social Council which was to be brought up for discussion at the conference to establish the United Nations Organization in June 1945. The PWC had discussed the United Nations after the major nations assembled at Dumbarton Oaks to launch the project in October 1944.53 Sargent had been instructed to prepare a memorandum ‘analyzing NAM previous positions’ on Dumbarton Oaks,54 which showed considerable overlap. The only areas of notable difference—apart from the name ‘United Nations’ which the NAM considered ‘unfortunate’—were over the proposal to establish a new ‘International Court of Justice’ when the NAM preferred to extend the jurisdiction of the existing Permanent Court, and the proposal for an ‘Economic and Social Council’ instead of NAM’s recommendation for an ‘International Board of Trade’, which they believed could act more independently of the politicians and bureaucrats in the United Nations.55 Still, the Advisory Group of the CWT fully endorsed the Economic and Social Council so long as its membership was non-political and business organizations were established under its auspices.56 The Economic and Social Council was an early topic of fascination for the CWT. It was clear that the Council was viewed by the NAM as the primary access point for business groups into the otherwise ­ government-dominated and politics-laden United Nations and

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represented the chief means for exerting business influence upon the organs of higher authority within the new international organization. In this regard, the NAM and their former conservative brethren the USCC were in complete accord.57 The NAM leadership was keen to make a strong impression at the founding meeting of the proposed United Nations Organization scheduled to begin in San Francisco on 25 April, so wanted to be well prepared. The Chairman, Gaylord, and CWT Advisory Group member Cumberland, were the two NAM representatives who, along with several other business organizations were invited by the State Department to join the 42-strong non-governmental wing of the US delegation to San Francisco. The Advisory Group to the CWT devoted two meetings to preparing a document on the proposals for a United Nations, in which the Economic and Social Council featured heavily. The memorandum ‘World Organization’, put together by Sargent, Bowen and Huston, was discussed at length at a joint meeting of the International Cooperation Subcommittee, which was chaired by Edward Riley (General Motors) with members Chevalier and Sykes, and the Advisory Group of the CWT on 6 April 1945.58 The subcommittee and Group members had no issue with the underlying spirit of the new international organization outlined at the Dumbarton Oaks conference in October 1944, designed as it was to maintain peaceful world relations as a basis for world economic prosperity. Only minor ‘improvements’ of the Dumbarton Oaks proposals were therefore suggested. The meeting wanted the ‘basic rights’ of all individuals more specifically ‘declared’ around a set of ‘positive standards’, and there should be no attempt to create a new court to replace the existing Permanent Court of International Justice. However, the bulk of their discussion was devoted to ways of improving the influence of business groups within the proposed Economic and Social Council. As possibly ‘the real peace agency of the world’, the NAM believed the Council, which was to be composed of representatives from eighteen member-states elected from the General Assembly of the proposed United Nations, must be established with care. It must be staffed by individuals with ‘experience in commercial, social, and economic fields’, the meeting ordered, as it ‘will deal with a vast number of conditions which directly affect business and which influence the life of all individuals everywhere’. Further, the subcommittee and the Group demanded that the NAM’s idea for an ‘International Board of Trade’ be affiliated to the Economic and Social Council and that ‘business advisory groups’ be appointed by,

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and incorporated into, the research and decision-making bodies of the Council. International law, problems of colonies, mandates and other strategic areas as well as arms control should all fall under the remit of the new international organization, they determined. The memorandum ‘World Organization’ was forwarded to the CWT Steering Committee and approved on 17 April 1945.59 The recommendations of the CWT, supplementing those of the Second Report, together served as a guide for the NAM delegates at San Francisco.60 At San Francisco, the NAM delegates were very pleased with their intervention. They later claimed that twelve of their thirteen specific recommendations were incorporated into the final United Nations Charter.61 These included mostly uncontroversial items such as a declaration of basic rights of individuals, the registration of treaties, trusteeship for ‘conquered and backward territories’, and the sanctity of sovereign jurisdiction.62 It was important that the NAM now follow up this success by ensuring it had a permanent, official foothold in the new international organization. At the September 1945 meeting of the Advisory Group to the CWT, the Economic and Social Council was the main topic of discussion. The Group demanded that the NAM should have its own ‘liaison representative’ stationed at the headquarters of the Council, ‘regardless’ of whether any other organization had such a privilege. The Group also insisted that the US government representative on the Council not only be of ‘the highest stature’ with an ‘adequate staff of experts’ on social and economic problems, but be considered ‘on a par’ with the US representative on the United Nations Security Council. Accordingly, the Group underscored the importance of the NAM upholding its contacts with the State Department, especially on economic affairs, and Lincoln was asked to approach the State Department with a suggestion that trainee diplomats ‘be given a tour of various business firms prior to taking up their mission’. Overall, the Group emphasized ‘the need for maintaining NAM leadership in this field so that we would be in a similar position to that which we were in at San Francisco – namely, ready to present, not oral, but written memoranda as to industry’s views on important economic international matters’.63 A month later, the Steering Committee of the CWT asked the Board to endorse the recommendations of the Advisory Group on NAM representation on the Economic and Social Council because ‘the [Council] is likely to be one of the most important agencies of the world, and because the NAM is the principal exponent of free enterprise’.64

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By far, the most wide-ranging and complex of the government arrangements for the post-war era related to the proposed international trade and monetary framework. None of these issues were strangers to the NAM. The desirability for some means of achieving currency stabilization after the war had been discussed by the NAM and in both annual reports of the PWC. These positions were reaffirmed during May 1944 when the NAM and the PWC responded to recent advances in the planning of a new monetary regime to be erected at the end of the war. Discussions had been taking place for months between financial experts from over thirty nations and the US regarding the best mechanism to ensure currency stabilization for the improved running of the post-war international economy. The NAM was skeptical of creating a long-term US commitment to an international monetary body and preferred that the function of currency stabilization be undertaken within the scope of an international bank. Proposals so far did not recognize the gold standard, which the NAM favored, and did not insist enough on the maintenance of sound domestic policies by borrowing nations, as the NAM insisted. All these reservations by the conservatives were based on a suspicion of creeping Keynesian influence upon the world economy, which tolerated imbalanced budgets, overspending by governments and short-term interventions by central banks which they believed under­ mined the pure operation of the free economy. The NAM, therefore, wished to insulate the US from such foreign digressions. The Research Department of the NAM had compiled a lengthy critique of the ‘Keynes plan’ for substituting an ‘international clearing house’ for a free exchange market after the war as a means for reducing the level of bilateralism and raising the level of non-discrimination in foreign trade. The NAM believed such a scheme would not favor the US, which enjoyed considerable success using bilateral trading mechanisms (like the Reciprocal Trade Agreement Act) and would enter the proposed clearing house as a debtor nation. The report concluded: ‘Baron Keynes accords the United States the high privilege of playing the role of an international “Santa Claus”, which honor might be impolitely declined by the hardheaded Yankees’.65 The NAM experts clearly enjoyed the seasonal symbolism, which had been introduced by the PWC in September 1942. Keen to ensure its members were correctly informed, the NAM Research Department put together a summary of the opinions of critics of the Keynes-inspired and US ­ government-backed International Monetary Fund (IMF), which it circulated to members in May 1944. The selection

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was mainly composed of those experts who favored a more short-term mechanism for post-war monetary stabilization, such as an International Settlements Bank preferred by the NAM, which allowed for temporary solutions only for the duration of the transition period. The PWC concluded that as it stood the proposed IMF was ‘unsound and should be rejected’.66 On 22 July 1944, the representatives of forty-four nations met at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, to finalize proposals for the post-war architecture of international trade and commerce. After three weeks of detailed negotiations, the US delegation won the agreement of the participants to erect three pillars of a re-born post-war world economy: an International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) to restore sound economies in war-torn areas; an IMF (discussed above) to insulate against currency destabilizations; and an International Trade Organization (ITO) to oversee liberalized, non-discriminatory trade.67 On their return to Washington, American officials encountered a bitter struggle with Congressional conservatives over ratification of the Bretton Woods proposals. The IBRD was uncontentious, as was an ITO scheduled for detailed negotiation as soon as peace returned. The main sticking point for corporate conservatives and American bankers was the proposed IMF, which in the form supported by the administration risked tying the US economy to weak and untrustworthy economies. As earlier, the involvement of Keynes in the negotiations surrounding the IMF only inflamed the suspicions of the conservatives. For its part, the administration, with the war fast coming to a close, wished to avoid any delay in ratifying the proposals painstakingly agreed in July 1944.68 Facing defeat on a central plank of its post-war economic blueprint, the government dispatched Harry Dexter White, Assistant to the Secretary of the Treasury Department, who was centrally involved with Keynes in framing the IMF at Bretton Woods, to win business support for the proposals. His experience with the NAM highlighted the difficulty of this task. The NAM prepared for the Congressional battle over Bretton Woods in the early months of 1945 by consulting the expertise of the CWT. An International Financial Relations Subcommittee of the CWT was convened and examined the proposals at its one and only meeting on 1 March 1945. The chairman was Curtis E. Calder (Electric Bond & Share Co.) and included well-known PWC academic Ray Westerfield (Yale). As ‘special guest’, Harry Dexter White treated the subcommittee to some ‘background information’ about the Bretton Woods proposals

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and fielded questions from the group. The intervention from White was to no avail. After he left, the subcommittee reaffirmed its opposition to the IMF and support for the IBRD, as recommended by the PWC and endorsed by the NAM Board on 5 December 1944.69 This firm stance was reiterated on 20 March 1945 when the CWT offered its first policy recommendation since its formation, an updating of the NAM position on the Bretton Woods proposals. The original statements by the PWC in its reports of 1942 and 1943 only covered the IMF, which the NAM opposed because it did not recognize the gold standard and did not insist on the maintenance of sound domestic policies by borrowing nations. Now, the CWT included a discussion of the proposed IBRD. The CWT statement continued its opposition to the IMF, which it asked Congress to reject, but supported the idea of an IBRD (along with the American Bankers Association and the USCC), if it had bestowed upon it the ‘beneficial’ aspects of the objectionable IMF.70 By way of contrast, White had a better experience when he visited the corporate moderates in the CED. They too voiced reservations about the weaknesses of the IMF, but proposed a compromise solution which allowed for the functions of the IBRD to be augmented (as favored by conservatives and bankers) but at a later date so as not to delay ratification of the IMF. The CED’s position, which was released on 19 March 1945 just as the Bretton Woods proposals neared rejection by Congress,71 helped to cement the organization as the government’s new business ally in Washington. President Truman declared the CED compromise as being ‘determinative’ in securing Congressional support for the proposals, which were ratified on 19 July 1945.72 The battle over Bretton Woods was an opportune test of the extent of conservative influence on post-war policy. It revealed that for the NAM, after three years of building its profile in the business planning debate, it was the voices of moderation that were winning the ear of government and through their openness to compromise were exerting influence over the shape of the post-war economy. The second major topic of concern for the CWT was international trade. As explained earlier, to date the reports of the PWC and others were limited to broad statements of allegiance to the principle of liberalized trade after the war, especially as it was considered so beneficial to US manufacturers. This was underlined by the central Research Department of the NAM in February 1945, whose internal report on ‘Foreign Trade Prospects’ concluded that ‘the opportunities for American exports in the

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postwar period are better than at any other time’, and that the role of the US government would have ‘a great deal to do with the export opportunities of American businessmen’.73 For its part, the US government, along with the other parties at Bretton Woods, made a basic commitment to establishing a mechanism for the international negotiation of trade on a multilateral basis and agreed to finalize the details at a major world economic conference sometime in 1946. In the meantime, on foreign trade the primary focus of US legislators was the settlement of the Lend-Lease program and the continuation of the Reciprocal Trade Agreements scheme born in the 1930s. On the former, the CWT was very business-like in its approach to settling war debts to the US, which it believed was as important an influence on the effective performance of world trade as currency stabilization. All parties were mindful of the harmful effect that debt had upon the international system after World War I. Conservatives in Congress were also fighting to prevent Lend-Lease funds from being used by the administration to assist recipients in their relief or reconstruction efforts.74 Conservatives had consistently argued that recipients of Lend-Lease aid should not be granted dispensation on their debt or be allowed to use American aid to improve their post-war commercial situation. Such reconstruction aid was to be handled in a manner entirely separate from LendLease. The thoughts of the CWT were no different. It argued that the terms of the Lend-Lease agreements, which avoided specifics about the precise manner in which they would be repaid, nevertheless had to be viewed as ‘one step in a complex series of arrangements which have, as their objective, victory in the war and also the orderly arrangement of economic relations among nations in the postwar world’, and carried an obligation on recipients to take ‘actions which are to the advantage of the lender or by refraining from actions which would be to the disadvantage of the lender’. More explicitly, the CWT ordered that where a monetary compensation is declined in favor of payment in kind, then the debtor should agree to ‘refrain from discrimination against American persons, American trade, American investments, and other American property rights and interests, on the basis of reciprocal unconditional most-favored-nation treatment’. And on that basis, in what appeared a calculated reference to the British Empire, the foremost recipient of Lend-Lease, the CWT asked that ‘the United States or its citizens shall have access on equal terms with the debtor and its nationals to raw materials within the territories of the debtor’.75 Again, the business

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hard-headedness of the conservatives was influenced not only by the desire for commercial advancement, but was informed, as it had been all along, by suspicions that the Lend-Lease arrangements might be utilized by the administration to influence reconstruction and further aggrandize the function of the US government at the expense of the private sector. The Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act was due for renewal once again in June 1945, giving the new International Trade Relations Subcommittee of the CWT something to chew over when it met on 16 March 1945. The subcommittee was led by chairman F. L. Hopkinson (Willys-Overland Motors) and included PWC stalwarts Colgate and du Pont.76 Old Guard Republicans in Congress, such as Representatives Bertrand W. Gearhart (California), Harold Knutson (Minnesota), and Daniel L. Reed (New York), were trying to filibuster extension of the Act. The NAM appreciated the importance of foreign trade to the prosperity of the US and always supported the Reciprocal Trade Agreement in principle. They chose not to stand with the conservative Republicans who sought in its abandonment the return of business control over the setting of tariffs. Still, the discussion in the subcommittee uncovered a revival of protectionism among some NAM activists: ‘No one can quarrel with the stated aims of the [RTAA]. On the other hand, we have to maintain the potency of gainful employment in the United States’. It was suggested that the NAM ‘probably should come out for an extension of one year instead of three’, and Hopkinson appointed Colgate, assisted by four others, to consider options and prepare a memorandum on the subject for the subcommittee.77 The Reciprocal Trade Agreements Group, as the subdivision was called, believed that renewal of the Act ‘in some form’ was inevitable given the pressure from the administration and much of Congress beyond the hard-core conservatives. The Group nevertheless concluded that the RTAA, ‘in the light of the existing international, political, and economic situations’, should be renewed for only one more year with no power to change the tariff rate (currently set at a maximum reduction of 50 percent). Hopkinson put these ideas to the Senate Foreign Trade Subcommittee on 18 April 1945, met with leading conservative Senator Robert Taft, and wrote to several Congressmen and Senators.78 The suggestions were incorporated into the recommendations on the RTAA made by the final meeting of the International Trade Relations Subcommittee, which were later ratified by the CWT Steering Committee on 17 April and agreed by the NAM Board on 27 April 1945.79

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The basis for NAM’s newly guarded policy toward the RTAA was amplified by Hopkinson in a long letter to Senator Walter F. George, head of the Senate Finance Committee, in June 1945. Hopkinson alleged that the CWT/NAM recommendations for a limited RTAA were based on anxieties regarding the immediate post-war world economy. Though the NAM was ‘opposed to economic isolationism either for this country or for any other country’, Hopkinson maintained that ‘a commitment beyond that [one year] length of time in a period of world dislocation and economic flux is both unnecessary and unwise. The road ahead has many turns, it is poorly lighted, and lined with entrapments, and every impulse of common sense urges us to tread it warily’. Hopkinson noted that the war in Europe had barely ended and that war in the Pacific still raged, that the country’s major trading partners, such as Britain and Canada, suffered major dislocations in their trade and showed few signs of economic openness, and the large potential markets in China, India, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand possessed either low dollar exchanges or complex ties to the British Empire. ‘It is certainly not our intention’, Hopkinson stressed, ‘to pain[sic] a picture wholly depressing and foreboding. Certainly, the United States has never been so strong, financially, materially, economically, in spirit and in manpower, in comparison with other nations. Debt-ridden, tax-laden, and confused though we are, the gap between our economic might and that of other nations is wider than it ever was’. In fact, Hopkinson continued, ‘war, which brought disaster, may also have brought to our nation the realization that sounder international relationship[sic] must be developed’. Nevertheless, the suggestion of a limited extension of the RTAA was, Hopkinson argued, ‘proof enough of our good will and fair intent’.80 This cautious revision of NAM’s position on renewal of the RTAA, which was traditionally unqualified, jarred with earlier PWC pronouncements about the desire for expanded post-war trade and a liberalized commercial environment led by the US in a new world system. The matter of international trade was too large for one ­subcommittee to investigate, so a special Advisory Group on Specific Foreign Trade Problems was created to advise the International Trade Relations Subcommittee of the CWT. PWC veteran George Ray, Jr., was joined by nine newcomers on the Group.81 Over a short period of time the Group passed judgment on several items that had a bearing on the post-war international trade of the US, such as Lend-Lease, the ­Export-Import Bank

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and the British-US loan request. In general, the Group was extremely business-minded in its approach. At its meeting on 2 August 1945,82 the Advisory Group invited Wayne C. Taylor, formerly Department of Commerce and now President of the Export-Import Bank which was established in 1934 to promote US trade overseas (mainly Latin America). Taylor faced ‘an extended period of questions and answers’ about the status and operations of the Bank. The consensus of the Group, which was later endorsed by the Steering Committee of the CWT, was that the Bank should not provide loans that would be ‘prejudicial to American interests’ in the recipient country, and nor should the loans ‘be used for the purposes of nationalizing private industry’.83 Post-war financing, along with debt settlement like Lend-Lease, was rightly identified by the NAM and all economists as being inextricably linked to the functioning of post-war world trade. American officials in Washington were acutely aware of this relationship and were busy ensuring that their indebted Allies delivered on their contractual obligations. When, in the summer of 1945 the British government asked the US for additional funds the NAM, as indeed all Americans, were greatly interested. In October 1945, the Advisory Group on Specific Foreign Trade Problems discussed a NAM memorandum on the status of the British-US loan talks in Washington. The British, led by Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax and economic advisor John Maynard Keynes, were locked in complex negotiations over their request for a dollar loan or gift to assist the reconstruction of war-torn Britain. The NAM memorandum reported that the figure requested was somewhere in the region of $3–6 billion, likely emerging as a forty or fifty-year loan with an interest rate of around 2.25 percent or higher. The loan negotiations, like all the diplomatic engagements between the Allies as the war ended, were inextricably bound to other outstanding economic matters which the US government wanted settled, such as Lend-Lease obligations, currency restrictions, export licensing controls and tariffs. Many of these issues were being discussed with the aim of finalizing them at an international conference on trade (the ITO) scheduled for 1946. However, as the NAM memorandum recognized, British refusal to lift restrictions in its Sterling Area over dollar transactions and export licenses to US companies, and resistance to lowering its Imperial Preference tariff wall throughout the Empire and Commonwealth for at least the next few years, factored heavily in any discussion with the British over further aid. ‘It is the fear of many Washington representatives of American manufacturers’, the NAM

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reported, ‘that if the British are permitted to maintain their present controls in the sterling area for that length of time, they will be so firmly entrenched that we will experience the greatest difficulty of ever breaking into those markets’.84 In the end, the NAM refrained from adopting an official line on the British-US loan, but did ‘participate’ in meetings with William Clayton, Assistant Secretary of State, and Henry Wallace, Secretary of Commerce, and other government officials on the matter in 1945.85 It is impossible to judge how effective these meetings were, especially as the administration was edging toward a tough line with the British anyway to ensure they would be too financially weak to back-out of the Bretton Woods timeline for convertibility to gold.86 When the negotiations were concluded in December 1945, the terms of the loan followed almost to the letter the requirements listed by the NAM. The British would receive a sum of $3–4 billion (at 2 percent interest over fifty years), in return for a commitment ‘to eliminate discriminations and other trade barriers within the sterling area, reduce empire preferences and American tariffs’, as well as an ‘in principle’ agreement to commit to ‘an international program to control cartels and eliminate trade barriers’.87 Until the leading nations had sat down and agreed the precise framework for establishing their new trade relationship beyond the vague assurances like those listed above, the work of the CWT was naturally limited and provisory. Still, the CWT wanted the NAM to be as p ­ repared for the next world meeting on trade as it was for the San Francisco conference in June. In October 1945, the Steering Committee of the CWT asked the Board to ensure the organization was ‘thoroughly prepared with positions’ on topics to be discussed at the upcoming intergovernmental economic conference, to which subject the ‘careful study’ of the CWT was pledged.88 In early December 1945, the Advisory Group to the CWT had sight of a confidential ‘tentative program’ of the conference when they invited two government officials closely involved in its organization, now scheduled for April 1946, to discuss the meeting. They were Leroy D. Stinebower, Deputy Director of the Office of International Trade Policy within the Department of State, and Francis A. Waring, Special Assistant to the Secretary of Commerce. Nothing of their discussion was recorded, but the NAM was among the first to hear that the administration intended to propose to the UN in June 1946 the formation of an ‘International Trade Organization’.89

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The handling of post-war international affairs by the NAM during 1945 was narrow and mechanical, just as Wampler and Weisenburger designed. Gone were the elaborate, colorful depictions of prosperity and progress that adorned the debates and conclusions of the earlier ­post-war committees. Conjecture was limited, confined by the specific legislation under examination, the pace of which was determined by external forces. For the NAM, the study of the post-war world was becoming an intellectually passive exercise that favored the transparent advancement of the self-interest of its members over the consideration of wider social, political or international obligations and responsibilities. Yet, by the end of the year Weisenburger was still unhappy at the direction of the NAM’s post-war work. In a letter to Gaylord, he admitted that he was unsettled by some of the discussions taking place in the post-war committees and wanted further refining of the area: ‘I am satisfied, however, that we have set our scope too wide, and that we welcome a lot of opportunities to do things that are not part of the picture, and unless I can get it in a prescribed area it will take a lot of time far beyond its value to our members. Consequently, it will more and more come into conflict with existing organizations constituted for that purpose’.90 The short distance the NAM had traveled in reforming its outlook since the war began was apparent in the conclusions of the newly created Research and Formulation Policy Committee assigned with the task of producing a ‘code of objectives’—Wampler’s ‘credo of management’— that would provide an inventory of ‘what NAM believes in, and will work for’. A preliminary draft of 20 September 1945 revealed a list of objectives strewn with conditional phrases that were obviously designed to remove any hint of concession to the moderates. The organization sought only an ‘adequate’ supply of jobs for all and ‘genuine’ labor-management harmony, which included restoring foremen to their ‘rightful place’ as representatives of management. The expansion of international trade that was ‘mutually profitable’ would be achieved, the group argued, by business involvement in the Economic and Social Council of the UN and the encouragement of industrial support for the ‘progressive lowering of tariffs as far as can be justified in terms of national security and national well-being’. The draft advised that the ‘progressive improvement’ of free enterprise would only be ‘facilitated’ in a country that emphasized ‘individual initiative’, promoted ‘incentives and rewards’, and encouraged ‘vigorous competition’ as the primary driver of an economy with ‘clearly-defined laws’ under which the government acted purely as

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an ‘impartial umpire’. ‘In such an environment’, the group concluded, ‘American management can contribute mightily toward transforming “America – the Arsenal of Democracy” into “America – the Dynamo of Peace and Prosperity”’.91 Certainly, there was nothing ‘dynamic’ in this assortment of standardized phrasings of the conservative viewpoint. On the other hand, the NAM was still cautious about its public perception, which had the effect of smoothing the harder edges of its message. After several further weeks of working ‘like the proverbial “dogs”’, and being handed to the Public Relations Policy Committee for more tuning, the ‘code of objectives’ was reduced to a ‘Statement of Principles’. The result was an even less inspiring mix of bland statements about the obvious superiority of free, private enterprise that avoided, no doubt thanks to the sensitive touch of the public relations experts, direct references to provocative topics like labor relations, the supply of jobs, the role of government, international trade or tariffs. As the statement concluded aridly: ‘Even though the war is won, the great issue of our time continues to center around the one word – “FREEDOM”’.92 Another signal of the conservative retrenchment in 1945 related to the burning issue of war controls. The timescale for their lifting as the fighting stopped was a subject of great controversy across the nation. For conservatives, any move to continue controls beyond their wartime utility, as was being suggested by many liberal planners, was viewed as a dangerous impediment on the freedoms of business and were therefore fiercely resisted. For the NAM, converting the economy to a peacetime footing was always about ensuring a speedy and complete withdrawal of government from the post-war landscape, and in no area was that retreat expected to be as complicated as in price control. It was the abandonment of price control that had contributed to the spiraling inflation and economic chaos which followed the last war. Hence, during 1944 the NAM entertained a softening of its position on the deadline for the ending of controls. The PWC had already counseled that the termination date for some war controls would be quite long, but the Board had stipulated a maximum life of twelve months for all controls after hostilities ended. After further examination by the PWC War Controls Subcommittee in May 1944, an ‘Introductory Statement on the Termination of Wartime Controls’ was issued in time for the renewal by Congress on 30 June 1944 of the Office of Price Administration, a regular target of abuse from the NAM. The statement, written after

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consultations with representatives of the WPB, Army and Navy,93 opened with the confession that when it first sat in 1943, the committee was ‘practically unanimous’ that all controls be eliminated at the end of the war, but were now ‘quite unanimous’ that the shift from a ‘controlled’ to a ‘free’ economy would be a ‘disaster’ without temporary regulation of price control. The committee made no further recommendations as to a cut-off date for controls, only that the government agency empowered to transform the US from a ‘scarcity economy’, the OPA—the unwilling ‘czar of profit’—must be carefully scrutinized by business, and especially Congress.94 The conclusions of the War Control Termination Committee formed the basis of a long and frank examination that sought to convince business to accept, albeit reluctantly, the persistence of some short-term government intervention for the reconversion period. It did not offer any new end-dates for controls, but was clearly written to persuade any doubters within the NAM hierarchy of the need to drop any illusions that war controls will, or could, be terminated immediately after the fighting stopped. Circulated in June 1944, ‘The Prospect for a Free Economy’, penned by Hugh O’Connor, a NAM public ­relations staffer assigned to the PWC, was the culmination of the work of more than seventy manufacturers in the three main policy committees of the PWC dealing with transition problems, namely War Control Termination, the Resumption of Civilian Production and Inflation Control. The committees had ‘surveyed the entire field of wartime controls’ to identify the timing and the mechanism whereby such controls would be lifted and a ‘free economy’ returned. The collective estimate was a grim one for conservatives: the American economy had moved away from being free to ‘a startling degree’ and the prospect was only of ‘an uncertain return’. As the author concluded dolefully: ‘For in our war experience we have tasted the fruit of the tree of the controlled economy, we can never again be sure that our free economy will always remain free’. Although the committee-men believed that to continue economic controls ‘beyond the period of necessity’ would be ‘an unwarranted usurpation of power’ by the government, they acknowledged that managing the transition to a civilian economy was an intensely complex and highly contested affair. For this reason, they rejected the calls of the ‘minority’ of businessmen that advocated immediate ending of all controls after hostilities so that the economy might ‘spring back to its normal shape’. Actually, they found that those responsible for managing

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the transition both in government and in business were ‘split down the middle’ on the matter of continuing controls into peacetime. It was noted that despite having the input of seven hundred and fifty industrial advisory committees the WPB was unable to offer a manageable solution, and instead, the report argued, wartime controls were being extended indefinitely by default. They also noted that ‘planners are not lacking in or near these governmental agencies who consider this a providential opportunity to establish some sort of American version of a state economy’.95 The solution put forward by the three committees resonated closely with the wider strategy being pursued by the NAM during 1944: to shift the locus of decision-making about post-war matters away from Washington and into areas where business had easier access. They argued that to ensure that the decision about ending controls was based purely on economic and not political grounds, a new layer of industrial advisory committees should be created like those utilized during the war by the WPB and the OPA. These bodies, outside of government, could then decide the right moment when controls were no longer economically necessary. The authors mentioned organizing these committees in a series of national post-war ‘conferences’ which would ‘really be listened to’ by government and, especially, Congress. Only by removing the ­decision-making about controls away from the politicians—of either hue—would the public be spared from endless bouts of federal regulation.96 The same line on ‘Industry Advisory Boards’ was adopted by the NAM in a joint meeting with the USCC and Congressional officials on 18–19 January 1945 to discuss the Surplus Property Act.97 Within days of the circulation of ‘The Prospect for a Free Economy’, the NAM Board agreed its recommendations and went public with its stark appraisal on the persistence of wartime controls. A supplement to NAM News was devoted to a summary of the forecast of the three PWC committees, although the tenor of their report was simplified. It blamed lingering public fears over a return to depression, the prevalence of liberal government planners, and the threat of inflation as reasons for the likelihood of a more-or-less pervasive presence of economic controls long after the war. However, the smoother the transition, the NAM argued, the less likely such controls would be retained by a nervous public or an over-zealous government.98 The flexibility of the NAM on war controls policy was, however, shortlived, even though it may have indirectly paid off. In July and October

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1945 respectively, the Congress passed the Tax Adjustment Act and the Revenue Act, which together promised a significant post-war tax cut for corporations.99 The Reciprocal Trade Agreement Act was also extended in July, albeit not for one year but for three, but with a revision that allowed Congress the right to maintain high duties on items threatened by overseas competitors.100 Now the door was slammed shut on any open-mindedness over the question of ending price controls. In their testimony before the Congressional ‘Colmer Committee’ hearings on the reconversion in November 1945, Wason and Airey of the NAM Reconversion Council delivered an uncompromising message: ‘The problem of reconversion is the recovery of freedom’. They pleaded to the Committee to eliminate all rationing and price controls by 15 February 1946 at the latest (which would have been six months after the end of the war against Japan). This was the ‘judgment’ of two thousand NAM committeemen, Wason claimed, as they believed ‘industry is now struggling to complete its reconversion’. The NAM representatives also added for good measure a demand for the reestablishment of free collective bargaining and the ending of the closed shop.101 According to the NAM, Wason’s testimony before the Colmer Committee was ‘front page news all over the country’.102 The snap-back to a firmer line on the ending of controls, the reversion to protectionism over the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act, and the restrictions placed upon the examination of post-war international planning, was testament to the retrenchment of the Old Guard in the NAM following the Charter clash and the decision made by Wampler and Weisenburger—who was clearly not a fan of international affairs—to focus more exclusively on the core domestic goals of the organization. It also made sense to press hard for industrial interests while there existed an unusually sympathetic Congress. The increasing fractiousness between key players in the economy—business, labor and government—that was evidenced in the Charter episode, critical issues related to the post-war transition such as price controls, and rising industrial unrest was perceived by the NAM as both a warning of the greater likelihood of federal imposition and an opportunity to establish industrial leadership on the process. An important vehicle to this end, the National Post-war Conference begun in 1944, had so far only highlighted the enormity of this task. Indeed, hopes that with the ending of the war the conferences would finally become meaningful quickly evaporated. The fifth National Post-War Conference, delayed until 27 June 1945 due to the collapse

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of Nazi Germany in May, was the toughest yet. Now that fighting had stopped in the principal theatre of Europe, the topics raised at New York assumed a vital edge. With the heading ‘High-Level Employment through Production and Distribution’, disagreement, mainly between labor and industry, was more pronounced. Conversations about raising wages or increasing investment, the distinction between ‘full’ or ‘high’ employment, where the precise responsibility for increasing employment lay, or the role of government in stabilizing the economy, ended in ‘no agreement’. Some suggested that the groups were actually ‘growing further apart’. Indeed, there were ‘strong pleas for industrial harmony’ from all sides, as Sargent’s outline of the conference optimistically logged, and that ‘while the discussion was heated, from a realistic view the differences were not great’. With no concrete agreement on any subject reached, a desperate suggestion was accepted that the next meeting should ‘attempt to come to a meeting of minds’ on certain of the major national problems which ‘now seriously threaten the stability of our economic, political and social system’.103 The conference system erected by the NAM to replace, or at least influence, the efforts of Washington to induce harmony amongst the key actors in the national economy was clearly failing. This was underscored when Truman moved to bring all parties together in another Labor-Management Conference to discuss the post-war relationship as his predecessor had for the war period in December 1941. Weisenburger immediately declared that the primary organizational task for the NAM was preparing for that conference, ‘the No.1 job before us’.104 After it was formally announced on 17 August 1945, the NAM was asked by President Truman to work with the USCC, CIO and the AFL to set-up an organizing committee for the conference. It was Truman’s hope that the conference would go some way to minimizing the continuation of industrial disputes into the post-war period. This time around, unlike in December 1941, the NAM immediately signed-up: in fact, the NAM pulled out all the stops. It enlisted thirty writers to support a radio campaign run by public relations experts Robert J. Smith Associates,105 sent representatives to meet with officials and commentators of the major stations, doubled its distribution of pro-business news stories to commentators (‘Briefs for Broadcasters’), issued two hundred and forty local radio stations with a recorded segment called ‘Your Business Reporter’, and began training its own radio debaters to tackle forum opponents ­‘bug-eyed with zeal for the Leftist side of the debate’.106 The NIIC canvassed over three hundred

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affiliated employers’ associations (some forty thousand members), and although only sixty-three associations responded the NAM concluded that broad support for its policies was evident.107 To lead the operation to dominate, or if not then demolish, the upcoming Labor-Management Conference, Mosher appointed NAM legal Counsel Raymond S. Smethurst. Together they identified three principle areas upon which the NAM had to exert influence. The first was the way the conference was perceived by the public (primarily that it was not a national collective bargaining arrangement). The second was the selection of business representatives and the content of the conference agenda. Lastly, to ensure success, they believed that this time around, unlike for the 1941 meeting, the NAM would be early and enthusiastic sponsors of the conference. It was a tactic that quickly paid off. In asserting that they and the USCC were the legitimate voices of business, the NAM could insist that all press releases about the conference were screened by representatives of all four organizations invited and that all industry representatives were selected by the NAM and the USCC alone (a task which Roosevelt passed to the BAC in 1941). Furthermore, both the NAM and the USCC would have the power of veto over any decision made by such representatives.108 The NAM arranged meetings of the business delegates two weeks before the conference to ‘indoctrinate’ them on the NAM position, and distributed to each delegate a ‘black book’ of NAM policies on all the issues raised at the conference, which was regularly updated by a team of twenty researchers specially assembled by Smethurst.109 As for the agenda, Smethurst devised a cunning scheme to spoil the chances of reaching agreement at the conference by suggesting that the proceedings be broken-up into smaller committees and by demanding that voting be unanimous or at least consist of a super-majority. This would hamper the likes of Johnston and the Charter supporters in securing overall approval from a fragmented delegation and severely limit the chances of management and labor reaching agreement on much at all. In this plan, the NAM was greatly assisted by the lack of cohesion of its opposition. Both the government and labor were wracked by indecision, incompetence and faction-fighting which promised to assist enormously the task of Smethurst in shaping the conference agenda at the planning meetings in August-September 1945.110 The leverage enjoyed by the NAM was evident when Smethurst successfully torpedoed a plan by corporate moderates to align the

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conference with general acceptance of the Charter. The plan came from the top echelons of the General Electric Corporation, whose leadership comprised members of the NPA, TCF and the CED, and was raised at the planning committee by Charles J. Symington (SymingtonGould Corp), who was acting as the ‘official adviser’ to the Secretary of Commerce at the conference. Symington was a trustee and a keen activist in the NPA.111 The threat of a NAM veto allowed Smethurst to oust the moderates’ proposal and, though he was not allowed to insert revision of the Wagner Act, Smethurst virtually dictated the terms of the conference agenda and structure. All agreed to follow a six-committee format that required a super-majority of fifteen from eighteen delegates to propose policy which received approval only upon the unanimous backing of an oversight grouping of the four main organizations.112 The NAM received a huge return on its investment in the conference. During the three-week gathering which started on 5 November 1945, the industry representatives, as Workman phrased it, ‘appeared unified and statesmanlike’, while the union delegates ‘seemed fractious, selfish, and even unrepresentative’.113 Mosher preached reasonableness in his opening address: ‘we are not here to “meet demands” or to defend a flock of “sacred cows”. On the contrary, we are ready to present to the delegates assembled here a program of sound, constructive proposals covering every item listed on this agenda of the meeting’.114 But, as the NAM calculated, the conference was a messy and confused affair. Four of the six conference committees, including the group looking at the crucial issue of collective bargaining, were unable to agree on a program. What is more, and outside of the control of the NAM, the outbreak of further strikes while the conference sat, at General Motors and of public transport in Washington, DC, helped Congressional conservatives quickly push two anti-strike bills through the House which had been held in abeyance until the LaborManagement Conference had concluded. In this atmosphere, Mosher, assisted by Prentis, Jr., Gaylord and Charles Hook, could stop any last-minute attempts by Johnston to revive the Charter, and prevent the conference from becoming anything that might resemble a vehicle for national collective bargaining—a priority objective for the NAM. After three weeks, the delegates had been unable to make any meaningful progress, and Truman lost faith in the conference idea as a means to prevent industrial unrest and ensure a smooth post-war reconversion.115 By means of this unprecedented level of preparation, the NAM could present itself as ‘constructive’ in feigning support for collective

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bargaining which had no chance of being supported, and portray management as ‘reasonable’ and unions ‘irresponsible’ for not moderating their demands.116 As Mosher later recalled, at the conference the NAM ‘went in PROPOSING instead of OPPOSING. To labor and the public this was revolutionary’. This only increased the stock of the NAM, as ‘the very manner of labor’s unequivocal rejections served to increase the public estimate of management’s position in sincerely seeking remedies’.117 And so, it was with a confident swagger that the NAM convened its Congress of American Industry on 5 December 1945, which coincidentally was its fiftieth annual meeting. Fresh from his successful performance at the Labor-Management Conference, outgoing president Ira Mosher—dubbed ‘the champ’ for his victory there118—told the ‘Golden Anniversary’ gathering to remain positive and to show resilience on key questions, such as labor and tariffs: two ‘hot’ examples of ‘special privilege’, he alleged, which had accrued during the Roosevelt years. Delegates were asked to adopt a program entitled ‘The Economic Background for Social Action’ which outlined the guiding policy of the NAM on labor, fiscal policy and government regulation. ‘In brief’, Mosher explained, ‘the position of labor today is that it has been legally established in the driver’s seat and it is unwilling to give up any of the special privileges involved in this position’. On tariffs, Mosher admitted he was not a ‘free trader’ and wanted tariffs or subsidies to be used to protect US markets against ‘Government-subsidized dumping of foreign products’ and other ‘unfair’ foreign trading practices, and to safeguard industries ‘essential for national defense’. However, ‘in our own self-interest’, Mosher concluded that national policy should be directed to achieve a ‘gradual reduction’ of tariff duties. His rallying call, in tones lifted from the Weisenburger playbook, was that business should develop sound leadership:In order to have and hold the confidence of the American people, the businessmen of the nation must show them that the objectives of management are predominantly in the public’s behalf… We’ve all got to be bigger men, of wider interests and broader understanding of affairs, domestic and international. There is no doubt that the United States has emerged from this war as the greatest power on earth.119

Incoming president, Robert R. Wason, who had flashed moderate tendencies on questions of international economics but who was steadfastly

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opposed to any relaxation of labor policy, spoke in triumphant tones about a future in which ‘America has no limits’: ‘The 19th Century belonged to England’, he proclaimed, ‘the 20th Century belongs to America’. At home, Wason vowed to fight for beneficial business taxes, against inflation, and for a balanced budget. Abroad, Wason acknowledged that the US was ‘the leading power of the world’ and was ‘no longer isolationist’, and pledged to support ‘the broadest possible expansion of foreign commerce’ through the organs of the UN, especially the Economic and Social Council. ‘Our own domestic economy may be vitally affected by international actions taken by the [ESC], and by international economic conferences. Therefore, the NAM must take a leading part, as the principal United States exponent of free enterprise, in careful examination and recommendation upon the major problems of international economic relations’. Furthermore, Wason perceived American economic leadership in terms of example, not charity. American goods should outshine in quality and cost those of its overseas competitors, and he believed private, not government, loans should be extended to ‘sick’ nations only on the condition that they support ‘full production’.120 Wason’s re-fashioned ‘cautious internationalism’ was similar to the conditional, selective brand of national engagement with the international community that had been voiced by leading figures of the Republican Old Guard since 1943. In the version sketched by Mosher and Wason at the Annual Congress, the NAM favored a conditional US membership of the new machinery of world intercourse but as instruments primarily for the promotion of American interests and as a defense against others, with the retention of protective tariffs and other instruments of trade discrimination in a process of gradual liberalization of the international economy as opposed to immediate through the imposition of multilateral agreements. The ‘Golden Anniversary’ Congress ended a year of considerable change for the NAM, both in its approach to combating the advances of labor and government in the workings of the economy, and in its record of success in winning those confrontations. On Capitol Hill, the NAM ‘had one of its busiest and most successful years’, as the mood on reconversion planning favored private enterprise. Congress repealed several tax laws, such as the Excess Profits Tax, Capital Stock Tax and the Declared Value Excess Profits Tax, and lowered the surtax corporation rate, froze Social Security levies (to the existing 1 percent), and reduced the top rate individual income tax. The reductions were small, but for conservatives a positive sign of things to come. A bill supported by the NAM was also passed that brought expenditures of government corporations

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under Congressional control.121 On labor relations, the ultimate test of its credentials, the NAM had rallied opposition to defeat the Murray Bill in a sign that conservatives now formed a significant bloc within the business and political community. By the end of the year, the NAM was confident it had finally convinced Americans that corporate conservatives were reasonable and public-spirited individuals. Their performance at the Labor-Management Conference, thanks to intensive preparation, tactical adroitness and a good deal of fortune, confirmed this was the case. The services of a vast public relations operation were not irrelevant to this outcome, for the Labor-Management Conference or for the wider promotion of the ‘new look’ NAM. This was acknowledged by Mosher in his end of year summary, which held that the consolidation of the NAM and the NIIC (which was not formally dissolved until December 1947) into a ‘close-knit single department’ with the addition of ‘top level staff’, was responsible for NAM’s success at the Labor-Management Conference.122 The public relations activities of the NAM during 1945 were as extensive as they were in the bumper year of 1944. There were seven hundred and eight ‘statements, analyses, and announcements’ to the press, which generated an estimated one hundred thousand articles in newspapers and magazines. The NAM broadcast 1350 radio hours over networks and local stations and supplied ‘Briefs for Broadcasters’ to 821 stations. It also served over five thousand small weekly and daily newspapers (‘hometown’) with a weekly clipsheet named ‘Industrial Press Service’, reaching a ‘potential’ readership, the NAM claimed, of a staggering sixty-nine million people. Over one million booklets were distributed across the US, with by far the largest proportion going to schools (762,247) and colleges (34,939), with industry and commerce (166,318) and miscellaneous groups (95,453) forming the next largest categories, and individuals (11,615), veterans (9752) and libraries (1744) accounting for the remainder.123 In its end of year report, the NIIC affirmed that its ‘aggressive national program’ in 1945 ‘was needed to convince people that only the American brand of competitive enterprise – the same mighty force which backed the victorious Allied armies – could fulfill the promises of peace’. The bulk of the $1.6 million the NIIC received from over seven thousand industrialists during the year was spent on running three hundred and fifty industry-group meetings with farmers, churches and other community ‘opinion molders’ across the US, holding one hundred and seventy-four meetings to thirty-eight thousand foremen, and advertising in five hundred newspapers in forty-eight

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states (and Hawaii) to a total of 36,920,000 readers. In addition, over one hundred thousand booklets were sent to eight hundred thousand schools and colleges and 166,000 to commercial institutions. On radio, the NAM sent 1350 radio hours to the ‘larger networks’, and NAM/ NIIC films had 14,892 showings to an audience of 2,465,908.124 The impact of this widespread publicity drive is difficult to empirically measure. For instance, the ‘Soldiers of Production’ rallies fell well short of their expected targets, and were in fact substantially down from the previous year, with eight hundred and thirty-five rallies before a total audience of only 314,359 people (projected 2 million), and a radio audience of 3.6 million instead of the anticipated fifty million.125 In a year of industrial unrest, it was clear that the appetite of workers for engaging in what was essentially a management forum had tapered off. By contrast, in 1945 an unprecedented surge of over three thousand managers joined the NAM. Membership had risen steadily by roughly one thousand a year during the war, but now stood at over fourteen thousand, double the 1940 figure.126 There can be no doubt that the decision to move onto the offensive as the NAM entered the year contributed to its resilience in facing down the sternest challenges yet to its principles. By the end of 1945, the NAM had withstood the moderate challenge presented by Johnston and others and made a strong bid for leadership of American business with only a minor recasting of its appearance. In this sense, the extent that the organization was actually offensive, that is aggressively p ­ ro-active, was limited to its high-powered assault in the field of public relations. In terms of advancing its policies or achieving influence, the NAM was less forceful than it was unyielding. The clash with the USCC over the Charter proved to be a watershed moment for the NAM. Faced with a crossroads, the NAM leadership rejected moderation and chose the simpler route of re-packaging its policies, as suggested by the public relations crew, rather than fundamentally altering them. The NAM leadership drew the conclusion that it had gone too far and neglected core values. Bread and butter conservative issues were being overlooked, or possibly neglected, in favor of grand visions. The NAM steadied the ship by reigning in the moderate dreamers, who were mostly in the PWC. Post-war studies were truncated, injected with new blood and tightly monitored. The CWT was disbanded at the end of the year.127 It proved to be a fortuitous move. The results of the Labor-Management Conference confirmed the tactics of NAM,

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which looked poised as an organization to enable corporate conservatives a strong say in the negotiation of the country’s labor relations. But it was also clear that the rise in numbers, and the improved fate of the corporate conservatives generally, was not down solely to the unprecedented efforts of the NAM. Wider national currents of a social and political nature were drifting in the direction of the conservatives. This included an increasingly divided labor bureaucracy, a gift of enormous value to American business. If anything, the NAM derived most of its improved status from the movement of external forces, the benefits of which it could tap by virtue of its general inertia. Moderation was rejected in favor of reaffirming conservative values and returning back to basics. In 1945, the Old Guard reasserted control. Unfortunately for the NAM, the dust had yet to settle on the uneven landscape of American society as well as the countless battlefields around the globe. During 1946, the NAM would be forced to revisit many of its ideas and plans about the post-war period as the economic transition abroad and the unfolding political and social backdrop at home produced a series of troublesome realities for corporate conservatives to navigate.

Notes



1. Blum, V was for Victory, p. 299. See also LaFeber et al., The American Century, p. 21. 2. See Blum, V was for Victory, p. 300. 3. Explained by Waddell, The War Against the New Deal, pp. 123–125. 4.  ‘West Front Tour Erases Optimism: Six US Industrialists Say Nation Must Produce Arms and Forego Reconversion’, New York Times, 5 December 1944, copy in Box 43, Folder 1070, Crawford Papers, WRHS. The other three industrialists were Charles Kendrick (Schlage Locks), Duncan Fraser (American Locomotive) and Clarence Stoll (Western Electric). Materials related to the visit are in the same box. Includes pamphlet of Crawford’s account Our New War in Europe: An Informal Report on a Tour of the Western Front, in which Crawford admitted ‘Coming from a complacent and optimistic home front, our little group was shocked and sobered’. That story was repeated in several formats in the following weeks. 5. On the ‘Full Employment Plus’ rejoinder see Mosher speech of December 1945 in opposition to those calling for g ­overnment-guaranteed jobs in Full Production Means Full Employment—Plus: An Address by Ira Mosher (NAM, January 1946), 217/XVI.

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6. From NAM: Achievement for Industry in the Year of Victory, 1945 Annual Report, p. 6, 225/XVI. For a detailed treatment see Stephen K. Bailey, Congress Makes a Law: The Story behind the Employment Act of 1946 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1950). Also Edward S. Flash, Jr., Economic Advice and Presidential Leadership: The Council of Economic Advisers (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965). 7. See Randall B. Woods and Howard Jones, Dawning of the Cold War: The United States’ Quest for Order (London: University of Georgia Press, 1991), pp. 34–35. The ‘Truman Committee’, which ran from 1941–1944, was officially the Senate Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program. For general texts see Alonzo Hamby, Beyond the New Deal: Harry S. Truman and American Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1973). For a short appreciation of Truman’s ‘methodical’ style on entering office see Klein, A Call to Arms, pp. 768–769. 8. Dealt with by Koistinen, Arsenal of World War II, pp. 415–416; 514. 9. On Truman’s reconversion woes see Donald McCoy, The Presidency of Harry S. Truman (Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1984), pp. 52–53; and Sparrow, Warfare State, p. 242. 10. The value of all shares on registered exchanges rose 92 percent between 1945 and 1946; see Robert Higgs, ‘Wartime Prosperity? A Reassessment of the US Economy in the 1940s’, The Journal of Economic History, Vol. 52, No. 1 (March 1992), p. 58. 11. In ‘Information Bulletin for NIIC Staff Speakers’, 29 November 1944, 845/III. 12.  From ‘Interpreting Free Enterprise to Grassroots America’ and ‘The NIIC Program in Action’. 13. ‘“Soldiers of Production” Plan: Fall 1944–Spring 1945’, 847/III. This is a large booklet that contains a detailed procedure for establishing contacts with managers and setting-up rallies. 14. See Workman, ‘Manufacturing Power’, p. 292. 15. From ‘Recommendations Regarding the Integration of NAM and NIIC Public Relations Functions’; and ‘A New Public Relations Policy for NAM’, both 13 November 1944, 844/III. In early December 1944, Harrison complained to Weisenburger about the ‘difficulties of getting a genuine crystallization of our thinking’ about the precise functions and objectives of the NIIC. Harrison identified that the main problem rested with the lack of unanimity over a public relations strategy among the various experts within the NIIC. Although the experts agreed that their primary aim was to ‘sell free enterprise’ and also to champion ‘individualism over stateism’, they all had different ideas about the proper strategy to achieve these aims, which Harrison broke down into five main

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categories: trading on the past accomplishments of free enterprise; presenting a philosophical defense of free enterprise; educating the public on economics; criticizing proposals which violate free enterprise; and encouraging a specific action or impression of a specific legislative objective. To compound the problem, Harrison added, ‘probably no one of our principals adheres strictly to one of these strategies’. Harrison deferred to the wisdom of Weisenburger on whether this matter should be aired elsewhere in the NAM. Weisenburger had argued that to do so was ‘bad salesmanship’, as airing failed tactics of the past would hamper progress in the future. ‘In any event’, Harrison concluded, ‘I shall have eased my conscience and discharged my responsibilities in presenting it to you’; See Harrison memoranda to Weisenburger, 5 and 7 December 1945, 847/III. 16. See ‘Providing Postwar Jobs’ (agenda for Harrisburg), 10 January 1945, 208/XV. 17. ‘Press Release’ from Hugh O’Connor, 19 January 1945; and ‘Digest of discussions at fourth meeting of National Postwar Conference at Harrisburg’, 18–19 January 1945, both in 208/XV. 18.  ‘The First Year of the National Postwar Conference’, by Hugh O’Connor, January 1945, 208/XV. 19. From ‘Digest of Findings of Public Opinion Polls on the Subject of Post-War Problems and Planning’ compiled by Kenyon Research Corporation, New York (circa. 1945), pp. ii–iv, 845/III. The NPA poll was conducted by the National Opinion Research Center. Other polls used included those of Fortune, Gallup, and the Opinion Research Corporation. The questions were ‘What is the primary job confronting the country after the war?’; ‘What is the attitude on post-war employment?’; ‘What does the public think should be done to solve this problem?’; ‘Is the public aware of the post-war planning being done by industry?’; ‘Does the public look with favor upon post-war planning at this time?’; ‘Is the public looking to industry, labor or government to lead in the post-war planning?’; ‘Is post-war planning by industry being interpreted as a promise of post-war jobs?’; ‘What is the attitude of the public toward management’s motives?’; ‘What is the public’s attitude toward re-employment of servicemen?’; ‘What do the people think of wartime manufacturer’s profits?’; and ‘Does the public feel that competition is a good thing for the country?’. 20. Wall, Inventing the “American Way”, pp. 129–130; and Workman, ‘Manufacturing Power’, p. 293. 21. See Gable, ‘NAM: Influential Lobby or Kiss of Death?’, pp. 264–265.

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22.  Listed in Gable, ‘A Political Analysis of an Employers Association’, p. 136. The NAM wanted prohibition of jurisdictional disputes, picketing and boycotts, work permit fees and excessive initiation fees. 23. Johnston crowed that the WPB-sponsored ‘labor-management committees’, which had been set up across the country to ensure smooth wartime production in the major plants, could be maintained in peacetime as ‘American enterprise inherently is a cooperative venture’ and ‘rightly or wrongly, the federal government will continue to inject itself into business, and into the affairs of labor, if there is not self-government in management-labor relations’; see Eric Johnston, ‘Management-Labor Cooperation in Wartime and After’, The Public Opinion Quarterly, Vol. 7, No. 3 (Autumn 1943), p. 364 and pp. 366–367 respectively. 24. These meetings involved the NAM Labor Legislation Steering Group and the USCC Labor Relations Committee; see ‘Chronology of Chamber of Commerce-NAM Contacts Regarding Labor-Management Relations’, circa April 1945, 209/XV. 25. Detailed in Workman, ‘Manufacturing Power’, pp. 295–296. See also Lichtenstein, Labor’s War at Home, pp. 217–218. A text of the ‘New Charter for Labor and Management’, 28 March 1945, is in 201/I. 26. Mosher to Johnston, 9 March 1945, 209/XV. 27.  Details and quotations from ‘Chronology of NAM’s Participation in Management-Labor Charter announced at Washington, DC, on March 28, 1945’, 201/I. 28. After Johnston announced publicly on 28 March that he did not know why the NAM ‘refused’ to be involved in the Charter, Mosher went public with his 9 March letter; see ‘Chronology of NAM’s Participation in Management-Labor Charter’; and Workman, ‘Manufacturing Power’, p. 297. 29.  See Sargent memorandum to Weisenburger, 3 April 1945; and Weisenburger memoranda to Mosher, 3 and 5 April 1945, both in 209/I. As Weisenburger said of the Charter: ‘I can say that the press is almost unanimously critical of our non-participation in the pact which is hailed editorially as the most promising postwar step taken thus far’. 30. Williamson memorandum to Weisenburger, 3 April 1945, 209/XV. 31. See Workman, ‘Manufacturing Power’, p. 298. 32. A record of the telegrams between Mosher and Johnston during April 1945 are in ‘Chronology of Chamber of Commerce-NAM Contacts Regarding Labor-Management Relations’. 33. ‘Memorandum of Points Discussed and Conclusions reached at April 30 Meeting between Messrs. Johnston, Mosher, et al.’, 209/XV. The group agreed to meet again on 11 May 1945; see ‘Minutes of Meeting

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of Representatives of US Chamber of Commerce and the NAM on the Labor-Management Charter’, 11 May 1945, same box. 34. See M. M. Anderson memorandum to Mosher et al., 24 May 1945, 236/XIII, which summed-up the Board meeting and circulated proposed letter to Johnston. 35. See Workman, ‘Manufacturing Power’, p. 299. A copy of Mosher’s letter to members of 11 June 1945 is in 209/XV. 36. By 1945, the CIO was nearly as big as the older AFL; see Winkler, Home Front USA, pp. 21–22. 37. Wampler’s report was completed on 26 March 1945, but was ‘held open for Executive Committee revision’ into April; see Harrison memorandum to NIIC Staff Executive (circa end March 1945), 847/III. 38. Ibid. 39.  Initial ‘technical advisers’ to the PR Policy Committee were Verne Burnett and John W. Hill (of Hill & Knowlton)—‘two of the country’s outstanding public relations counsellors’. Holcombe Parkes was the specialist eventually appointed director of NAM’s post-war public relations; see Harrison memorandum to NIIC Staff Executive (circa end March 1945), 847/III. 40. All from ‘To the Executive Committee of the NAM’, 25 April 1945, 847/III. That was Wampler’s final set of recommendations to the Board on the NAM-NIIC merger and NAM reorganization. The NIIC had begun decentralizing its regional operations as early as September 1944; see ‘Interpreting Free Enterprise to Grassroots America: A Summary of NIIC Activities’, circa early 1945, 845/III. 41. NAM: Achievement for Industry in the Year of Victory, 1945 Annual Report, p. 3, 225/XVI. 42. ‘Special Board Committee on Labor-Management Relations’, 21 March 1945, 236/XIII. 43. See Workman, Manufacturing Power’, pp. 299–300. 44. Workman, ‘Manufacturing Power’, p. 308. Wampler reiterated NAM’s attitude towards labor, as well as fiscal policy and government regulation, at the Golden Anniversary Congress in December 1945; see Three Keys to Industry’s 1946 Job (NAM, 1946), 224/XVI. 45. ‘Significant Highlights’, p. 19, Crawford Papers, WRHS. 46. Weisenburger memorandum to Sargent, 9 March 1945, 76/I. Aldrich was head of the International Chamber of Commerce. 47. Three memoranda between Sargent and Weisenburger on this subject from 25, 26 and 30 October 1945, illustrated the tension that existed between them; see 76/I. 48. Mentioned in preamble to America Has No Limits: Address by Robert W. Wason (NAM, 1946), 223/XVI.

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49.  For membership see lists of 10 October, 7 April and 23 October 1945 respectively for each group in 293/I. A fifth subcommittee on ‘Stockpiling’ was originally suggested, but was terminated before it sat. 50.  Members included Millard Brown, Ray, Jr., Dexter D. Coffin, and R. A. Hummel. 51. Others were Henry B. Balgooyen, D. H. Bellamore, Paul Dietz, G. W. Fennebresque, Heman Greenwood, Huntington, Mahon, Reginald Orcutt, Pogue, Ray Jr., Shotwell, van Valkenburg, Wilbert Ward and S. Riley Williams. From ‘Advisory Group to NAM Committee on World Trade Policy’, 14 June 1945, 294/I. 52. The precise involvement of the subcommittees in decision-making is also obscured by the incomplete record of their meetings in the archives. 53. For a single account see Robert C. Hildebrand, Dumbarton Oaks: The Origins of the United Nations and the Search for Post-War Security (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1990). 54. ‘Minutes of the Postwar Advisory Group’, 20 October 1944, 288/I. 55.  From ‘Comparison of 1944 Dumbarton Oaks and 1943 NAM Proposals’, 30 October 1944, 288/I. 56. ‘Minutes of Advisory Group of NAM Foreign Trade Policy Committee’, 26 February 1945, 293/I. 57. On all aspects of the UN, the NAM was in agreement with the USCC; see ‘United Nation Charter Provisions as Approved by the US Chamber of Commerce’, Report by Harper Sibley (Consultant to US Delegation and Chair of Committee on International Postwar Problems of the USCC), 29 June 1945, copy in 294/I. 58. The memorandum was first presented to the 29 March meeting of the CWT Advisory Group and amended after discussion at its meeting on 6 April 1945. See Sargent to Advisory Group of World Trade Policy Committee, 21 March 1945, 293/I (memorandum attached); and ‘Minutes of Advisory Group to NAM Committee on World Trade Policy’, 6 April 1945, 294/I. Members of the International Cooperation Subcommittee were Mackay, Alline, Bechhold, Bullis, Fletcher, Graves, Houston, Keresey, Orcutt, Ray Jr., Riddle, Robins, Whitman and Zehrlaut. The International Cooperation Subcommittee met once more on 12 April 1945 and with the CWT Advisory Group on 18 October 1945. 59. ‘Minutes of Joint Meeting of International Cooperation Subcommittee and Advisory Group of the NAM Committee on World Trade Policy’, 12 April 1945, 293/I; and ‘Minutes of Steering Committee of CWT’, 17 April 1945, 236/XIII. 60. Noted in ‘NAM and International Relations’, p. 28, 76/I. 61. Ibid.

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62. Listed in NAM: Achievement for Industry in the Year of Victory, p. 7. 63.  ‘Minutes of Advisory Group to NAM Committee on World Trade Policy’, 19 September 1945, 293/I. 64. ‘Minutes of Steering Committee of NAM Committee on World Trade Policy’, 19 October 1945, 293/I. 65. ‘Keynesian Plan for Post-War Monetary Stabilization, Prepared by the Research Department, NAM’, April 1943, 289/I. 66. See ‘A Summary of Plans for International Monetary Stabilization’, by NAM Research Department, circa. May 1944, 288/I; and ‘International Currency Stabilization’, by the PWC, 17 May 1944, and ‘Summary of IMF’, both in same box. Extracts included ones from Herbert Feis, the chief economic adviser to the Department of State, economists Leon Fraser, B. H. Beckhart and Congressman Dewey. 67.  The main texts on that pivotal event are Richard N. Gardner, ­Sterling-Dollar Diplomacy: Anglo-American Collaboration in the Reconstruction of Multilateral Trade (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956); Alfred E. Eckes, Jr., A Search for Solvency: Bretton Woods and the International Monetary System, 1941–1971 (Austin: Texas University Press, 1975); Georg Schild, Bretton Woods and Dumbarton Oaks (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995); and Benn Steil, The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013). 68. A good summary of the IMF controversy can be found in Scott Newton, The Global Economy, 1944–2000: The Limits of Ideology (London: Arnold, 2004), pp. 16–18. 69. See ‘Minutes of International Financial Relations Subcommittee of NAM Committee on Foreign Trade Policy’, 1 March 1945, 293/I. Other members were Zellers, Batts, Boos, Burke, Fiske, Haskell, McMenemy, Schwartz, Zehrlaut and adviser Rufus S. Tucker. 70. ‘Bretton Woods Proposals’, 20 March 1945, 293/I. Attached to Sargent letter to NAM Board, 21 March 1945, same box. Copy also in 289/I. The Board endorsed CWT opposition to the IMF and ‘tabled’ the CWT recommendations on the IBRD; see ‘NAM and International Relations’, p. 27, 76/I. 71. Released as The Bretton Woods Proposals: A Statement on National Policy (CED, 1945). 72. An account of the White/CED meeting and the Truman quote is in Whitham, Rise of the Corporate Moderates, pp. 137–138. The Bretton Woods Bill passed the Senate by 61 votes to 16. 73. ‘Foreign Trade Prospects: Prepared by Research Department of NAM’, February 1945, 294/I. The report added: ‘Judging from newspaper stories and general discussions there appears to be a widespread feeling that

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American export opportunities after this war will be far greater than ever before in American history’. 74. See Blum, V was for Victory, p. 311. 75. ‘Bretton Woods Proposals’, 20 March 1945, 293/I. Attached to Sargent letter to NAM Board, 21 March 1945, same box. The British wanted outright cancellation, but the US wanted some sort of cash or trade compensation. 76.  The large membership included Ackerman, C. E. Adams, Albright, Frederick K. Barbour, Beesemeyer, Benjamin, Broughton, Cable, Converse, Crosby, Flersham, Gaunt, Gifford, Greene, Hoyt, Hummel, Johnson, Kirkpatrick, Larsen, Lazrus, Mallon, Martindale, Marsh, McKenna, Mertes, Mohn, Overmyer, Patch, Pierce, Renton, Riley, Rocca, Salisbury, Spruance, Starr, Stieh, Schell, Thompson, Todd, Turcotte, Simmons, van Walsem, Waite, Wedin, White, Ziebell and Zinsser. From ‘Attendance at March 16th Meeting of Subcommittee on International Trade Relations of NAM Committee on Foreign Trade Policy’, 293/I. 77. From ‘Minutes of International Trade Relations Subcommittee of NAM Committee on World Trade Policy’, 16 March 1945, 294/I. The others were Renton, White, Albright and McKenna. 78. They included Congressman Robert Doughton, Senator Walter George and Senator Claude Pepper. He met Taft on 17 May 1945; see NAM: Achievement for Industry in the Year of Victory, pp. 14–15. 79. See ‘Minutes of Reciprocal Trade Agreements Group of International Trade Relations Subcommittee’, 30 March 1945 (with attachments), 294/I. Also ‘Minutes of Meeting of the International Trade Relations Subcommittee’, 10 April 1945, which approved the Group’s suggestions (same box); and ‘Summary’ and ‘Minutes of Steering Committee of CWT’, 17 April 1945, 236/XIII. The RTA Group first met on 21 March, then 30 March, and lastly 23 April 1945 (no minutes). 80. Hopkinson to George, 1 June 1945, 294/I. 81.  They were I. F. Baker, Balgooyen, Bellamore, Bowen, Crosby, Fennebresque, Gifford, Mahon, Richards and Ward; see members list in ‘NAM Advisory Group on Specific Foreign Trade Problems’, 15 October 1945, 293/I. 82. The Group first met on 18 June; see ‘Minutes of Group on Specific Foreign Trade Problems’, 18 June 1945, 293/I. The Group discussed such items as credit insurance, the aircraft industry, Lend-Lease, and the Export Import Bank. There are no minutes for its second meeting on 11 July 1945. 83. ‘Minutes of Meeting of the NAM Advisory Group on Specific Foreign Trade Problems’, 2 August 1945, 293/I. Endorsed in ‘Minutes of Steering Committee of NAM Committee on World Trade Policy’, 19

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October 1945, 293/I. On Lend-Lease, the Group asked Congress to demand a full breakdown of Lend-Lease materials supplied. 84. ‘Minutes of NAM Advisory Group on Specific Foreign Trade Problems’, 1 October 1945, 293/I. ‘Washington Office Memorandum on Current English-American Discussions’, 17 September 1945, is attached. The Advisory Group met once more on 17 October 1945 (no minutes). 85.  On 11 and 12 October 1945, Sargent, Hopkinson, Schell, Shields, Fletcher and Edgar Smith met with Clayton and Wallace over the loan; see NAM: Achievement for Industry in the Year of Victory, p. 16. Also ‘NAM and International Relations’, p. 30, 76/I. 86. Covered in detail in Woods, A Changing of the Guard, pp. 332–362. 87. As described in ‘Minutes of World Trade Advisory Group’, 12 December 1945, 293/I. 88. ‘Minutes of Steering Committee of NAM Committee on World Trade Policy’, 19 October 1945, 293/I. 89. See ‘Minutes of World Trade Advisory Group’, 12 December 1945. The ‘Program Tentatively Agreed to by the United States and England for International Conference, including Outline of Plan to be submitted by the United States’, 23 November 1945, was attached. 90. Weisenburger to Gaylord, 8 November 1945, 76/I. 91. ‘NAM’s Code of Objectives: Preliminary Draft’, 20 September 1945, 289/I. 92.  Enunciated by Wampler at the Golden Anniversary Congress of December 1945; published in Three Keys to Industry’s 1946 Job. The remainder of the sentence read: ‘All the facts of history show that individual freedom cannot long be maintained except in a nation which embraces an expanding economy, one which continually produces more things for more people. The only system of economic organization that has conclusively demonstrated its ability to provide a continually rising standard of material well-being in an environment of political freedom is a system of free, competitive enterprise, such as that developed in the United States, within the political framework of a representative democracy’. 93.  They were L. R. Boulware (vice-chairman WPB), Brigadier General Frank E. Lowe, Brigadier General Hugh C. Minton (Director Production Division, Army Service Forces and Chairman of the Army Board of Review Passing on Contract Cancellations), and Commander F. Linder (Administrator of Contract Termination for the Navy); see ‘Minutes of War Control Termination Committee’, 4 April 1944, 288/I. No transcripts of the addresses of the government agents were attached.

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94. ‘Introductory Statement on the Termination of Wartime Controls’, 22 May 1944, 288/I. This was based upon an Airey draft of 1 March 1944 (same box). 95. From ‘The Prospect for a Free Economy’, 15 June and 16 June 1944 versions, both in 287/I. 96. A far harsher treatment of war controls, but with no author ascribed, was circulated just days after that of the three committees. It demanded the ceasing of all war controls on the ‘termination of war’, excepting those designed to limit the threat of inflation in the transition period but for no longer than six months after the war. Beyond that single exemption, any continuation of war controls ‘beyond the period of necessity which caused them to be brought into being’, the authors believed, ‘would be economically unsound, dangerous to the liberties of Americans, and an unwarranted usupation[sic] of power’; see ‘War Controls’, 19 June 1944, 287/I. 97. See ‘Minutes of Joint Meeting of USCC Surplus Property Committee and NAM Committee on Disposal of Government-Owned Plants and Materials’, 18–19 January 1945, 236/XIII. Marion Folsom (CED) and members of Congress were present from the Senate Military Affairs Committee and the House Committee on Expenditures in Executive Departments. They were Senators Edwin C. Johnson (Dem), Albert W. Hawkes (Rep), Joseph C. O’Mahoney (Dem), and Congressmen William M. Whittington (Dem), Charles L. Gifford (Rep), Charles A. Halleck (Rep), Clare E. Hoffman (Rep) and Carter Monasco (Dem). 98. See NAM News: ‘Postwar Preparation’, 24 June 1944; and accompanying release by the NAM Press Service, ‘What is the Prospect for a Free Economy? NAM Asks’, 26 June 1944, both in 200/I. 99. The highest marginal corporate rate dropped from 95 to 38 percent, providing a $5.7 billion tax cut. The bitter Congressional fight over the Revenue Act is surveyed in Klein, A Call to Arms, pp. 637–641. 100. Woods, A Changing of the Guard, p. 3. 101. ‘Concluding Remarks of Robert Wason summarizing the testimony of the three witnesses as to NAM’s Reconversion Recommendations before the Special Congressional Committee on Postwar Economic Policy and Planning, 9 November 1945’, 288/I. See also the report of their intervention in NAM News and Editorial Digest (No. 1682), 12 November 1945, 844/III. 102. Mentioned in NAM: Achievement for Industry in the Year of Victory, p. 5. 103. ‘Outline of Discussion at the National Postwar Conference, New York City’, 27–28 June 1945, 208/XV. Conference agenda in same box. Predictably, nothing came out of the sixth meeting at Atlantic City either, which took place in November, very close to the L ­ abor-Management Conference. The

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ESC and the British-US Loan were topics added to the staples of industrial production, employment and taxation. It was unanimously agreed that, although called as a wartime measure and offering nothing in the way of practical solutions of p ­ost-war problems, the national conference still ‘offered a unique opportunity for exchange and testing of opinions without concern as to publicity or commitment’, and would continue under the same name; see Sargent memorandum to National Postwar Conference Participants, 13 November 1945, 208/XV. 104. Weisenburger in his memorandum to Harrison, 1 October 1945, 844/ III. Mosher also called it ‘item #1’ on the NAM agenda: see Mosher letter (to full membership), 19 October 1945, same box. 105. Mentioned by Workman, ‘Manufacturing Power’, p. 312. 106.  Quotation from NAM Annual Report of 1946 in Fones-Wolf, ‘Corporations and Radio Broadcasting, 1934–1954’, p. 244. 107.  Explained by Workman, ‘Manufacturing Power’, p. 308. Mosher also sent a questionnaire to all members prior to the conference: see Mosher’s covering letter, 19 October 1945, 844/I (no questionnaire attached). 108. See Workman, ‘Manufacturing Power’, pp. 307–309. Workman’s remains the best account of the meeting. 109. Ibid., pp. 309–311. ‘Indoctrinate’ quotation was from a NAM member. 110.  All from Workman, ‘Manufacturing Power’, pp. 302–305. Workman blamed in-fighting between the NWLB and the Department of Labor, and between the AFL and CIO, as causes for the disunity; see pp. 304–305. 111. Symington also sat on the Business and International Committees of the NPA. General Electric had a uniquely liberal-leaning management, run by Progressive-era executives Owen Young and Gerard Swope: a posture that changed radically after the strikes of 1946; see Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands, pp. 90–93. 112. See Workman, ‘Manufacturing Power’, pp. 306–307. 113. Ibid., p. 312. 114.  Quoted in ‘Industry’s View on the Labor-Management Conference’, November 1945, 844/III. 115.  See Workman, ‘Manufacturing Power’, pp. 313–315. On the conference’s failure see also Kersten, Labor’s Home Front, p. 220; and McCoy, The Presidency of Harry S. Truman, p. 51. 116.  Workman, ‘Manufacturing Power’, p. 311. Also Lichtenstein, Labor’s War at Home, pp. 220–221. 117. NAM: Achievement for Industry in the Year of Victory, p. 4. 118. Mentioned in a speech by incoming President Wallace Bennett before the Newcomen Society published as The Very Human History of NAM (New York: Newcomen Society, 1949), p. 11.

270  C. WHITHAM 119. Full Production Means Full Employment—Plus: An Address by Ira Mosher (NAM, January 1946), 217/XVI. 120.  America has no Limits: Address by Robert W. Wason (NAM, 1946), 223/ XVI. ESC comments from ‘NAM and International Relations’, p. 33, 76/I. 121. From the end of year report of the NAM Government Finance Group (consisting of the Taxation Committee, Government Spending Committee and Tax Administration Committee); in NAM: Achievement for Industry in the Year of Victory, p. 7. Surtax corporation rate dropped to 38 percent from a three-year high of 40 percent, and the top rate of income tax fell from its all-time high of 94 percent to 86 percent. 122. Ibid., pp. 3–4. 123. Ibid., p. 8. 124. ‘Report on the NAM Public Relations Program (NIIC) and Preview for 1946’ (leaflet), 218/XVI. 125. Figures in NAM: Achievement for Industry in the Year of Victory, p. 9. 126. Figures from ‘NAM Membership—Number and Dues’, 225/XVI. 127.  Most of its subcommittees met just a handful of times during 1945 which limited their ability to offer anything substantive. Much of the decision-making of the CWT fell to its Advisory Board.

CHAPTER 8

Winning the Peace, 1946–1948

Increased trade between the US and other nations would help to demonstrate to the world the peace-time superiority of Free Enterprise, just as the war demonstrated its superiority during the period of conflict. (NAM Subcommittee on British Loan Agreement, January 1946) As the “New Deal” crumbles into history, let’s help see that a fair deal takes its place. (Earl Bunting, NAM President, March 1947)

For American business, the reconversion was going well. Since the end of 1945, generous tax breaks and sympathetic legislation on the ending of war production helped oil the wheels of an economy buoyed by huge savings and pent-up demand that sustained higher than predicted levels of employment and corporate profits better than they were during the war. Private investment tripled between 1945 and 1946, stock prices climbed and three jobs awaited every returning veteran. There was no imminent danger of the US slipping into a post-war slump.1 With a buoyant economy and a pro-business Congress, corporate conservatives had many reasons to be cheerful as the post-war world unfolded. Even the US president, despite his best efforts, was able to lend a helping hand to his conservative opponents. Of all the apparatus of the war economy that had been dismantled since the surrender of Japan, resolving the issue of price controls remained the toughest. In attempting to © The Author(s) 2020 C. Whitham, Corporate Conservatives Go to War, Palgrave Studies in American Economic History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43908-8_8

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solve this problem, President Truman, who lacked the craft and guile of Roosevelt, aggravated Congress and lost the trust of labor, accelerating the national drift toward the right. The besieged president later wrote that he vetoed more major bills than virtually any other president before him.2 In the battle to control inflation, Truman failed to preserve the Office of Price Administration which Congress agreed to extend but without the power to be effective. When he vetoed the Congressional proposal, the OPA and all the controls that it administered expired on 1 July 1946 allowing a massive spike in prices and the cost of living. The NAM objective of ending wartime controls within a year of the cessation of hostilities was achieved, but at apparently great cost to economic stability.3 The president’s woes were compounded by a rash of crippling strikes in steel, coal, autos, rail and trucking during 1946 that involved the most workers in US history. Truman was unable to force an agreement on unions determined to safeguard their wartime gains. Union membership had grown exponentially from 10.5 million in 1941 to 14.75 million in 1945. Truman took control of the railroads and the mines in the name of national security and came down hard on the unions, further enraging labor.4 Truman’s inability to control prices and his harsh treatment of workers damaged what support remained among Americans for New Deal reformism and the party associated with it. Conservatives across the US sought to cash-in on the mounting disaffection with the government, which materialized in a scorching of the Democrats in the mid-term elections of November 1946. The Republicans dominated both houses of Congress for the first time since 1928, just as the focus of domestic politics became unavoidably enmeshed with developments in the international sphere. Still, Americans may have moved away from New Deal liberalism and its attendant ‘big government’ emphasis, but the increased responsibilities of the US on the world stage required a stronger, not a weaker, nation-state, especially when faced with a new threat of military confrontation with the Soviet Union or economic catastrophe in Europe. By 1947, the peculiar dynamics of World War II had given way to the even more unusual forces unleashed by the Cold War bringing fresh challenges and opportunities for the corporate world. Flushed with enthusiasm and a newfound confidence in the righteousness of its decision to face down the forces of moderation, the NAM was ready to make its mark for the cause of free enterprise in the rarified conditions of post-war America. The opportunity to do so emerged in

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two key areas of the post-war outlook of the newly anointed superpower: labor policy and foreign economic relations. The campaign by conservatives in 1946 to water down the National Labor Relations (Wagner) Act was a decisive moment for US ­business-government-labor relations and set the tone of their relationship for years to come. It was the second major test of the willingness of the NAM to embrace modification of its policy toward labor, which had weathered the storm of the Charter affair but remained unresolved after the inconclusive Labor-Management Conference in November 1945. Just how sustainable was rigid opposition to labor rights in the volatile setting of post-war America? After the collapse of the Labor-Management Conference, Truman looked to legislate his way to industrial harmony. With this in mind, throughout 1946 the NAM drew together its own legislative requirements. This time, however, the NAM leadership broached a modification of its time-honored stance on labor. Accenting the theme of ‘fairness’ toward management and labor, the revised policy was the culmination of the long campaign by Weisenburger and other moderates in the NAM leadership to correct the ‘oppositional’ mindset of the NAM Old Guard.5 The moderate cause was boosted by the continued evidence that the conservative message, despite clear signals that the public was upbeat about the prospects for prosperity in the aftermath of the war, was still struggling to make headway. In January 1946, a survey by the Opinion Research Corporation reported that 56 percent of the American public believed that ‘manufacturers are more interested in high profits than in high living standards’ and 66 percent said that ‘businessmen should “speak up” on current national problems’. These damning results, combined with ‘increasing threats to our free competitive economy by well organized and adequately financed forces’, led the NIIC to conclude that their public relations campaign in 1946 must be ‘intensified and expanded’.6 In fact, the ‘revised’ NAM policy toward labor remained essentially unchanged. It contained the long-held demand for a ban on the closed shop, for a legal duty on both sides to adhere to collective bargaining agreements (that should exclude foremen), the prohibition of monopolistic practices of unions and employers alike, and the outlawing of mass picketing and of strikes over anything but wages, hours or conditions. The NAM also retained its opposition to compulsory government arbitration of labor disputes. But, significantly, the NAM did not reject government involvement out of hand, holding instead that it should be

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‘reduced to an absolute minimum’. This modification in the NAM position was recorded in the November 1946 publication of a ­six-year-long study of the ‘American free enterprise system’ by the Economic Principles Commission (formerly Textbook Committee of Hershey meeting). The assortment of businessmen and economists involved in the study, despite their largely conservative demeanor, arrived at a ‘consensus’ that after the war American business ‘should learn to live with reasonable government regulation and use its influence merely to keep such regulation in proper bounds’.7 This ‘new look’ declaration on labor policy was published in December 1946 as Industry Believes. The emphasis now was on limiting the extent of that intervention or removing its perceived bias toward labor: a concession enabled by the confident assumption that Congress and industry was now strong enough to check the excesses of a waning government. During a rare bout of ‘internal dissension’, a minority of the Board, mainly linked to the auto and steel manufacturers who wanted outright repeal of the Wagner Act, were eventually defeated.8 The ditching by the NAM of its former, unwavering mantra on labor rights and government interference was duly noted by onlookers. The New York Times headlined with ‘Liberal Program on Labor, economy announced by NAM’, but most majors were more reserved in their judgment. The New York Herald Tribune held that ‘moderate opinion prevailed over extreme conservatism on NAM’s Board of Directors’, and Newsweek hailed the NAM policy as ‘middle of the road’ and the ‘acme of moderation’. Meanwhile, Time judged the statement as ‘moderate and conciliatory’, noting that ‘a new spirit might be percolating through NAM’s hardened arteries’. The avowedly liberal press, however, pointed to the remaining ‘old-look’ NAM calls for outlawing the closed shop, sympathy strikes, mass picketing and industry-wide bargaining as evidence that this particular conservative leopard had not really changed its spots.9 The enthusiasm for moderation within the NAM was, to be sure, limited. This was made clear on several occasions throughout 1946 in the run-up to the Taft-Hartley legislative saga. Most notable was an attack on the corporate moderate poster-boys, the CED, whose star was fast rising in Washington circles thanks to its success in bridging the divide between liberals and conservatives on Capitol Hill. In a stinging critique of the CED publication Jobs and Markets in May 1946, the NAM tried to ‘prevent public misunderstanding’ about the document which it condemned as ‘in reality (and perhaps unwittingly) a proposal permanently

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to establish a totalitarian type of regimentation in America while oppositely masquerading as a proposal to get rid of that sort of thing’. The NAM presented a long commentary against each of Jobs and Markets’ ten policy proposals for the transition which acknowledged extended use of price and monetary controls, public works, raised taxes and government authority. The NAM concluded: ‘The war being over, we should have the courage to recognize that it is over and so rid ourselves of wartime regimentation inappropriate to America in peacetime’.10 The other home for corporate moderates, the BAC, was heavily infiltrated by the NAM during 1945. By the end of the year, the NAM held a majority in the BAC’s labor relations committee, which Workman claimed adopted a position on labor which ‘echoed in nearly every respect’ that of the NAM.11 An emphasis on the perils of lingering war controls, big government and big labor was the main feature of the seventh National Postwar Conference held on 15–16 March 1946 at Atlantic City to discuss inflation, housing and government expenditure. The NAM recorded that the delegates spent much of their time bemoaning the responsibility of government in causing or perpetuating the country’s economic ills. The much-maligned Office of Price Administration was blamed for exacerbating inflationary tendencies and its leadership criticized for its ‘name calling and “holier than thou” attitude’ which did not aid public understanding. And although the opinion was that the soon-to-expire price controls should have been continued ‘for a limited time’, the OPA, government fiscal policy and ‘labor trouble’ were the chief culprits for rising inflation, the delegates reasoned. The problems with labor were blamed not on trades union leaders (who were present in the room), but on ‘underground influences of the extreme left’, which ‘might not stem from or be part of any existing state but be the reflection of some less definite and more sinister international movement’. Latent ­anti-communism aside, the real threat to the US economy stemmed not from Soviet wreckers but from big government: ‘We are not realistic until we face the problem of whether government can be confined to its traditional place in the economy or whether it is going to exert efforts to stimulate business in bad times and to hold down the situation in boom times’. As Sargent recorded, ‘the statement that government is or soon may write [sic] the economy was made again and again’.12 The lambasting of the OPA by the NAM was so severe that the CIO walked out and refused to attend ‘until there is a permanent change in the leadership and responsibility of the National Association of Manufacturers’.13

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Actually, the post-war conferences were beginning to fall apart in what was, in hindsight, a reflection of the growing discord between management, government and labor as the basis for wartime cooperation evaporated. At the eighth meeting, again in Atlantic City on 14–15 June 1946, the AFL announced its ‘return’ to the national conference since leaving after the fourth meeting in Harrisburg. This was because the head of the AFL, William Green, refused to sit down with ‘a divided house of labor’. The CIO, for its part, announced at the eighth meeting that it was to leave.14 The problems of labor also featured in a July 1946 address by Wason to the Chautauqua Institution. Wason bellowed that: ‘In America, in recent years, labor unions have become a ­super-government. The Administration in Washington is their stooge’. Wason claimed the principal obstacles to US prosperity were labors’ ‘super-government’, the OPA and inflation, all of which needed to be dissolved immediately to help a nation ‘shaken by economic anarchy’.15 The demeanor of the NAM was, therefore, uncompromising—even bellicose—on the issue of labor as fresh legislation on workers’ rights made its way through Congress. When it emerged in late 1946, the NAM rallied behind the labor bill comprised of two separate proposals by conservative stalwart Senator Robert Taft, chairman of the Senate Labor Committee, and Congressman Fred Hartley, chairman of the House Committee on Education and Labor. The Taft–Hartley Bill was an explicit attempt to roll back the rights of labor under the Wagner Act by emphasizing a worker’s right to refrain from unionization or collective bargaining, the employer’s right to resist unions, banning secondary picketing or jurisdictional strikes, outlawing the closed shop and requiring union officials to sign non-communist affidavits. In the run-up to the hearings of the Bill, the NAM raised a large war-chest of funds for its public relations drive and hired professional lobbyists to convey its message. It was in ‘frequent contact’ with important Congressional figures making fourteen appearances and twelve supplemental written statements in 1947. According to one senator, the NAM waged ‘the most intensive, expensive, and vicious propaganda campaign that any Congress has ever been subjected to’.16 The NAM suggested its members send letters to their stockholders that urged them to write to their Congressmen as a ‘patriotic duty’.17 On this occasion, unlike so many times in subsequent years, the NAM was pushing against a partially open door in what was now, after the mid-term elections of November 1946, a largely Republican-controlled

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Congress. Even the president was unable to rely on the Democratic Party to support him when he moved to veto an Act he believed was designed to ‘shackle’ labor, illustrating the extent of the shift toward the right—or away from New Deal liberalism—that had occurred in the US during the war.18 The result was that the NAM acquired a decent return on its efforts. The new Labor-Management Relations (Taft-Hartley) Act of 1947 did not outlaw mass picketing or industry-wide bargaining, but banned the closed shop (though not ‘union shops’ which obliged new employees to join the union but allowed them to leave within a specific time), forced the NLRB to treat company unions the same as any other and in all other respects replaced enough of the objectionable features of the Wagner Act to meet with the approval of the NAM.19 To retain their legal rights, union officials were also commanded to declare annually they were not members of the Communist Party. Business Week called it ‘a New Deal for America’s employers’.20 Collective bargaining was sufficiently downgraded in the interests of ‘free speech’ to allow employers to refuse it and instigate their own propaganda campaigns with leaflets and speeches at compulsory workplace meetings. The NAM embarked on its own major publicity drive to inform managers of the benefits of the Act, which, they argued, depended for its success on the careful application of its provisions in the workplace.21 The Taft–Hartley Act was a symbolic turning point in the post-war history of the US. It was a rejection of the Wagner Act, the foremost symbol of the liberal program borne of the Depression, drawing a line under the New Deal once and for all for conservatives. As Lichtenstein wrote, the Act ‘codified’ the containment of the largest trade unions.22 The nation, it seemed, had come to its senses and was not willing to become a bastion of collectivism or social experimentation. The fact that organized labor had fought so hard to defeat the legislation and failed showed that perhaps the tide was turning on the forward progress that labor had enjoyed for so long. However, the concessions to labor made by the NAM in supporting the legislation—unthinkable prior to the war and unlikely in 1946— cannot be underestimated. They were a testament to the degree that conservatives had failed to convince Americans of the capacity of ‘free enterprise’ to deliver economic security after the war, and of how far conservatives had now resolved to travel to meet the unmistakable national appetite for some measure of that security against the uncertainties of the post-war era. This was the solemn verdict of the scientists in

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the Economic Principles Commission. Published in November 1946, its findings were too late (and at more than a thousand pages in two volumes too dense and technical), to serve as a propaganda tool when it was most needed. In any case, given its academic character and its ruling on the future the value of the study in generating optimism would have been limited. ‘We may never again within our time see in this country a period so free from regulation as that preceding the depression of the 1930s’, the experts concluded. ‘The American economic system has now developed to a point where the people insist that the government, in the performance of its function, may legitimately be called upon to step in at many more places than formerly were deemed necessary’.23 The NAM had relaxed its stance on labor just enough to meet the sentiments of a nation that had undertaken its own journey away from liberalism to some sort of comfortable, tolerable center-ground. Over the following months, the NAM sought to cash-in on the revitalized sense of influence that it apparently now enjoyed in the altered national climate. It proved to be a hard slog, but in several important areas of post-war international policy the NAM registered success. As noted, a particular obsession of the NAM was obtaining a seat on the Economic and Social Council, the presumed fulcrum of economic power in the United Nations. This avenue showed promise for the corporate conservatives, as moderates in the NPA and the CED were less concerned with the ESC as they were confident of representation elsewhere on behalf of the government, often as leading members. The NAM, being on the outside of the Washington establishment, had no such access points. After the first official session of the United Nations at the beginning of 1946, the NAM wrote to its Secretary-General requesting that it be appointed as a ‘consultant’ to the Economic and Social Council. The NAM maintained pressure upon the United Nations and US government representatives for more than a year until, in July 1947, the NAM was informed by the State Department that out of one hundred and forty US organizations that had applied for consultative status, it would be recommending only the NAM and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. This status was officially granted to the NAM on 14 August 1947.24 Alongside representation in the United Nations, the NAM had consistently championed the establishment of an international body to oversee the conduct and expansion of world trade. Since the intergovernmental meeting at Bretton Woods in 1944, the primary vehicle

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of post-war international trade was the proposed International Trade Organization (ITO), still to be negotiated. The attitude of the NAM to the ITO was an extension of its ‘umpire’ view of government in domestic economic affairs projected onto the world stage and was akin to the ‘International Board of Trade’ idea which the PWC had enunciated in its annual reports years prior. The viewpoint of the NAM was reaffirmed on 22 April 1946, in a joint meeting of the new International Economic Relations Committee and its Advisory Group which endorsed the ­setting-up of an ITO in order ‘to provide rules of the game – international standards for the carrying on of international trade’, even between ‘state-controlled’ and ‘free enterprise’ economies.25 The initial enthusiasm of the NAM about the prospects for an ITO began to fade, however, as details of the new organization slowly emerged following successive and grueling annual ­ inter-governmental conferences to finalize the new institution. The Geneva draft of the ITO had been deliberately worded to allow various ‘exceptions’ from its clauses, and protectionists complained that the US was being asked to sacrifice too much. The Advisory Group to the NAM’s (renamed) International Relations Committee in March 1947 believed that as it stood the draft proposals for an ITO were ‘extensive in scope and in most places uncertain in meaning’, and until the meeting in Geneva planned for April 1947, the Advisory Group was unable to pass final judgment on whether the ITO should be joined by either American industry or the US government. Nevertheless, the Group was still very committed to the idea:It is our definite opinion that the United States and the world as a whole need an International Trade Organization to help remove chaos in international trade, to promote mutually beneficial international trade, and to thus assist in promoting world understanding and world prosperity, all of which would have the result of promoting the maintenance of world peace. We so believe both on the basis of idealism and for the primary purpose of protecting our own domestic economy.26

Again, present in the Group’s formulation of US foreign economic policy was the potential contradiction, highlighted earlier by Lincoln and others, in promoting federal activism overseas but the rejection of such activism at home. Free trade abroad would, by necessity, require nation-states to both promote and police a liberalized trade regime, ­ potentially through imposing strict performance requirements upon

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signatory governments, necessitating a dynamic government role that conservatives apparently insisted should be highly circumscribed in the US but fully encouraged overseas. There was the added dilemma of requiring foreign nations to lower barriers to the entry of US goods into their markets while at the same time avoiding unwanted penetration of the US market by foreign goods. This question was raised directly by a joint NAM and National Foreign Trade Council paper presented to the tenth, and final, National Postwar Conference held in Atlantic City on 14–15 March 1947. The paper, which asked ‘To what extent should our government formulate and control foreign economic policy’, was the first on the agenda and provoked a most revealing discussion. The USCC position was a contradictory blend. It wanted a passive approach from the government that would not control but would ‘implement’ policy overseas, yet somehow ensure that ‘in dealing with other countries we must get them to act in accordance with our views’. The NFTC asked simply: ‘what can the United States do to convert the rest of the world’. The NAM, on the other hand, argued for government protection, at least for its domestic markets: ‘We must train our guns on imports and must let imports gauge our exports. The Governments in Europe are very much in need of everything. That also brings up the question of tariffs. We don’t want goods produced by starvation wages shipped into this country’. However, the NAM claimed it ‘was not for any isolation’. In fact, the NAM wanted a more assertive US foreign policy: ‘In establishing a foreign policy it should transcend an economic policy. It is time the United States, for once, established a real broad political foreign policy. Then we can fit into it our economic policy. Other people can then fit into it any economic policy they choose’.27 The complexities involved in achieving an acceptable balance between trade liberalization, government regulation and the protection of the home market were proving overwhelming, both for the government negotiators and for the specialists in the NAM. After the inconclusive conference at Geneva in April 1947, the Board found the proposals for the ITO were still not ‘wholly satisfactory’. Some of its principles were ‘far out of conformity with American principles’, it said, and if applied would be ‘dangerously detrimental to the best interests of the United States’. Even ‘sound principles’, the Board observed, were too ‘surrounded’ by qualifications to mean anything. The Board wanted US representatives to seek a redrafting of the ITO charter at the next conference scheduled at Havana that would seek improvement in these four

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main items: a strict separation between long-term commitments to international trade of nations (principles) and those temporary exceptions required by countries for the transition period only; greater protection of international investments; no equivocation toward ‘restrictive business practices’; and the denunciation of intergovernmental commodity agreements (which the NAM likened to cartels). Without these changes, the Board confessed, it would be better not to have an ITO.28 At the conference in Havana in November–December 1947, to which the NAM was invited to send a representative to join the US delegation,29 the prospects for an ITO that would be agreeable to the NAM were just as remote. None of the NAM recommendations were accepted by the participating nations. Nevertheless, with Congressional ratification of the Havana Charter not expected until the beginning of 1949, the NAM chose to battle on. In May 1948, the International Relations Advisory Group recommended, and the Board agreed, that the NAM issued a public statement ‘to the effect that the NAM continues to favor the basic concept of an international trade body’, despite ‘misgivings’ over aspects of the Havana Charter. The Advisory Group remained committed to the study of the Charter and the formulation of recommendations that gave consideration to ‘both the present unsettled international situation as it effects world trade, and the ultimate objective of achieving an expanded and non-discriminatory flow of commerce among nations on a multilateral basis’.30 The commitment to multilateralism was reaffirmed a few weeks later in a radio address by former NAM President Earl Bunting, who stressed that the cause of freedom, for which the US was still fighting, would be won if ‘we take full advantage of our world economic position to lead the way toward removing all international trade barriers which are not essential to the economic and social ­well-being of the nations concerned’.31 The saga over ratification of the ITO was an exceptionally protracted affair. What would under normal circumstances have been a difficult process became almost impossible in the fluid political and economic circumstances of the immediate post-war period. By 1947, some three years after the idea for an ITO had been submitted, it was increasingly clear that the Western European economies were in deep trouble and their governments were in no mind to expose their fragile domestic markets to overseas, that is American, traders. The mounting threat of Soviet expansion and European communism curbed the appetite for multilateralism in the US government which began to favor strong state

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solutions in Europe that favored rapid national economic rehabilitation and reconstruction over pledges to provide immediate open access to markets. These concerns, added to the fact that 1948 was an election year, convinced Truman to delay sending the Charter to a skeptical Congress.32 Despite its faith in the ultimate goal, by the time the Havana Charter came before legislators in January 1949, the Advisory Group and the International Relations Committee asked the Board to oppose its approval. The Havana Charter ‘so compromised and modified’ the original objectives of the ITO, they claimed, ‘as to render it an ineffective instrument’, and contained provisions ‘in direct conflict with American principles of a free competitive enterprise’.33 The Board, in its statement on the ITO issued in March 1949, noted that, because the Charter had been ‘greatly distorted and changed from its original concept and purpose’, it was ‘with a sense of great disappointment and sincere regret’ that the NAM could not advocate its ratification by Congress. This was because, according to the NAM, there was a ‘gradual departure’ from the spirit of non-discriminatory multilateral trade in successive drafts of the Charter. The NAM believed that the Charter had failed multilateralism in several ways, notably in making ‘the world safe for socialistic planning’, leaving ‘the doors wide open’ for the operation of cartels and monopolies, discouraging the world flow of private capital and placing US foreign trade in ‘a precarious position’. As the NAM insisted, the Charter had to be rejected because it was not built for purpose, not because the NAM had given up on multilateralism:At this point of its historical career this country finds itself in a position in which its own prosperity depends upon the prosperity of the world, and the health of its own economic institutions depends upon the successful rebuilding of a world economy in which man’s individual endeavor is given the maximum of opportunity…It does not mean that efforts should be relinquished aimed at the reconstruction of a well-knit world economy and the eventual creation of a true ITO.

The NAM pledged itself ‘to work unrelentingly for the r­e-establishment of multilateral, non-discriminatory world trade as a framework for enhanced individual opportunity and forever increasing welfare for all’.34 It was apparent that in its current form the Havana Charter was an unreliable vehicle for enforcing the principles of free enterprise upon a world that looked in increasingly bad shape. Hence, it was not latent protectionism that caused the NAM to finally reject the Havana Charter

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version of the ITO, but the opposite. If the NAM protestations are to be believed, the Charter simply did not go far enough in lowering barriers to trade by allowing too many dispensations to weaker nations that, in the mind of the NAM, posed a threat to the integrity of the US economy. This rationale did not obscure the fact that the NAM, along with a coterie of Republicans and conservative Democrats in Congress, opposed the Havana version of the ITO out of an old-fashioned protectionist impulse. All the same, the collapse of the ITO project, as noted above, was not entirely due to business opposition, but a confluence of international as well as domestic factors. During 1949, the Soviet Union successfully exploded its first atom bomb, and the Chinese communists looked set to win the civil war against the nationalists. The immediately post-war world was just too unstable and unpredictable to allow for the implementation of a grand international scheme of economic cooperation. For the government and the public at large, global security concerns now overrode multilateralist objectives, for which time had run out. What remained was the Havana Charter declaration of 1947 that became the basis for a system of cyclical rounds of an international General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which lasted until the creation of the World Trade Organization in 1995. Protectionists had been satiated, but there was a recognition, which had been growing during the war and was evidenced in the deliberations of the NAM, of the importance of free-flowing trade to the interests of private enterprise and to the US domestic economy as a whole. Conservatives, along with labor, agriculture and most of the business community, therefore strongly endorsed US commitment to the bilateral lowering of trade barriers in voting by a large margin for another term of the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act in September 1949.35 The collapse of the proposed International Trade Organization was a triumph, if a somewhat hollow one, for the corporate conservatives in their defense of American free enterprise. It marked the last gasp of the liberal agenda of World War II and the final ‘victory’ for the p ­ ost-war conservative retrenchment. It would be matched by an equally notable demonstration of the power of organized business in another high-profile moment in the post-war international economic relations ­ of the US. The protracted debate over the ITO took place alongside the national dialogue about aid to Europe and comprised near-identical issues related to the post-war viability of the world economy. In June 1947, Secretary of State George C. Marshall announced his plan to provide large-scale financial assistance to help the struggling Europeans

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to manage their ailing economies. Marshall was adamant that, after his recent visit to the continent, the democratic governments of Europe would either collapse under the strain of feeding their populations, opening the door to communist or anti-democratic forces, or introduce drastic economic measures to protect their vulnerable industries and markets. Either scenario would be disastrous for US political and economic interests. Financial assistance from the only country with sufficient capital and resources to provide it was vital if the indispensable European market was to be preserved.36 The policy of the NAM on the granting of overseas loans and on the reconstruction of post-war Europe had been enumerated in several publications and speeches since 1944. The direct involvement of the US in rebuilding the war-torn nations after the war was fully anticipated and embraced by the NAM, essentially as a good business opportunity. Loans for rebuilding war-torn economies should be privately sourced and granted on strict condition that the funds were used to encourage indigenous private enterprise and would not interfere with, or better still would be linked to, the advancement of US economic interests. This ruthless business approach was taken in respect of the British-US loan agreement in 1945–1946, a line the US government also shared at that time. American foreign economic policy had always been predicated on the swift return of the rich Western European economy to the international fold as an essential requirement of US post-war prosperity. It was the boom in exports to Europe, some $15 billion in 1946 alone, which kept the US economy moving during the reconversion.37 Moreover, the NAM believed that increased US trade overseas held additional value as it ‘would help to demonstrate to the world the peace-time superiority of Free Enterprise, just as the war demonstrated its superiority during the period of conflict’.38 Indeed, the NAM was quick to exploit business opportunities for its members in post-war Europe. After attending a session of the International Chamber of Commerce in Paris in June 1946, Gaylord and Wason went on a tour of England, France and Germany.39 In the same year, Herbert H. Schell (Sidney Blumenthal & Co), a Committee on World Trade Policy regular and now chairman of the International Relations Committee, joined an American group on a tour of Swedish industry.40 At the end of 1946, the NAM and the USCC were asked by the State Department to supply a list of industrialists to send to Germany to see at first hand the demands of reconstruction, and after talks between the International Relations Committee and General

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Clay, Assistant Secretary of War, and Major-General John H. Hilldring, Assistant Secretary of State for Occupied Areas, thirteen industrialists were chosen to tour Germany in May 1947.41 The NAM, therefore, had some idea of the parlous state of the European economy when Marshall gave his announcement in June 1947. The tenuous state of the continent carried a number of social and political risks that stretched far beyond their impact on the US economy and which rendered a narrowly business-like approach to European problems redundant. It was awareness of these dangers that lay behind the Secretary of State’s plea that America get behind a rescue package. And there was already some evidence that his appeal would receive a sympathetic hearing among important sections of the country. The softening of the NAM policy on foreign loans began in April 1947, just as Marshall toured the war-ravaged sites of Europe. The Board was responding to the request by Truman in March that Congress release funds to help British forces in their fading effort to re-install the pro-Western monarchy in revolutionary Greece. The NAM recognized that ‘when critical conditions arise’, US government loans or gifts ‘may be advisable’, but declared that the ‘eventual goal’ should be to replace all such assistance to foreign nations with private financing as soon as ‘normal international relations become established’.42 This position was revisited again in October 1947, when the Board updated its stance after careful examination of the finer details of Marshall’s comprehensive assistance program for Europe. A deeply conservative Congress approved the $400 million to keep Greece and Turkey in friendly hands, largely thanks to an intense performance from Truman that convinced doubters that failure to do so would be to surrender Western democracy to the communists. But the $12 billion four-year program that Marshall requested for Europe was a harder sell. The deliberations of the Board were informed by the work of its vast Committee on International Economic Relations, chaired by John R. Suman (Standard Oil).43 The conclusions of the NAM leadership shed an interesting light on the mindset of corporate conservatives toward the European dilemma which combined a routine business hard-headedness with an awareness of the utility of aid in shaping the political economy of Europe. The NAM supported financial assistance for what it considered genuine economic reconstruction and recovery so long as there existed a ‘reasonable assurance that the objective of restoring production abroad shall be accomplished’ and that ‘complete frankness’ be employed

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in striking aid agreements with foreign governments, principally in ensuring that they remove government restraints on production: ‘The American people have fresh in their minds the dampening effects peacetime government controls had on production here at home. They therefore are convinced Europe’s production expansion will not take place until the myriad of peacetime controls now being imposed by socialistic governments are eliminated or at least drastically modified’. This meant no more nationalization programs or the ‘destroying or impairing’ of private enterprise, the elimination of all barriers to trade, such as tariffs and customs unions, and ‘so far as practicable’ aid should be offered only to private enterprises in the foreign countries. In addition, the NAM demanded that recipient nations sought a balanced budget, purchased only goods produced in the recipient nation or the US and strongly discouraged cartels. The NAM also argued that no extension or ­re-imposition of controls be contemplated in the US for any reason related to the overseas assistance, and that debt be retired and taxes be reduced at home to help capital formation to advance production. The NAM was also very clear that the arguments for extending assistance to war-torn nations were not based on altruism, that the aid was long term in nature, and was not viewed as an absolute necessity for the betterment of a US economy that was ‘sufficiently flexible’ not to require an aid program just to maintain or increase domestic production and jobs. In fact, in the short term, the NAM insisted, economic aid carried the threat of bringing inflation to the US due to the immediate flight of goods to Europe. Similarly, the NAM was convinced the US did not have to be ‘stampeded merely by the threat of Communism’ to extend aid to Europe. For the Board, economic aid was all about the future: ‘Sound economies in the rest of the world and mutual beneficial international trade are very important to the peace and prosperity of the United States, and a program of foreign economic aid based on the principles laid down in this memorandum can be of great advantage in achieving such ends’.44 The reasoning of the NAM therefore closely echoed the broadly economic verdict of the government for providing such magnanimous assistance.45 But the NAM rationale differed in that it downplayed the supposed political reasoning (anti-communism) for the aid and dismissed the argument that the export of capital to Europe was imperative to satisfy the requirements of the US economy. For the NAM, offering the aid was as much about establishing a ‘free enterprise’ Europe as it was

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about anything else. As Calder, chairman of the International Relations Committee, said before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that was debating the Economic Cooperation Act (Marshall Plan) on 23 January 1948: ‘Our position, published in 1943 was that the economic pacification of the postwar world would be on the same level of importance as the suppression of armed international disorder, which was then in the form of a shooting war’.46 More significant for the NAM was its recommendation that the US government remains at arm’s-length from directing the aid, which it argued should be administered by a ‘corporation’ filled with a ‘non-partisan Board of Directors’ comprised of ‘men of outstanding ­ experience and recognized leadership’ in all areas of the economy.47 The Board relayed its opinion to Truman face-to-face on 10 November 1947 and presented its recommendations to Congress in early 1948, claiming later that it was ‘the first major national organization to take a definite position on this subject’.48 The NAM rationale for providing aid might have downplayed the absolute necessity to the US of reviving the Western European economies, but the securing of vital markets for US manufacturers was a crucial factor in obtaining corporate conservative support.49 Indeed, the Economic Recovery Act obliged recipients of aid to purchase surplus agricultural commodities from the US and instructed that half of all goods purchased be carried in American ships.50 The trade-centered approach of the NAM and other conservatives such as in the USCC was certainly important. But more instrumental in winning business approval were the arguments of the moderates, especially the CED and increasingly the NPA, whose stress on the wider structural, ideological and internationalist objectives of providing aid—namely in promoting US economic principles overseas—resonated with a growing number of corporate Americans. In short, the ‘planners’ outweighed the ‘traders’.51 The passing of the Act was helped by a compromise solution on the status of the agency charged with dispensing the aid which would be ‘quasi-independent’ of the government and staffed by experts from business, labor and agriculture. Paul Hoffman, head of the CED, was appointed the first Administrator.52 The majority of the personnel of the Economic Cooperation Administration were of a moderate disposition, but the NAM was able to insert Curtis E. Calder, chairman of the International Relations Committee, on the group that selected personnel for the agency.53 Within days of its ratification, NAM President Morris Sayre roared:-

288  C. WHITHAM We’ve grown up! We’re a world power. Millions and millions of folks over the world are looking to us for food, machines, money and – above all – leadership…With enactment of ERP [Marshall aid] the United States has embarked on a world program that can make it or break it as a world power for peace, progress and prosperity. It is a situation which demands here at home the highest order of political statesmanship, economic wisdom, industrial leadership and unswerving public devotion to fundamental American principles.54

The contribution of the NAM to the passing of the Marshall plan in April 1948 may have been less significant, and certainly less enthusiastic, than that of the corporate moderates, but was enough to gain the NAM its first invitation to the White House in fifteen years.55 The successes enjoyed by the NAM in influencing critical government policy in the international realm (International Trade Organization, Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act and the Marshall plan), and in securing a position of future influence within the new architecture for international decision-making (Economic and Social Council), were testament to the renewed power that had flowed in the direction of corporate conservatives, and organized business interests as a whole, since the end of the war. The ITO project may have fallen short of expectations and soon lost the interest of business (and was anyway abandoned by the administration as the Cold War took shape after 1948), but the central importance of international economics, and international affairs generally, to the national interests of the US was obvious to all sections of the nation after the war, a fact hastened by the global rise in tension between the Western powers and the Soviet Union. The awakening of the NAM to the significance of international affairs, from its long slumber on the topic during the Depression years, was a process of rapid re-education born of the unique conditions of the war period which heightened the ideological clash with the liberals and granted new opportunities for a conservative revival based upon a post-war prosperity hitched to an expansive world economy. Still, the debt owed by the NAM to the structural and intellectual stimulus of the organization from its involvement in international affairs was placed under fresh questioning as the physical and political debris of the world war began to settle. In June 1948, the NAM Executive appointed Frederick Crawford to head a special committee to ask whether the NAM should continue its ‘participation’ in international

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matters, and if so in what areas. Other members of the committee included former presidents Gaylord, Mosher, Pew and Wason.56 It is unclear what specific event triggered this latest reappraisal, but since the Wampler reorganization of 1945 and even before that sections of the NAM had been uncomfortable with the organization’s involvement in international affairs. In fact, the realities of dealing with the aftermath of a global war had intensified the challenges that conservatives faced to their cherished ideals, particularly over the role of government in the economy, which further aggravated the tension caused by trying to limit the power of government at home at the same time as promoting government intervention abroad. This apparent inconsistency was noticed by the business organ Fortune in an article of July 1948 that sought to commend the NAM for its open-mindedness in its support for Marshall aid: ‘Government spending is NAM’s final road block, and there is no reason why this stand against the man-eating shark should lose it any friends among responsible citizens. But NAM, which generally takes a forward-looking position in international questions, is not averse to government spending for European recovery’.57 Faint, and not a little taunting, praise like this from the moderate wing of the business community must have riled the heads of the NAM and aroused heartfelt questioning. Also, the exit of one of the staunchest advocates and devoted officials of international studies in the NAM may have forced this reconsideration. Since the Wampler shake-up, which he had survived, Sargent had been working under the supervision of Economics Division chief Ralph Robey, editor of Newsweek, who he considered of junior stature. Upon ‘mature reflection’, in July 1948, Sargent decided to quit his duties as Secretary to the International Relations Committee.58 Whatever the true motivation for undertaking the study in August 1948—fears of moderation, personnel changes or simply applying the ideological brakes at a very busy time in international affairs—the Crawford committee submitted its lengthy report to the Board outlining emphatically the case for a continuation of NAM participation in international affairs. A committed internationalist and moderating voice within the NAM during the war, it was no surprise that Crawford’s committee advanced a strong and uncompromising rationale for continued NAM involvement in international relations. In fact, it believed that international affairs were of such vital importance to the aims of the NAM that the committee recommended a significant enlargement of its current involvement. The committee’s rationale was derived from four primary

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considerations. The first was the continued importance of foreign trade to the US economy, which was expected to exceed the 5 to 10 percent of the total volume of business that prevailed before the war. The second was the fact that the US ‘today is morally and financially committed to help re-build the productive facilities of a large part of the world’, which would ‘affect the operations of every manufacturer in the nation’. Third, the committee argued that ‘practically all broad economic policies in the domestic field today are being materially affected by international developments and financial commitments’, meaning that ‘there will be no manufacturer in the United States whose economic well-being will not be appreciably influenced by what is done in the international field’. And finally, that the US stood ‘virtually alone’ as the defender of private enterprise. These four factors, the committee believed, made it ‘imperative’ that the NAM developed a ‘clear-cut program of study and appraisal in the international field and fully integrate this program with its work in the domestic field’. The committee argued that the current ‘item-by-item’ approach to international issues, as decreed by the Wampler Committee in 1945, had ‘largely limited our activity to items that came from an external source’, principally government initiatives (such as the RTA, IMF, ESC, ITO, Marshall aid). It was the committee’s judgment that US manufacturing ‘cannot be adequately served’ by such an approach. The committee therefore recommended that two committees be created in the international field, one to deal with ‘international economic problems’ and the other ‘inter-governmental relations’. The latter committee idea acknowledged the growing role of government in ­macro-economic decision-making.59 The Crawford committee was informed in its deliberations by the input of Patrick McMahon, former Special Executive Assistant and the remaining secretary of the International Relations Committee after Sargent’s departure. McMahon penned a detailed assessment of what he saw as the main priorities of US foreign affairs which, as the contours of the post-war world finally became apparent, forecast a tough period ahead for American free enterprise. ‘From the NAM point of view’, McMahon began, ‘the most significant feature of our foreign relations since the end of the war is the increasing impact that almost every single phase has on industry and on our domestic economy’. This was because, in addition to wartime commitments to ensure worldwide economic, commercial and financial stability after the war (such as the Atlantic and UN Charters, Bretton Woods, RTAA and ITO), and overseeing the

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capitalist restoration of the advanced and developing nations (foreign aid, Marshall plan), the US was now engaged in blocking the further expansion of the Soviet Union. The result of this fraught international scenario, McMahon insisted, had been to ‘impose’ upon the domestic economy a military budget of ‘two or three times our total maximum federal budget’, posing the ‘constant threat of government controls over a broad area of industrial activity’. Even worse, while attention had been centered on the ‘dramatic’ struggle between Communism and democracy, the battle which was ‘of paramount long-range importance to US industry’ was that between free enterprise and the ‘various forms of “democratic” socialism’ that had emerged in the non-Communist world since the end of the war. This was a pointed reference to the large s­tate-run enterprises in Britain and much of Western Europe that had been erected to provide infrastructural support for their economies and the survival of their chief industrial operations since 1945. ‘Virtually every other nation’, McMahon lamented, ‘is committed to some form of state socialism’.60 On 17 September 1948, the Board resoundingly approved the continuation of the NAM’s involvement in international relations, agreeing with the Crawford committee that ‘the effects, direct or indirect, of international affairs upon the internal economy of the United States are of such importance that there is no question of…NAM’s continued interest in this field of activity’. The Board asked that the US serves as ‘a shining example’ of republicanism and ‘individual competitive enterprise’ in a world trending toward ‘tyrannical statism’. The Board recognized, however, the unavoidable ‘dilemma’ that preparedness for modern war invited highly centralized and intrusive governments, an ‘impasse’ the solution of which was ‘the great problem confronting mankind today’. On the world stage, the Board demanded that the US government desist from using public funds to aid foreign governments with planned economies, reverse the current trend toward bureaucratic ‘direction and regulation’ of international trade and ‘cease from becoming a party’ to politically determined commercial transactions. Indeed, ‘NAM believes this is an opportune time to promote a thoroughgoing critical reexamination of the current state of the world economy, and to challenge those aspects of it which are inconsistent with or antipathetic to those principles [of free enterprise] to which we adhere’.61 The decision to retain an active interest in international affairs was the final act of moderation of its war and post-war policies undertaken by the

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NAM. Even before 1948, the contours of world politics were being hastily realigned in a manner that lasted for the next forty years and recast the outlook of the NAM, and all Americans, in profoundly original ways. Even so, the NAM remained steadfast in its defense of free enterprise on the home front. On 14 March 1947, Earl Bunting, President of NAM, condemned the latest round of national strikes and Truman’s fiscal plans as wasting the ‘year of America’s greatest opportunity’ by granting concessions to labor unions. The US, compared to the rest of the post-war world, was ‘indeed fortunate’, he started, but ‘still we falter and fail to make the most of the fortunate circumstances of our post-war position’. He condemned suggestions for ‘compulsory arbitration’ by the government to overcome the impasse between management and labor as ‘the great big step over the line into the realm of the authoritarian state’, and attacked the closed shop as an ‘abridgement of the right to work’. He concluded: ‘As the “New Deal” crumbles into history, let’s help see that a fair deal takes its place’.62 Little did Bunting know that his casual phrase would be usurped by the Democrats. By the end of 1948, elements of the business community, organized labor and government had finally settled on an accommodation regarding their relationship. That arrangement was codified in the successful election of Truman in November 1948 on his Fair Deal platform. It called for an expansion of social security, a rise in the minimum wage and a federal housing program, all of which were agreed by a Democratic-held Congress. However, there were limits to any extensions beyond these former New Deal policies, such as in education, agriculture, health insurance and civil rights. As the historian LaFeber surmised: ‘Where the New Deal had been innovative, the Fair Deal was more often imitative’.63 This version of political economy lasted in the US for the next two decades. The NAM entered the immediate post-war era as robustly in defense of private capitalism as it had entered the war itself. Yet the experience of the war had changed the organization. The self-proclaimed guardian of free enterprise had pressed at every turn the case for a revival of private enterprise stewardship of the economy, both during and after the war, but found the going tough. Even with the steady disillusionment of the American public with the New Deal reform agenda, corporate conservatives found that by the end of the war the nation’s taste for federal involvement to curb the worst excesses of the capitalist economy was too strong to ignore. To break the long spell of isolation the NAM had

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endured since the Great Depression, the organization was compelled to soften its stance on government-labor relations and drop protectionism for internationalism, albeit a ‘cautious’ variant. It may have failed to eradicate all traces of the New Deal in its war against the liberals, but perhaps it could win the peace. The changes brought a degree of relevance back to the corporate conservatives—on labor relations, the UN and over foreign economic policy—but the NAM was still outside the mainstream consensus on business-government relations. More widely, the organization’s full-scale assault on the minds of the American public was left wanting. As an Opinion Research Corporation survey of January 1947 revealed, 80 percent of business executives felt more needed to be done to sell free enterprise to the people with two-thirds of those questioned fearing a ‘Socialistic trend’.64 This was underscored by the Republican failure to gain control of the White House, even in the favorable conditions of 1948, a turning point that spurred a thoroughgoing re-examination of American conservatism against the extraordinary backdrop of a new, and very different, world conflict.

Notes

1. Outlined in Herman, Freedom’s Forge, p. 339. 2. Noted by Truman in his memoir Years of Trial and Hope: Volume II, 1946–1953 (New York: Hodder & Stoughton, 1956), p. 508. In total vetoes, however, Truman (250) was far behind Roosevelt (635). 3. Waddell blamed an ‘alliance’ of military and corporate officials for blocking a government-led planned approach to the reconversion; Waddell, The War Against the New Deal, pp. 129–131. 4. See LaFeber et al., The American Century, pp. 23–26. 5. Underlined by Gable, ‘A Political Analysis of an Employers Association’, p. 144. McQuaid claimed that after the Republican mid-term victory of 1946, the NAM ‘muzzled’ the extreme anti-labor voices in its ranks, see McQuaid, Uneasy Partners: Big Business in American Politics, pp. 28–29. 6. In ‘Report on the NAM Public Relations Program (NIIC) and Preview for 1946’ (leaflet), 218/XVI. 7. The American Individual Enterprise System: Its Nature, Evolution and Future (NAM, 1946), p. 1028. 8. Noted by Gable, ‘NAM: Influential Lobby or Kiss of Death?’, p. 262. 9. All in Gable, ‘A Political Analysis of an Employers Association’, pp. 145–146. All the articles appeared in December 1946. 10. ‘Comment on CED “Jobs and Markets”’, 3 May 1946, 272/I.

294  C. WHITHAM 11. Workman, ‘Manufacturing Power’, p. 309. Long-time NAM representatives in the BAC were former presidents Charles Hook and Henning Prentis, Jr. 12. From ‘Outline of Discussion at National Postwar Conference, Atlantic City’, 15–16 March 1946, 208/XV. As with previous ‘outlines’, this was most likely written by Sargent. Agenda in same box. 13. Mentioned in ‘Report to NAM Directors by Walter D. Fuller’, 9 July 1946, 237/XIII. 14. Ibid. Also mentioned in Kersten, Labor’s Home Front, p. 220. 15. A Businessman looks at the National Economy (NAM, 1946), 223/XVI. 16.  Gable quoted Senator Aiken in ‘A Political Analysis of an Employers Association’, p. 440. The NAM invoked ‘liberal catchwords’ like equality, rights and fairness in its publicity and worked closely with Congressional conservatives from both parties, see Jacoby, Modern Manors, p. 200. 17. Gable, ‘NAM: Influential Lobby or Kiss of Death?’, pp. 268–269. 18. On Truman’s view toward the legislation and his disappointment, see his Years of Trial and Hope: Volume II, pp. 30–32. Quotation from p. 186. McCoy argued Truman opted for the veto to win liberal and labor votes in the upcoming election, see McCoy, The Presidency of Harry S. Truman, p. 99. Indeed, the animosity of Southern Democrats to an enlarged post-war role for labor was key in deciding the legislation, see Katznelson et al., ‘Limiting Liberalism’, p. 302. 19. Detailed in Gable, ‘A Political Analysis of an Employers Association’, pp. 148–150. Gable concluded that the charge that the NAM ‘wrote’ the Taft–Hartley Bill ‘cannot be substantiated’ from the evidence: ‘Actually, the real influence the NAM exerted over preparation of the Taft-Hartley Act resulted, not so much from direct pressure upon Congress, but from accepting the concept of government intervention in employee relations and from engaging in the most extensive public relations campaign in its history to secure approval for specific proposals within this general frame of reference’; Gable, ‘NAM: Influential Lobby or Kiss of Death?’, pp. 272–273. Unions were liable for violations of contracts and had to send annual financial reports to their members and the government, secondary boycotts and jurisdictional strikes were forbidden, and neither unions nor companies were allowed to contribute financially to election campaigns. The president was also empowered to obtain injunctions in strikes involving interstate commerce, public utilities and communications. 20. Quoted in Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands, p. 32. 21.  NAM published three pamphlets on the Taft-Hartley Act: The Public and the Taft-Hartley Law (5 September 1947); Are Attacks on the Taft-Hartley Law Justified? (5 September 1947); and Who Wrote the ­Taft-Hartley Bill? (13 January 1948).

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22. Lichtenstein, Labor’s War at Home, p. 239. 23.  The American Individual Enterprise System, p. 1028. 24. From ‘NAM and International Relations’, p. 33, 76/I. The Carnegie Endowment was a long-time champion of the United Nations. 25.  ‘Minutes of Joint Meeting of International Economic Relations Committee and Advisory Group’, 22 April 1946, 237/XIII. They met to consider the US government’s ‘Proposals for Expansion of World Trade and Employment’ which were attached to the British-US loan agreement. 26. ‘International Trade Organization: Recommendations of Advisory Group on Basic Approach’, circa March 1947, 237/XIII. The Board agreed: see ‘International Trade Organization’, 25 March (same box). There were forty members on the Advisory Group on International Relations: Arthur, Baker, Balgooyen, Bellamore, Bowen, Bray, Burke, Carroll, Emilio G. Collado (US Exec Director of IBRD), Crosby, Cumberland, Darlington, Dietz, Emerson, Eveleth, Fletcher, Gage, Gifford, Gillis, Greenwood, Heilperin (International Chamber of Commerce), Hudson, Huston, Lincoln, Mises, Orcutt, Richards, Rose, Sacra, Saxon, Shields, Schoppmeyer, Snyder, Tuttle, Tweedle, van Valkenburg, Ward, Whiteley, Wild and S. Riley Williams. 27. ‘National Postwar Conference’, 14–15 March 1947, 209/XV. These minutes were taken by someone other than Sargent. The conference heard papers on the ‘United Nations and National Defense’, ‘Free versus Slave Labor’, ‘Labor Legislation’, ‘Expenditures and Taxes’ and ‘Veterans’. 28. ‘NAM Position on the Geneva Draft of the Charter for an International Trade Organization: Approved by Board of Director, 29 October 1947’, 238/XIII. 29. Mentioned in ‘Significant Highlights’, p. 22, Crawford Papers, WRHS. The NAM sent Henry W. Balgooyen of the American & Foreign Power Company, to Havana. 30.  ‘Recommendations as to an Interim Position on the Havana Charter (approved by Board 28 May 1948)’, 194/XII. The statement was made in NAM News. 31. Quoted in ‘NAM and International Relations’, p. 33, 76/I. The address was called ‘A Platform for America’ and was aired over the NBC ­Coast-to-Coast network on 4 June 1948. 32. See Tom Zeiler, Free Trade, Free World: The Advent of GATT (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), p. 153. The ratification saga is finely detailed in Chapter 9. 33. ‘Resolution on ITO Charter as adopted by the International Relations Committee on the Recommendation of its Advisory Group’, 17 February 1949, 238/XIII. Members of the Committee numbered ninety persons. They were Calder (chairman), Ralph J. Kraut, Leo Welch and Charles

296  C. WHITHAM L. Wheeler (VC’s), Albright, Angle, Baker, Barbour, Bond, Boos, Brile, Bristol, D.K. Brown, Caldmeyer, Catranis, Coffey, Colgate, Cortney, Cowdin, Crane, Dorwin, Dulin, Eldridge, M.E. Evans, Fassnacht, Gaskin, Gaunt, Gaylord, Gorodiz, Greene, Greinetz, Guiler, Hamilton, Hardy, Haskell, Hayward, Hemphill, Hopkinson, Hummel, George H. Johnson, H. F. Johnson, Miss Vivian Kellems, Kendig, Jay R. Kennedy, Kridel, Kunz, Lazrus, Lisle, Mahn, Marlatt, Marr, Martindale, Maxant, Roy C. McKenna, McMenemy, Merz, Muller, Portteus, Putney, Ray, Reed, Resch, Rich, Ryan, Schell, Schmitt, Schumann, Schwartz, George H. Sibley, Sisto, Edgar W. Smith, Spang, Strickland, Stuhr, Sutton, Swartwout, Sweatt, Tilford, Trent, Tucker, Turcotte, Upson, Vagim, Wanvig, Earle W. Webb, Werthmann, Whitlock, Wilkens, A.N. Williams and Zellers. 34. ‘NAM’s Statement on the ITO Charter: As Approved by the Board of Directors’, 30 March 1949, 238/XIII; and The Havana Charter for an International Trade Organization: An Appraisal (NAM, April 1949), 194/XII. The NAM case was put by Lee H. Bristol, chairman of the International Relations Committee, in a long and detailed statement to the House Foreign Affairs Committee in April 1950. Leadership over the contents of the Charter, claimed Bristol, had passed from the US ‘into the hands of statesmen from socialistic countries’ and no longer embodied ‘American ideals’. As it stood, the Charter allowed continued economic discrimination, especially against those countries who ‘shared in the basic American belief in the virtues of economic liberalism and of competitive, multilateral trade’. The Charter was not only an unsatisfactory document but a ‘dangerous’ one which, if allowed to establish an ITO, would leave the US in ‘an increasingly unfavorable international position’; from ‘The Havana Charter for an International Trade Organization: Statement of Lee H. Bristol for NAM before the House Foreign Affairs Committee’, 26 April 1950, Box 161, National Foreign Trade Council Records, Accession 2345, Hagley Museum and Library. 35.  On the RTAA, see Zeiler, Free Trade, Free World, pp. 168–170. As Wilkins explained, US trade would be ‘self-regulating’ instead of being guided by an international organization, but ‘overall support for freer trade remained’; Mira Wilkins, The Maturing of Multinational Enterprise: American Business Abroad from 1914 to 1970 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974), p. 288. 36.  The major work on this subject is Michael J. Hogan’s masterful The Marshall Plan: America, Britain, and the Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1947–1952 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Also Pollard, who earlier wrote that the US commitment to establishing an open and stable world economy ‘necessitated the reconstruction of Western Europe with or without the presumed threat of Soviet and

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Communist expansion’; Robert A. Pollard, Economic Security and the Origins of the Cold War, 1945–1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), p. 4 (Chapter 7 for Marshall Plan). Later works include Nicolaus Mills, Winning the Peace: The Marshall Plan and America’s Coming of Age as a Superpower (New York: Wiley, 2008); and Gregory A. Fossedal, Our Finest Hour: Will Clayton, the Marshall Plan, and the Triumph of Democracy (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1993). For a recent summary of the rationale behind the Plan see G. John Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis and Transformation of the American World Order (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), pp. 198–199. 37.  From LaFeber et al., The American Century, p. 57. US exports to Western Europe for 1947 were 130 percent higher than in 1938, see Newton, The Global Economy, 1944–2000, pp. 32–34. 38. ‘Report of Chairman on Decisions made by Subcommittee on British Loan Agreement’, January 1946, 236/XIII. 39. See ‘NAM and International Relations’, p. 29, 76/I. 40. Ibid. This was apparently at the request of the Swedish government. 41. Ibid., p. 30; and ‘Significant Highlights’, p. 22, Crawford Papers, WRHS. 42.  The International Relations Committee submitted to the Board ‘specific recommendations’ about loans to Greece and Turkey; see ‘Considerations Involved in Proposals for United States Aid to Other Countries to facilitate Economic Recovery: Approved by Board of Directors, 29 October 1947’, 76/I. 43.  Vice-chairs were Calder and Wheeler. Other members were Albright, Armstrong, Arutunoff, Barbour, Beaird, Bechhold, Bell, Benjamin, Bissinger, Boos, Boyle, Brainard, Brile, D.K. Brown, Harrison, Bush, Cate, Catranis, Colgate, Cortney, Cowdin, de Fremery, Evans, Fassnacht, Fernstorm, Gaunt, Gorodiz, Gottlieb, Gould, Greene, Greiner, Greinetz, Guiler, Hamilton, Hardy, Jr., Hopkinson, Houston, Hummel, Jacobs, G.H. Johnson, H.F. Johnson, Kellems, Kendig, Kersey, Koeppel, Kraut, Kridel, Lazrus, Lucas, Mallon, Martindale, McDonough, McKenna, McMenemy, Mertes, Merz, Moffat, Payson, Pierson, Ray, Reed, Reimold, Resch, Rich, Rothert, Ben Sargent, Schell, Schmitt, Schwartz, G. Sibley, Simmons, Smith, Somervell, Spang Jr, Sperling, Stern, Stifel, Stuhr, Sykes, Thompson, Tucker, Turcotte, Upson, Wanvig, Webb, Werthmann, Weyl, White, Whitlock, Wilkens, Wilkie, Yetter, Young and Zellers. Advisory Group was Arthur, Baker, Balgooyen, Bellamore, Carroll, Collado, Crosby, Cumberland, Darlington, Dietz, Eveleth Jr., Fletcher, Gage, Gifford, Greenwood, Heilperin, Hudson, Huston, Lincoln, McKittrick, Mises, Orcutt, Richards, Casra, Saxon, Schoppmeyer, Shields, Snyder III, Tweedell, van Valkenburg, Ward, Welch, Wild and Riley Williams.

298  C. WHITHAM 44. ‘Considerations Involved in Proposals for United States Aid to Other Countries to facilitate Economic Recovery: Approved by Board of Directors, 29 October 1947’, 76/I; and bound version Recommendations of the NAM on the Principles, Conditions, and Administration of Economic Aid to Europe, 193/XII. 45.  The political rationale was identical: ‘Moreover, the best way to prevent the spread of Communism and other undesirable forms of political organization and activity is to encourage political and economic security for the peoples of the various nations of the world, and to demonstrate by example that the system of free competitive enterprise provides such security and well-being most efficiently’ (ibid.). 46. Quoted in ‘NAM and International Relations’, p. 32, 76/I. 47. Ibid. 48. Ibid.; and ‘Significant Highlights’, p. 22, Crawford Papers, WRHS. 49. As one historian saw it, ‘the plan also worked to avert a repeat of the 1930s by rebuilding the great market for American products and molding Western Europe into a long-term partner’; LaFeber et al., The American Century, p. 59. See also William F. Sanford, Jr., The American Business Community and the European Recovery Program (New York: Garland Publishing, 1987). 50. The Act further demanded that 25 percent of total wheat shipments were in the form of flour, and that recipient nations consult with the IMF about exchange rates when the US government deemed it necessary. 51. Outlined in Hogan, The Marshall Plan, pp. 97–98. 52.  The ECA appointments are listed in Hogan, The Marshall Plan, pp. 137–142. 53. NAM president Morris Sayre was ‘cooperating’ with Hoffman in ‘securing executive personnel for the ECA’, see ‘NAM and International Relations’, p. 32, 76/I. 54. Ibid., p. 33. 55. See ‘NAM Past and Present: Presentation made to NAM New Regional Personnel by Vada Horsch’, 225/XVI. The NAM stated that ‘extensive modifications as a result of NAM’s suggestions were made in the Bill as finally enacted’, but there is nothing to support that claim, see ‘NAM and International Relations’, p. 20 and p. 32, 76/I. The eagerness of the NAM to help with the Marshall plan is noted in Sanford, The American Business Community and the European Recovery Program, p. 72. 56. The others were Curtis E. Calder, Ralph J. Cordiner, B.E. Hutchinson, Herbert H. Schell and John R. Suman. 57.  Fortune, July 1948, 76/I. 58. See Earl Bunting to Morris Sayre, 12 July 1948, 76/I. Sargent became the NAM representative on UNESCO.

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59. ‘Suggested Scope of Activity in the International Field by the NAM’, 23 August 1948, 76/I. 60. Ibid. 61.  From Crawford ‘Memorandum on the Scope of Activity in the International Field by the NAM’ (to the Board), 17–18 September 1948, 76/I. Reprinted as a leaflet ‘International Affairs and our Internal Economy’ (1948), in 184/XII and 217/XVI. The Board, however, did not agree to divide the study of international matters into two branches as the committee advised, but created an International Relations Department (run by the Secretary) to oversee the work of the International Relations Committee, see ‘NAM Activity in International Relations’, 22 September 1948, 76/I. 62.  NAM Newsroom: ‘Year of Opportunity: An Address by Earl Bunting, President of NAM’, 14 March 1947, 201/I. 63. LaFeber et  al., The American Century, pp. 75–76. The NAM Board resisted—unlike the CED, USCC and the Republicans which supported rises in 1948—any raising of social security benefits until 1950, see Jacoby, Modern Manors, p. 219. 64. Quoted in Beder, Free Market Missionaries, p. 24.

CHAPTER 9

Conclusion: Not Quite ‘Free’ Enterprise

We have almost enshrined the words “free enterprise”—propagated by the National Association of Manufacturers and the organs of monopoly— into a national taboo beyond the reach of inquiring minds. (Democratic Senator Claude Pepper, September 1946)

The war exerted seismic changes upon all sections of American ­society, and the NAM was no exception. As war broke, this large, hierarchical and inelastic organization was ill-equipped to respond to this new challenge after being shaped by years of isolation as the country experimented with novel ways to break the cycle of depression. For years, as the self-appointed ‘guardian’ of free enterprise, the NAM sought to rally crestfallen private capitalists through ruthless devotion to the singular objective of destroying their nemesis, the New Deal. During these years of bitter and strident opposition to any government infringement on the workings of the market-place or the bolstering of organized labor in the despised Wagner Act, the posture of the NAM became increasingly rigid and negativistic. The apparent stalling of the New Deal agenda at the end of the decade only hardened the resolve of the NAM to clinch victory in its ‘war’ against the New Dealers. The fixation with beating New Deal reformism did not appreciably lessen as the prospect of a world war multiplied after September 1939. In fact, the steady mobilization of the US economy served only to heighten the fears of corporate conservatives that the emergency would strengthen © The Author(s) 2020 C. Whitham, Corporate Conservatives Go to War, Palgrave Studies in American Economic History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43908-8_9

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the government’s hold upon the economy and re-energize the flagging New Dealers. The NAM, in common with most conservatives across the country, preferred the US to remain out of the European imbroglio while at the same time broadcast the fact that in producing for defense American industrialists were happily fulfilling their ‘patriotic’ duty. Some in the NAM public relations departments, who had honed their craft in the late 1930s and were pressing for greater subtlety in portraying the business message, were seeing in the mobilization the potential to revive the reputation of private enterprise and outmaneuver their New Deal adversaries. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, it became apparent, albeit slowly, that the language of opposition born of the Depression was no longer effective in the new conditions of full war mobilization. Industrialists were thankful that in the interests of expediency Roosevelt chose not to exercise total command of the economy but instead enlisted the cooperation of the private business sector in producing for war with a raft of inducements and business-friendly appointments in the key appropriations departments. But the attempt by the NAM to influence wartime labor relations failed at the Labor-Management Conference in December 1941 as Roosevelt snubbed conservatives and favored moderate business representatives to help steer government labor policy. The track record of opposition to the New Deal had come back to haunt the NAM. Roosevelt was listening to the voice of business, but it was not that of conservatives. The president quickly packed his mobilization agencies with liberal or moderate inclined business representatives he trusted. Corporate conservatives faced continued isolation from influence over economic policy unless their tactics changed. Worse still, the regimentation of American society necessitated by waging a total war carried the potential of permanently transforming the nation in ways the New Dealers had only dreamed. The NAM was chastened by results from its regular polling that Americans were at least partially convinced by the arguments of the liberals in expressing a desire for a ‘balance’ between private and public control of the economy after the war. To combat this trend, in 1942 the NAM began a two-pronged strategy to repackage its ‘negative’ messaging of free enterprise and to embark on planning for the post-war era to compete with the already advanced schemes of the corporate liberals (some as early as 1940). The stimulus of the business post-war planners cannot be underestimated in prodding the NAM out of its stupor. The absence of a definite lead

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on post-war planning from the administration (outside of the largely ignored National Resources Planning Board), left a vacuum that corporate liberals were destined to fill. As the war progressed, the two prongs of the NAM approach became inextricable in a race with the liberals to provide a vision of the future upon which Americans could be ‘sold’. A campaign of positive messaging, borrowed directly from the liberals, was begun, founded on a vision of a post-war America of boundless prosperity framed by the principles of free, competitive enterprise. This account of the wartime activities of the NAM enriches our understanding of how organized business in the US prepared for the post-war world, a story that hitherto was based primarily on disjointed excerpts from the abundant publicity releases of the NAM or examinations of the corporate liberal/moderate planning community which was dominated by the National Planning Association, the Twentieth Century Fund and the Committee for Economic Development. What we learn is that corporate conservatives were just as concerned about post-war America as their corporate rivals, and every bit as determined in their efforts to influence post-war outcomes. It was a commitment that reached as deep into the organization as that of constructing propaganda, for which the NAM was so infamous. The various ­committees the NAM dedicated to the evaluation and formulation of policies related to post-war affairs were testament to a commitment by the conserva­ tive business sector not formerly recognized. The statement in my earlier work The Rise of the Corporate Moderates that conservatives did not take post-war planning ‘as seriously’ as the liberals and moderates therefore needs to be qualified in the light of this study, as it is correct only in a narrow sense.1 This accusation was certainly true up to the end of 1941, when the NAM first recognized the need to become involved in post-war planning. To be sure, the NAM was slow to enter the national debate about the post-war world. Even when it was nudged from its complacency out of anxiety over the headway being made by the corporate liberals, for structural and ideological reasons the NAM shunned collaboration and remained outside of the wider business planning community, preferring instead to craft its own plan for the post-war world. The NAM later conceded it had ‘little contact’ with the TCF, NPA or the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.2 For all that, the relative isolation of the NAM throughout the war nullified the logic for devising elaborate post-war schemes like the liberals and the impetus for continuing detailed post-war planning waned. Unlike their opponents,

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the NAM strategy was ultimately based less on changing government policy from within (as it was unable), and more on altering the minds of the public and legislators in a vast propaganda effort. In this regard, the NAM approach to influencing the future was even more ambitious, and perhaps even less achievable, than that of the policy-focused corporate liberals. The heavy commitment by the NAM to post-war planning was notable in other ways. It soon emerged that in embarking on the study of the post-war world—up to this point the preserve of liberal dreamers— the NAM had built for themselves something of a ‘Trojan Horse’. Detailed examination of the impact of the war on the national economy, and the wider effect of the war on the international political and economic order, faced the NAM Old Guard with some uncomfortable questions about the future shape of free enterprise. Disputes quickly arose between moderates in charge of post-war studies and hard-line conservatives over the extent of federal regulation needed after the war and the role of the US in international affairs. One such clash at Hershey revealed stiff resistance from the Old Guard which limited the recommendations of the post-war planners to little more than reiterations of NAM staples. There was always going to be a problem in trying not to appear as a ‘planner’ when the term had been so successfully hijacked by the liberals, even though ‘planning’—if only to check the post-war rise of big government—was exactly what the NAM was being compelled to do. The slow start to revitalizing the potency of the NAM in 1942 was given a major boost in 1943 with the assumption of the presidency by Frederick Crawford. The energetic and progressive-minded Crawford was instrumental in promoting a brighter, socially responsible image of corporate conservatives in what became a peak year in the NAM’s effort to impress both the American public and the business post-war planning community. Crawford furthered three elements of the NAM strategy to improve its ‘negative’ image. First, he sought to raise the profile of the NAM through offering direct engagement with the agencies of government. Second, he acknowledged the crucial role of government on the world stage in cultivating post-war prosperity at home. And third, the area in which he would be chiefly remembered, he was a loud advocate and foremost practitioner of a ‘visionary’ approach to selling a post-war world of plenty for Americans, not one beset with ‘problems’ of reconversion such as unemployment, inflation or slumps. In 1943, the NAM scaled-up its drive to market a positive image of private enterprise in the

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media and on the ground launched a series of heavy interventions in the workplace (Soldiers of Production) and various regional conferences. In this way, the publicity campaigns of the NAM were directly informed by its post-war studies, what Crawford described as a ‘must’ if they were to ultimately triumph. There was a significant and quantifiable explosion of NAM activity during 1943 as the war reached a turning point and the productive capacity of the US neared its peak. But, so far the main changes to the NAM had involved only the representation of its policies, namely its image. In terms of content, the policies of the NAM remained essentially unchanged from the dark days of the Depression. Issues related to the post-war conversion to peace stressed the immediate lifting of wartime regulatory controls, the retreat of government and the restoration of private command over the economy. The New Deal, the NAM proclaimed, was no longer needed to shepherd what all observers agreed would be a vibrant and mighty peacetime US economy. By 1943, the chief threat to private enterprise came no longer from the New Deal radicals, the NAM reckoned, but from those wishing only to ‘modify’ the system. Even so, the resilience of the NAM hierarchy to any thoroughgoing moderation of its policies—even to satisfy the heavily monitored opinion of Americans—was encouraged by the non-stop attacks of the reenergized ‘conservative coalition’ in Congress on the last vestiges of the original New Deal. Despite the efforts of Crawford and several of the moderates of the Post-War Committee, the NAM’s commitment to US involvement in international institutions after the war was therefore qualified: a ‘cautious internationalism’ was preferred, similar to that adopted by the Republican Old Guard. There was no change to labor policy, a litmus-test of ‘true’ conservatives, even though Crawford reversed the NAM decision in 1941 to stay outside of the National War Labor Board. The attempt by Crawford to engage on the government’s terms rather than carp from the outside was designed to improve the credibility of the NAM, but it would be years before the NAM substantially altered its policy toward labor. The momentum gathered under Crawford was augmented in 1944 as the NAM strove to move out of the shadows toward meaningful influence on the direction of national policy. This was an important departure for the NAM. It illustrated that the wartime ambitions of corporate conservatives stretched beyond the bounds of simple promotion and propaganda. There were serious attempts to actualize the perceived

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gains of conservatives in a number of bold initiatives launched in a year of raised political expectations for those riding high on a wave of mounting public disaffection with the government. The National Postwar Conference program was devised to counter the liberal planning community by offering business and labor an alternative forum to organize the future to that weakly provided by an indecisive administration. The calling of the International Business Conference in Rye was a big ‘first’ for the US and was still viewed by the NAM years later as ‘the most important international business conference ever staged’.3 The event mirrored, even out-maneuvered, the government’s efforts to rally world leaders around an American-led post-war order, and showcased the NAM’s conviction that private enterprise would emerge dominant in the post-war world. The commitments there to multilateral trade liberalization strengthened the internationalist segment of the NAM leadership, although on the removal of tariffs and the abrupt termination of Lend-Lease aid to the Allies the NAM was unmoved. The NAM entered 1945 confident, strident, and seeing no need to modify its policies. Many of the technical aspects of the reconversion, such as contract termination and the liquidation of government-owned property, had been settled to the liking of business by the start of the year. The withdrawal of centralized regulation of the economy and the removal of the federal protections granted to labor were, the NAM hierarchy maintained, self-evidently all that was needed to maintain the high levels of production and jobs at war’s end. Earlier polls of American opinion that favored a post-war ‘mixed economy’ were mostly ignored except for a few. Two of them, public relations gurus Walter Weisenburger and Clifford Harrison, lost their patience with the Old Guard and pushed for a radical shake-up of the entire organization based on their assessment that unless the NAM changed its ways the American public, rightly or wrongly, would turn to the government for leadership after the fast-approaching end of the war. The plea from the public relations men coincided with a challenge from the moderate Eric Johnston of the USCC over the question of post-war labor rights. After an internal clash between the moderates and the Old Guard, the NAM rejected Johnston’s invitation to endorse his ‘LaborManagement Charter’, which had the backing of the main trade union organizations the AFL and CIO, as it permanently enshrined the rights of labor granted under the Wagner Act and committed the government to underwrite protections against unemployment, sickness and old-age.

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Simultaneously, Cloud Wampler reported on his examination of the case for reorganization prompted by Weisenburger and Harrison. He recommended a streamlining of the functions of the organization around a single, strong message about the superiority of private enterprise. The consequent rationalization of the NAM structure and tightening of its focus had the effect of strengthening the hold of the Old Guard on the organization and weakening that of the moderates. The back-to-basics approach called for by Weisenburger enabled a thin­ ning of the moderates clustered in and around the committees looking at post-war affairs, which were broken down and placed under tighter central control. As for its publicity, greater sums of money were channeled to its information campaigns but in terms of content there was no immediate sign of compromise to the forces of accommodation.4 The Old Guard refused to countenance moderation of its policy on labor, and scored successes on limiting the extension of the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act (a vehicle of trade liberalization), and pushed for the rapid termination of wartime controls. It is therefore an overstatement to claim, as Workman did, that by 1945 ‘programmatic changes had moved the NAM marginally toward the political center’.5 Actually, the recalibration of the NAM’s post-war stance toward the ‘center’ was slower and even more ‘marginal’. Workman is supported by Wall, who suggested the Charter episode broke the ‘deadlock’ between ‘pragmatists and conservatives’ in the NAM to allow a ‘moderate’ strategy to be rolled out at the Labor-Management Conference in November 1945.6 This overstates the degree to which the NAM materially shifted between the period of March 1945 and the ascent of Taft-Hartley in 1946 when its famed ‘modification’—which more accurately described the eventual policy recasting by the NAM—on labor took place. After all, in that spell the NAM was better prepared and faced inferior forces in a divided labor movement, weak federal leadership and a tired public. At least some of the explanation for the inflexibility of the NAM in the immediate post-war period was the palpable shift of the American public to the right. That the political tide had drifted firmly in the direction of corporate conservatives by the end of the war was plain. When it eventually transpired, from a business point of view the eagerly awaited reconversion took place smoothly. Employment and production levels were high enough to prevent any post-war slump. Profits rose and dislocations were minor. As Waddell asserted, the close alliance of military and corporate officials in Washington had effectively

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blocked a ‘planned approach’ to the transition period and ensured that government regulation of the economy which had featured in the mobilization ‘would not be projected into the post-war era’.7 However, the main trades unions remained unsure about their post-war ranking, and lost faith in the potency of a hitherto friendly administration to defend their interests. Not surprisingly, union leaders turned away from the ‘alternative’ platform of Postwar Conferences erected by the NAM, which never rose above tokenistic displays of unity, from either side. Organized labor chose instead to exercise its will where it was strongest. A string of bitter strikes was harshly met by the new President, Harry Truman, who, having inherited few executive instruments with which to manage the demobilization, was also forced to relent in continuing price controls thanks to a resurgent conservative Congress. The failure of Truman to reconcile the interests of business and labor, especially after the ­Labor-Management Conference, at that critical juncture in the transition from war to peace further emboldened conservatives who, faced with an ineffective administration and a divided trade union movement (the AFL and CIO drifted apart), managed to push through legislation which unraveled much of the Wagner Act. The NAM recognized that the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, which did not go as far as many conservatives would have liked in emasculating labor, was the best chance it had to influence post-war labor policy.8 In so doing, the NAM was forced to make a concession, albeit minor, on the responsibility of government in collective bargaining. It was a decision to change course only, as Gable phrased it, when ‘further obstinance might prove disastrous’.9 Although it eventually broached a limited moderation of its fabled stance on labor, in hindsight, the earlier decision by the NAM to reject Johnston’s moderate Charter—which was far softer on the rights of labor—worked in its favor. The NAM had finally, as its Economic Principles Commission recommended after three years of deliberation, ‘learned to live with reasonable government regulation’, but only because it was confident, by 1946, that it was able to limit such regulation within ‘proper bounds’.10 As this examination has shown, the principle of accommodation had been openly acknowledged and actively promoted by members of the Post-War Committee, yet mostly rejected by the NAM leadership, years before that astute pronouncement. The area where the NAM had leaned to a greater degree in the direction of the moderates, thanks again mainly to the efforts of the P ­ ost-War Committee, was that of international relations. As the political and

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economic architecture of the post-war world, which had been so painstakingly crafted by the US government, lurched toward implementation, the NAM claimed some success in helping to shape it. In 1945, the NAM was outwitted over passage of the Bretton Woods Agreement (in particular the objectionable International Monetary Fund), by the corporate moderate upstarts in the CED. Still, after a long slog the NAM was able to gain representation in the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations (a position of no interest to the CED which already enjoyed the ear of government), rally business support for the Marshall plan against a skeptical Congress, and help to veto the International Trade Organization. Yet these feats, it seemed, were as much a testament to the conservative drift of the nation after 1945 as they were of the finely honed craft and dexterity of the NAM policy team. The chief task for the NAM, as Henthorn submitted, was then to ‘solidify’ the rightward swing of the nation.11 So, just how successful was the NAM in restoring the power and influence of America’s free enterprise capitalism? As its national guardian, the NAM had steadfastly championed private capitalism over public from the lows of the Great Depression to the highs of the post-war boom. It had devoted huge resources on a level never before seen in resurrecting the status of American private enterprise in its struggle to gain freedom from regulation by the state. In the end, the stature and reputation of American private business were enhanced greatly, but by a combination of several processes: the waging of industrialized warfare, the political exploits of Congressional conservatives, the disunity of organized labor and the decision-making of Roosevelt himself. To that dense mix of political, military, social and economic trends was added the tenacious input of the NAM. Though impossible to accurately measure, it is reasonable to suggest that the sheer scale of the NAM’s multimedia assault on the minds of workers, managers and legislators, the loudness of its relentless promotion of a brighter-packaged free enterprise future—indeed the great blanket of background noise this would have generated across the nation in support of private capitalism—served an important function in generating a climate of respectability for business and generally boosting its reputation in wartime America. As Democratic Senator Claude Pepper commented sourly in 1946, the NAM was a major force behind consecrating the phrase ‘free enterprise’ as a ‘national taboo beyond the reach of inquiring minds’.12 The NAM was certainly not alone in promoting the free enterprise or pro-business message during the war.13 But with its access to a vast reservoir of funds—far greater than its rivals in the TCF,

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NPA and the CED14—plus links to a multitude of publicity outlets and a willingness to experiment across a broad range of media, most observers recognized the NAM as an eminent marketer of ‘free enterprise’. As Beder acknowledged, despite tending to be ‘heavy-handed and condescending’ in its messaging, by 1950 ‘most people, particularly the middle classes, had come to accept big business as an essential part of American life’.15 Certainly, the post-war legacy of the NAM’s publicity campaigns has been recognized. Tedlow reckoned that the NAM’s public relations efforts helped to forge a ‘major weapon in the defense of business’ and provided the employer with a ‘non-violent means of expressing himself’.16 Fones-Wolf claimed that after the war businesses ‘followed the lead’ of the NAM by expanding their community relations programs and ‘more companies sponsored radio programs after the war than before it’.17 The complexities of waging a total war also gifted opportunities for conservatives to exploit in advancing their material interests and in erasing several remnants of the New Deal era. Powerful business figures were given command over essential features of the mobilization and private interests were entrusted to organize the machines and the ‘soldiers’ of production. The mobilization greatly improved the health of business, especially the industrial giants, and served as a vast proving ground for the efficiency of private capitalism.18 Total annual corporate profits went from $7.2 billion in 1939 to $26.5 billion in 1944, with b ­ efore-tax profit rates averaging 22 percent between 1939 and1945 compared to 9.8 percent in 1939.19 Also, scholars have traced in the mobilization for World War II the harbinger of the ‘military-industrial complex’ of close partnership between the military and industrial suppliers of fighting material which endures to this day.20 Indeed, as we have seen, the impact of the mobilization spread far beyond the consolidation of the giant firms and the institutionalization of military production. The countless ‘wonders’ of production cast a wider ripple upon the social, cultural and political fabric of the nation which also favored the American business class. Importantly, the mobilization nourished public discontent with government intrusion in everyday life which bolstered Congressional critics in their drive to revoke core elements of the New Deal. Further, as the war ended, the Taft-Hartley Act clawed back some of the power private enterprise had lost to organized labor under the Wagner Act, the ‘GI Bill of Rights’ was not generalized to the rest of the population as liberals had planned, and the International Trade Organization was scrapped.

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For all that, in the ‘war’ against the New Deal, the NAM and its partners in Congress had managed only to fight the government to a standstill.21 The New Deal experiment in social reform and regulation of the economy had not been vanquished, only arrested. Important vestiges of it remained at least into the early post-war era, such as in the rights of labor to collectively bargain, strike and invoke the union shop. Meanwhile, fiscal regulation along the lines advanced by economist John Maynard Keynes, remained a tool for stimulating the economy ‘without coercing its private institutions’ which no subsequent president would relinquish.22 Moreover, unavoidable global responsibilities, many of which firmly accepted by conservatives, vested substantial government interests in the military establishment, especially as the arms race gathered pace, which ensured a ‘big government’ of high public spending and large deficits in the US for the foreseeable future. Diamond observed that despite this by the 1950s American conservatives had reconciled themselves to living with a strong state, without ‘splitting at the seams’, as the only means to eradicate communism at home and prevent Soviet expansion abroad.23 Waddell agreed, arguing that conservatives were satisfied that the ‘military-state’ that replaced the New Deal after the war ‘substantially increased’ the power of the US government to intervene abroad ‘while containing its ability to intervene domestically’.24 It was not until the 1980s when, in response to another severe economic downturn, the US government chose to loosen, rather than tighten, its regulation of the economy to deliver recovery that private enterprise was granted some of the ‘freedoms’ for which it had longed.25 A strong state, nevertheless, remains in the US to this day, and capitalism has faced new crises, but American conservatives have succeeded in the decades since World War II to avoid any reincarnations of the New Deal and effectively narrow ‘the horizon of alternatives’ to a free enterprise system.26 In that respect, the wartime drift toward ‘conservatism’ in the US was less an affirmation of the credo of free enterprise than, as Brinkley and Waddell have persuasively argued, a wider rejection by Americans of any further experimentation in social liberalism.27 The essentially conformist orientation of the American mood at the end of the war was neatly expressed by Winkler: ‘Their vision of the future included no brave and bold new world, but a revived and refurbished version of the world they had once known’.28 Unlike so many other nations touched by the conflict, the war did not radicalize Americans. No new parties were created, nor calls for fundamental change heard. Women, African-Americans, the elderly and the poor would have to wait decades for meaningful

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advances in their rights and standing as citizens. What resulted from the wartime clash of ideals born of the Great Depression was a vision of the future that embraced what Wall expressed as ‘compromise and consensus’, a notion which excluded the ‘purist’ models of the liberals and of the conservatives.29 As a far-sighted journalist wrote in April 1943: ‘no one expects a swing back to “the old days”, back to the 20s. Many of the basic reforms of the New Deal will stick and be permanent…but the GENERAL veering is toward what might be called “orthodoxy”’.30 Similarly, the notion of a ‘postwar ascendancy of business’, such as expressed by Workman, must also be qualified.31 In that regard, the wartime performance of the NAM is instructive. The NAM was rightly an important contributor to any rise in the post-war status of American business, having helped to at least generate an atmosphere of public acceptance of the value of private enterprise in lifting the economy and in severing its damning association with the Great Depression. But as this account shows, it was events largely outside the control of corporate conservatives, namely the gradual movement of the nation toward the right, that eventually benefited the NAM, whose wartime stance on policy— as compared to presentation—was characterized by inertia rather than activism. Changing direction for the NAM was never going to be easy. Unlike the many other business groups who were not as large and not as answerable to a paying membership, altering the course of the NAM was like turning a mighty cargo ship on a stormy sea. The NAM was very hierarchical, and its committees were formed predominantly from its membership, that is from its own ranks, unlike other business groups which co-opted far more outside expertise. The organization also physically grew to new heights during the war which improved its claims to legitimacy but amplified its problems over effective d ­ ecision-making. In terms of actual membership, of course, the NAM represented but a fraction of all US industrial concerns. Gable and Cleveland disagreed over the precise figures, but neither placed the NAM membership as representing at its peak better than 6–8 percent of all US manufacturers.32 Given the numerical size of the sector, and the fact that most businessmen were members of local associations rather than national ones, the percentage recruited by the NAM was still impressive. Besides, the NAM was able to speak for a wider spectrum of American businessmen using the extensive array of contacts and subsidiary channels it had established—such as the NIIC—over the decades. As Gable contended, the spike in NAM membership during campaigns of opposition to trades

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unions indicated that the anti-labor stance of the ‘active minority’ of big business representatives was acceptable to the passive majority as ‘the most desirable method of achieving industrial and political goals’.33 Arguably, the sensitivity of the NAM toward labor rights was in no small part due to the fact it represented large manufacturing concerns most vulnerable to the actions of industrial unions.34 Structural constraints such as those compounded the organization’s ideological rigidity to place the NAM crucially behind events rather than in front. As one of the earliest scholars of the NAM observed, when the organization eventually ‘did strike out in a new direction, the path was already well worn’.35 The improved standing of business in the post-war era, therefore, was not universally applicable. Restricted to lobbying and waging vast public information drives, the NAM had no clout where it really mattered, namely in government. Negativism and obstructionism remained for the NAM as the chief theme in the political realm in the 1940s much as it had in the 1930s, despite the best efforts of the moderates and the modernizers and the burnish of a multi-million-dollar public relations campaign. Those in the NAM who were open to change, and who mainly coalesced around post-war studies, made an impression on the organization but were unable to significantly breach the ideological hold of the Old Guard. Where they did, such as over labor, the shift was too little and, as the fight over Taft-Hartley showed, too late to raise the national stature of the organization. In fact, even with this first post-war legislative victory the influence of the NAM was indirect. And on the late embrace of a narrow internationalism, where the impact of the moderators was perhaps strongest and at least superficially improved the standing of the NAM with the White House, the rejection of the International Trade Organization confirmed that the roots of ‘traditional’ conservatism in the organization ran very deep. As became apparent, it was those business groups that were willing to open a two-way dialogue with government agencies and their representatives—the corporate liberals and moderates—and not the corporate conservatives who were the main beneficiaries of the post-war ‘ascendancy’, and for whom the label more appropriately fits. Ultimately, despite some late adjustments to its traditional line which acknowledged the permanence of organized labor within the political economy and the enlarged duties and responsibilities of government in directing a ‘superpower’ nation, the NAM finished the war still isolated from the organs of influence over national policy—a far cry from its 1920s heyday. The moderates, such as in the CED and the

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NPA, who were willing to accommodate New Deal reformism and articulated a national consensus on the balance between government, business and labor much earlier in the war than the NAM, were now the poster-boys of corporate interests in Washington.36 As well as heading the administration of the Marshall plan, CED members filled the benches of the Council of Economic Advisers (established under the Murray Bill) until the 1970s, and held top posts in the Truman and Eisenhower administrations, including chairman of the Federal Reserve and Secretary of the Treasury.37 Conservatives, on the other hand, took years to achieve the ideological and organizational clarity of the moderates. As Diamond concluded, until the mid-1950s the American right ‘was more of an intellectual ideological current than a proper social movement’.38 The three ‘principles’ which had loosely bound American conservatives since the Depression— small government, federalism and an ‘America first’ foreign policy— were severely compromised by war’s end. The return of Truman in the 1948 election underscored the perennial weakness of conservatives as a political force in America, even if many of their values and principles were shared by Democrats. Similarly, the wartime Republican successes in the non-presidential elections were in hindsight less an endorsement of conservatism than a ‘protest vote’ against the sitting administration, a logical outcome in a two-party system.39 In the end, the Republican Party’s response was to lean further toward the political center, which brought them success in the 1952 election with Eisenhower’s ‘Modern Republicanism’. The NAM, conversely, refused to moderate its stance any further. Having lost the initiative to the moderates, there seemed nowhere else for the NAM to go except further to the right. By the early 1950s, the moderate voices in the NAM which ended the war reconciled to cooperation with organized labor, federal intervention in the economy and internationalism, were gone. Presaged by the anti-communist stipulations of the Taft-Hartley Act, the NAM maintained its attacks on a divided labor movement in an atmosphere of rising hostility toward the left and its liberal bedfellows by virtue of the Cold War. Membership of the NAM dipped after 1947 and did not revive until the 1950s, and it was not until the Labor-Management Relations Act of 1959 was passed after a long campaign on the ‘abuses’ of union power that corporate conservatives scored their first legislative victory since Taft-Hartley.40 In the NAM, the ideological isolation of conservatives was reflected in

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the presence of its ‘silent’ partner, émigré economist Ludwig von Mises, who, unemployable since arriving in the US, had loitered in the backrooms of NAM committees throughout the war. In fact, the wartime leadership of the NAM showed little interest in embracing a rounded philosophy that might underpin its actions and was content to bend into service any theory that would validate its simplistic brand of ‘free enterprise’. One such example occurred in April 1945 when the NAM excitedly distributed to its members an unsophisticated, pure government-bashing Reader’s Digest summary of the free-market tome The Road to Serfdom (published in the fall of 1944 in the US), much to the chagrin of its author, Mises protégé Ludwig von Hayek.41 NAM heavyweights such as DuPont funded splinter ‘think-tanks’ like the Foundation for Economic Education (1946) and the American Heritage Foundation (1947) to propagate the free enterprise message,42 but it was well into the 1950s before Mises and Hayek reached notoriety after forming the right-wing intellectual group the Mont Pelerin Society.43 This phenomenon was traced by Burch who identified the rise of ultra-conservatives in the leadership of the NAM in the late 1940s who had been relatively quiet while the war was on. Ultra-conservatives came to the fore in the NAM just as the fifteen-year domination of big business over the organization gave way to small- and medium-sized companies and the nation succumbed to rabid anti-communism. The new fight against the Soviet Union offered ideological clarity around which conservatives could unite. Burch claimed that by 1950 these factions achieved a majority of the seats on the Executive Committee and the big business hold over the 150-man Board had fallen to less than sixty seats.44 Notably, this a­ nti-communist narrative was entirely absent from the NAM’s wartime assessments of the Soviet Union, which accented the great post-war investment and trading potential of the vast war-torn nation. Smelling blood, employers grew in confidence and right-wing groups began to surface using a­ nti-communism as a new weapon to achieve their goals. The NAM, in its relentless, dogmatic and often crude advocacy of conservative values, had played an important part in developing the p ­ ost-war consensus that halted the New Deal experiment and elevated the corporate moderates—not the corporate conservatives—to center-stage. The political rewards for their tenacity, therefore, were not immediately forthcoming. Conservatives, in Congress and in the NAM, continued their journey of soul-searching, unable to make significant inroads into the

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post-war orthodoxy of a ‘mixed economy’ for decades to follow. The war against the New Deal had ended in a tie: liberals were prevented from emasculating private enterprise while conservatives were faced with the consolidation of labor within a stronger state. As its website makes plain, time has not diluted the NAM’s crusade for an America based on ‘free enterprise, competitiveness, individual freedom and equal opportunity’,45 waged along battle lines that were drawn during, and which remain essentially unaltered since, the pivotal span of World War II.

Notes







1. Whitham, Rise of the Corporate Moderates, p. 185. It was said in the context of filling the gap in government planning. 2. From ‘NAM and International Relations’, p. 36, 76/I. The NAM also listed the policy think-tanks the Foreign Policy Association and the Council on Foreign Relations as groups it had no dealings with. The only groups in the US it considered as fellow ‘business groups’ were the United States Associates (US Section of the International Chamber of Commerce), USCC, NFTC and the US Inter-American Council (US Section of Inter-American Council of Commerce and Production). 3.  ‘NAM Past and Present: Presentation made to NAM New Regional Personnel by Vada Horsch’, 225/XVI. 4. In 1945, the NAM had a total income of $3,770,973, over 40 percent of which was obtained from its public relations program; figures from ‘NAM Membership—Number and Dues’, 225/XVI. Percentage from Cleveland, ‘NAM: Spokesman for Industry?’, p. 365. The remainder was from membership dues. By 1946, members subscribed 45 percent more than they did in 1945 ($2.3 million) for NAM publicity, and in 1947 NAM spent $4.6 million of which $3.2 million was devoted to public relations. Gable noted that the $3.2 million included ‘direct member services’ but that this largely involved ‘internal’ public relations expenditure; see Gable, ‘NAM: Influential Lobby or Kiss of Death?’, p. 283. These estimates are backed up by the documents: see ‘NAM Membership— Number and Dues’, 225/XVI. 5. Workman, ‘Manufacturing Power’, p. 293. 6. Wall, Inventing the “American Way”, pp. 130–131. 7. Waddell, The War Against the New Deal, p. 129. 8. Burch noted the NAM played an ‘underrated role’ in securing passage of the Taft-Hartley Act; Burch, ‘The NAM as an Interest Group’, p. 130. 9. Gable, ‘A Political Analysis of an Employers Association’, p. 151. 10.  The American Individual Enterprise System, p. 1028.



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11. Henthorn, From Submarines to Suburbs, p. 232. 12. Quoted in Wilson, Creative Destruction, p. 270. 13.  The War Advertising Council, formed in 1942, was composed of the nation’s foremost advertising agencies and was a foremost exponent of business messaging during the war, albeit of a ‘moderate’ variety closely aligned to that of the CED; see Robert Griffith, ‘The Selling of America: The Advertising Council and American Politics, 1942–1960’, Business History Review, Vol. 53, No. 3 (Autumn 1983), pp. 388–412. 14.  These groups performed on far smaller budgets: $250,000 (CED); $130,000 (TCF); and $100,000 (NPA). See Whitham, Rise of the Corporate Moderates, pp. 70, 80 and 86 respectively. 15. Beder referenced a 1951 poll that showed 76 percent of respondents approved of big business compared with 10 percent who disapproved; Beder, Free Market Missionaries, p. 59. 16.  Tedlow, ‘The NAM and Public Relations during the New Deal’, pp. 44–45. In fact, NAM’s use of public relations marked the ‘coming of age’ of the profession (p. 40). 17.  Fones-Wolf, ‘Corporations and Radio Broadcasting, 1934–1954’, pp. 245–246. Wilson did not mention the NAM by name, but stated that the portrayal of the economy by ‘business propaganda’, which ‘distorted the realities of mobilization, concealing the substantial contributions of public actors…proved remarkably influential’; Wilson, Creative Destruction, pp. 93–94. Some businesses used advertising to sell ideology during the war when they could no longer advertise the products they once sold; see Jordan Braverman, To Hasten the Homecoming: How Americans Fought World War II through the Media (Lanham: Madison Books, 1996), p. 246. 18. The du Ponts, like so many large NAM contributors, earned huge profits during the war and greatly enhanced their corporation’s post-war standing, producing 55 percent of all US gunpowder used, and large quantities of its paints, dyes, anti-freeze, DDT, rubber and rayon yarn; see ­Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands, p. 24. 19. From Koistinen, Arsenal of World War II, p. 437. High profit rates were also experienced by non-war industries that catered for the domestic market, including small businesses. Still, the NAM early complained that government rules to limit profiteering meant that industry ‘will lack sufficient reserves at the end of the war to convert to peacetime production’; see One Year After Pearl Harbor (New York: NAM, December 1942), p. 59. Copy in 288/I. 20. Staples include Benjamin F. Cooling (ed), War, Business and American Society: Historical Perspectives on the Military-Industrial Complex (New York: National University Publications, 1977); Paul A. C. Koistinen, The

318  C. WHITHAM Military-Industrial Complex: A Historical Perspective (Westport: Praeger, 1980); and Gregory Hooks, Forging the Military-Industrial Complex: World War Two’s Battle of the Potomac (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1991). Also William Steinert Hill, Jr., ‘The Business Community and National Defense: Corporate Leaders and the Military, 1943–1950’ (PhD dissertation, Stanford University, 1980). 21.  Sherry claimed that during the war Congress functioned ‘more as an arena for conflict than as a decisive force itself’; Sherry, In the Shadow of War, p. 74. For Koistinen, ‘the New Deal as a reform movement was largely spent’ after 1938; Koistinen, Arsenal of World War II, p. 514. The rights of labor, too, ‘would not expand much beyond the beachheads established during the war’; Sparrow, Warfare State, p. 249 (and detailed through pp. 247–252). 22. Sherry, In the Shadow of War, p. 74. 23. Diamond, Roads to Dominion, p. 35. Wilkins concluded that after 1949 US industry charted its course ‘far more conscious of problems of national security than ever in peacetime history’; Wilkins, The Maturing of Multinational Enterprise, p. 285. 24. Waddell, ‘Corporate Influence and World War II: Resolving the New Deal Political Stalemate’, p. 250. 25.  The attempt failed, as lower taxes and supply-side policies did not prevent President Ronald Reagan from spending on the military and building up the nation’s biggest ever deficit; see Hebert Stein, Presidential Economics: The Making of Economic Policy from Roosevelt to Reagan and Beyond (Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 1988 edition). Also Burgin, The Great Persuasion, pp. 206–207. The NAM today claims that its ‘Revitalization Agenda’ was a ‘major part of Reagan’s economic program; see http://www.nam.org/ about. 26. Burgin, The Great Persuasion, p. 216. 27.  Waddell blamed America’s unique institutional weaknesses, powerful class forces and a ‘dominant ideology that tends to restrict the legitimate exercise of state power to narrow parameters’ for weakening attempts at serious reform; Waddell, The War against the New Deal, pp. 161–162; Brinkley concluded that even though it could be argued that full-blown social liberalism was not given a chance, American liberals were anyway happy to settle for limited gains once the economy was prosperous and which required only slight ‘correction’; see Brinkley, The End of Reform, pp. 270–271. 28. Winkler, Home Front USA, p. 114. 29. Wall, Inventing the “American Way”, p. 5.

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319

30. From W. M. Kiplinger’s Washington Letter, quoted in Klein, A Call to Arms, p. 636 (emphasis in original). 31. Workman, ‘Manufacturing Power’, p. 317. 32. See Cleveland, ‘NAM: Spokesman for Industry?’, p. 366; and Gable, ‘NAM: Influential Lobby or Kiss of Death’, p. 257. They designated 1947–1948 as NAM’s ‘peak’ year of nearly 17,000 members, but official NAM documents suggest it was actually 1946–1947, with a membership approaching 16,000; see ‘NAM Membership—Number and Dues’, 225/XVI. 33.  Gable, ‘NAM: Influential Lobby or Kiss of Death?’, p. 260; and Cleveland, ‘NAM: Spokesman for Industry?’, p. 356. Many of the big corporate firms were well aware of their interests, and were in Rockoff’s words ‘not good soldiers’. Rather, ‘the giants were wary adversaries of the government, cognizant of the political as well as narrowly economic constraints they faced’; Hugh Rockoff, ‘The Response of the Giant Corporations to Wage and Price Control in World War II’, Journal of Economic History, Vol. 41, No. 1 (March 1981), p. 128. 34. That point is raised by Hogan, who distinguished between the interests of what he called ‘labor-intensive’ and ‘capital-intensive’ firms in The Marshall Plan, pp. 10–11. That distinction does not easily fit the CED and the NPA, for instance, which had several ‘labor-intensive’ firms represented in their leadership, just as the NAM had those which were ‘capital-intensive’. 35. Gable, ‘A Political Analysis of an Employers Association’, p. 151. He added: ‘The Association’s perception of social needs was generally five to ten years, sometimes more, behind political and economic developments…Belatedly it adjusted to an evolving environment’. Also Burch on NAM’s limitations because of its rigidity in ‘The NAM as an Interest Group’, p. 130. 36. As Fones-Wolf put it, ‘the CED’s more moderate message predominated’ over that of the NAM; Fones-Wolf, Selling Free Enterprise, p. 9. 37. See Whitham, Rise of the Corporate Moderates, p. 183; and Schriftgiesser, Business Comes of Age, pp. 161–162. Eisenhower was a CED trustee in 1950. 38.  Diamond added that: ‘At this stage, conservatives knew which state policies and political forces they opposed, but they had only begun to articulate alternatives’; Diamond, Roads to Dominion, p. 35. 39. For a discussion see Roland Young, Congressional Politics in the Second World War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1956). 40.  See ‘NAM Membership—Number and Dues’, 225/XVI; and ‘The National Association of Manufacturers: Historical Highlights’ (circa 1978), 225/XVI. In fact, trade unions managed to grow after the war despite Taft-Hartley. 41. Covered by Burgin, The Great Persuasion, pp. 87–89. Hayek complained of the many simplistic renditions of his book, which became an influential treatise. An excited NAM dispatched the Digest article free-of-charge.

320  C. WHITHAM 42. On the formation of the FEE, to which Mises was appointed economic adviser, and its later association with the ultra-right John Birch Society in the late 1950s, see Beder, Free Market Missionaries, pp. 45–47. 43. See Diamond, Roads to Dominion, p. 27 and p. 29. The Mont Pelerin Society was established in 1947 as a gathering place for supporters of market-based economics; see Burgin, The Great Persuasion, p. 8; on Mises see pp. 56–57; on establishing the Society see Chapter 4. 44. See Burch, ‘The NAM as an Interest Group’, pp. 105–108. Power gradually shifted back to big business again in the late 1950s-early 1960s. Burch wrote of a ‘coalition’ between large family-controlled corporations with strong laissez-faire credentials and smaller like-minded companies which gave the NAM its ‘peculiar ultra-right bias in the first half or more of the postwar period’ (pp. 128–129). That analysis is confirmed by Soffer who argued the NAM ‘became dominated by anti-communists on the far right’ during the 1950s, and by 1958 was dominated by an ultraconservative clique of small (less than 500 employees) to ­ medium-sized family-controlled manufacturers, such as Robert H. W. Welch (candy manufacturer). Welch went on to found the far-right John Birch Society in 1958; Soffer, ‘The NAM and the Militarization of American Conservatism’, p. 777 and p. 781. Also, Jacoby, Modern Manors, p. 232 for right-wing links with post-war NAM. For a recent discussion see Jennifer Delton, ‘The Triumph of Social Responsibility in the National Association of Manufacturers in the 1950s’, in Richard John and Kim Phillips-Fein (eds), Capital Gains: Business and Politics in Twentieth Century America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), pp. 188–190. 45.  http://www.nam.org/about.

Appendix

:

Members of the NAM Active in Post-war Planning

Ackerman, A C

Ackshand Knitting Company WTC Subcte on International Trade Relations (1945)

Adams, C E

Air Reduction Company, Inc. WTC Subcte on International Trade Relations (1945)

Airey, John

King-Seeley Corporation VC PWC (1942); Steering Cte (1942); chair Transition Subcommittee of PWC (1943); NAM Board (1943); VC War Controls Termination Committee (1944)

Albright, Horace M

United States Potash Company WTC Subcte on International Trade Relations (1945); Committee on International Economic Relations (1947); International Relations Committee (1948)

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 C. Whitham, Corporate Conservatives Go to War, Palgrave Studies in American Economic History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43908-8

321

322  Appendix Allina, Joseph O

Thonet Brothers, Inc. NAM Corporation Peacetime Planning Committee (Guides) (1943); WTC Subcte on International Cooperation (1945)

Anderson, A B

Nagel-Chase Manufacturing Company Transition Period Subcte (1943); War Time Controls Group; War Controls Termination Committee (1944)

Anderson, William D

Bibb Manufacturing Corporation PWC (1943); NAM Board (1943)

Anderson, Edwin J

Goebel Brewing Company War Controls Termination Committee (1944)

Angle, W Mackenzie

Stromberg-Carlson Co. NAM Board (1943); International Relations Committee (1948)

Appleton, W C

American Viscose Corporation PWC (1943); International Relations Subcte of PWC (1943)

Armour, G L

American Aniline Products, Inc. International Transportation and Communications Subcommittee of WTC (1945)

Armstrong, C Dudley

Armstrong Cork Company Committee on International Economic Relations (1947)

Arthur, H B

Swift & Company Subdivision to Formulate Principles for Post War World of International Relations Subcte of PWC (1942); Advisor PWC (1944); Advisory Group WTC (1945); Advisory Group to Committee on International Economic Relations (1947); Advisory Group on International Relations (1947)

Appendix

Arutunof, A

  323

Reda Pump Company Committee on International Economic Relations (1947)

Baker, Melvin H

National Gypsum Company PWC (1942); NAM Board (1943); Transition Period Subcte (1943)

Baker, I F

Westinghouse Electric International Company Advisor PWC (1944); Advisory Group on Specific Foreign Trade Problems (1945); Advisory Group WTC (1945); Advisory Group to Committee on International Economic Relations (1947); Advisory Group on International Relations (1948)

Baker, F Cecil

American Potash & Chemical Corporation Advisor PWC (1944)

Baker, H S

Producers Cotton Oil Company International Relations Committee (1948)

Balgooyen, Henry W

American & Foreign Power Company, Inc. Advisory Group on Specific Foreign Trade Problems; Advisory Group WTC (1945); Advisory Group to Committee on International Economic Relations (1947); Advisory Group on International Relations (1948)

Bancroft, L E

California Portland Cement Company PWC (1943)

Barbour, Frederick K

The Linen Thread Company WTC Subcte on International Trade Relations (1945); Committee on International Economic Relations (1947); International Relations Committee (1948)

Bard, F N

Barco Manufacturing Company Economic Textbook Committee (1942); VC Transition Period Subcommittee (1943)

324  Appendix Barker, Walter L

Improved Paper Machinery Corporation PWC (1943)

Batts, Arthur

The Carborundum Company WTC Subcte on International Financial Relations (1945)

Bauer, P F Bauer

Allis-Chalmers Manufacturing Corporation PWC (1942); Transition Period Subcte (1943)

Beaird, J Pat

J B Beaird Company, Inc. Committee on International Economic Relations (1947)

Beaver, H C

Worthington Pump and Machinery Corporation Transition Period Subcommittee (1943)

Bechhold, Seigfried

North American Canning Company WTC Subcte on International Cooperation (1945); Committee on International Economic Relations (1947); International Relations Committee (1948)

Beesemeyer, C S

General Petroleum Corporation of California WTC Subcte on International Trade Relations (1945)

Beitzel, George B

Pennsylvania Salt Manufacturing Corporation PWC (1942); Economic Textbook Committee (1943)

Bell, W B

American Cyanamid Corporation WTC Subcte on International Financial Relations (1945)

Bell, V C

General Aviation Equipment Company, Inc. International Relations Committee (1947)

Bellack, R F

Fox River Paper Corporation Transition Period Subcommittee(1943)

Appendix

Bellamore, D H

  325

Republic Steel Corporation Advisor PWC (1944); Advisory Group on Specific Foreign Trade Problems (1945); Advisory Group WTC (1945); Advisory Group to Committee on International Economic Relations (1947); Advisory Group on International Relations (1948)

Benjamin, Edward B

Bay Chemical Company, Inc. PWC (1942); WTC Subcte on International Trade Relations (1945); International Relations Committee (1948)

Berlin, B S

Heinemann Electric Company PWC (1942)

Bissinger, Paul

Bissinger & Company Committee on International Economic Relations (1947)

Black, S Duncan

The Black & Decker Manufacturing Company PWC Steering Cte (1942); chair PWC Subcte Practical Program for Industry (1942); NAM Board (1943)

Blood, Howard E

Borge-Warner Corporation Chair Post-War Purchasing Power Subcte of PWC (1942); chair Distribution Subcte of PWC (1943)

Boggs, Conda P

Sylvania Electric Products, Inc. PWC (1942)

Bond, A D

A P Green Fire Brick Company International Relations Committee (1948)

Boos, L C

United States Rubber Export Company WTC Subcte on International Financial Relations (1945); Committee on International Economic Relations (1947); International Relations Committee (1948)

326  Appendix Borden, E B

Borden Manufacturing Company War Controls Termination Committee (1944)

Bowen, M W

Socony-Vacuum Oil Company International Business Conference (1944); Advisory Group on Specific Foreign Trade Problems (1945); Advisory Group WTC (1945); Advisory Group on International Relations (1948)

Bower, Marvin

McKinsey Company NAM Corporation Peacetime Planning Committee (Guides) (1943)

Boyle, Harlow B

Boyle & Company Committee on International Economic Relations (1947)

Brace, Maxwell

Brace-Mueller-Huntley Inc. War Controls Termination Committee (1944)

Brainard, Elliott E

Lock Joint Pipe Company Committee on International Economic Relations (1947)

Briggs, T L

Business Counselor NAM Corporation Peacetime Planning Committee (Guides) (1943)

Brile, L M

Fairmont Aluminum Company Committee on International Economic Relations (1947); International Relations Committee (1948)

Brinley, Charles E

Baldwin Locomotive Works PWC (1943); NAM Board (1943)

Bristol, Henry P

Bristol-Myers Company International Relations Committee (1948)

Broughton, C F

Wamsutta Mills WTC Subcte on International Trade Relations (1945)

Appendix

Brown, Donaldson

  327

General Motors Corporation National VP NAM (1942)

Brown, Lewis H

Johns-Manville Corporation VC PWC (1943)

Brown, Millard D

Continental Mills, Inc. Chair Subdivision to Study Certain Practical Problems of International Relations Subcte of PWC (1942); VC WTC Subcte on International Trade Relations (1945); Steering Cte WTC (1945)

Brown, D K

Neenah Paper Company Committee on International Economic Relations (1947); International Relations Committee (1948)

Brown, J Harrison

A P Green Fire Brick Company Committee on International Economic Relations (1947)

Brown, Gordon D

Douglas Aircraft Company NAM Corporation Peacetime Planning Committee (Guides) (1943)

Bullis, Harry A

General Mills VC PWC (1943); NAM Board (1943); WTC Subcte on International Cooperation (1945); also CED

Burke, Charles T

Swift Lubricator Company, Inc. WTC Subcte on International Financial Relations (1945)

Burke, W F

Scovill Manufacturing Company Advisory Group on International Relations (1948)

Burt, Clayton R

Nile-Bemont-Pond Company PWC (1943); NAM Board (1943)

Bush, Lester C

National Glove Company Committee on International Economic Relations (1947)

328  Appendix Butterworth, Jr., H W

H W Butterworth & Sons Company PWC (1943)

Cable, D A

United States Quarry Tile Company WTC Subcte on International Trade Relations (1945)

Calder, Alexander

Union Bag & Paper Company PWC (1942)

Calder, Curtis E

Electric Bond & Share Co./American & Foreign Power Co. Chair WTC Subcte on International Financial Relations (1945); VC Committee on International Economic Relations (1947); Chair International Relations Committee (1948); Crawford Committee (1948)

Caldmeyer, Dan F

National Furniture Manufacturing Company International Relations Committee (1948)

Campbell, Don E

Standard Rolling Mills, Inc. International Transportation and Communications Subcommittee of WTC (1945)

Canaday, Ward M

Willys-Overland Motors, Inc. PWC (1943); VC War Controls Termination Committee (1944)

Cardwell, H W

Cardwell Manufacturing Company, Inc. PWC (1943); NAM Board (1943); War Controls Termination Committee (1944)

Carroll, Mitchell B

International Association for Public Finance and Fiscal Law Advisor PWC (1944); Advisory Group WTC (1945); Advisory Group to Committee on International Economic Relations (1947); Advisory Group on International Relations (1948)

Cate, Henry H

Flour Mills of America, Inc. Committee on International Economic Relations (1947)

Catranis, John Geo

Catranis, Inc. Committee on International Economic Relations (1947); International Relations Committee (1948)

Appendix

Chance, F Gano

  329

A B Chance Company PWC (1943)

Cherry, W L

Cherry-Burrell Corporation PWC (1942)

Chevalier, Willard

Business Week Chair Subdivision to Formulate Principles for Post War World of International Relations Subcte of PWC (1942); chair International Relations Subcommittee (1943); WTC Subcte on International Cooperation (1945)

Clark, John B

Clark Thread Company PWC (1943); NIIC Board (1943)

Coffey, Daniel F

Marinette & Menominee Box Company International Relations Committee (1948)

Coffin, Dexter D

C. H. Dexter & Sons, Inc. Steering Cte WTC (1945); chair International Transportation and Communications Subcommittee of WTC (after June 1945)

Colgate, S Bayard

Colgate-Palmolive-Peet Company Chair PWC (1942); NAM Board (1943); WTC Subcte on International Trade Relations (1945); Committee on International Economic Relations (1947); International Relations Committee (1948)

Collado, Emilio G

Standard Oil Company, Inc. Advisory Group to Committee on International Economic Relations (1947); Advisory Group on International Relations (1948)

Connors, Jr., Geo W

Connors Steel Company PWC (1943)

Converse, W I

Horton & Converse WTC Subcte on International Trade Relations (1945)

330  Appendix Conway, C C

Continental Can Company PWC Steering Committee (1943)

Coolidge, E C

Crowe Name Plate & Manufacturing Company PWC (1942)

Coombe, Reginald G

Central Hanover Bank & Trust Company PWC (1942); International Relations Subcommittee (1943)

Cordiner, Ralph J

Schick, Inc. PWC (1942); Crawford Committee (1948)

Cortney, Philip

Coty, Inc. Committee on International Economic Relations (1947); International Relations Committee (1948)

Costello, James F

Jacobsen Manufacturing Company Transition Period Subcommittee (1943)

Coulter, John Lee

Agricultural economist Adviser, International Relations Subcte of PWC (1942)

Cowdin, J Cheever

Universal Pictures Corporation NAM Board and NIIC Board (1943); International Transportation and Communications Subcommittee of WTC (1945); Committee on International Economic Relations (1947); International Relations Committee (1948)

Cozad, Walter F

Roberts Dairy Company PWC (1943)

Crane, Jasper

E I du Pont de Nemours, Inc. NIIC Board (1944); International Relations Committee (1948)

Crane, G S

Cutler-Hammer, Inc. International Relations Committee (1948)

Appendix

Crawford, Fred C

  331

Thompson Products, Inc. VC PWC (1942); President NAM (1943); NIIC Board (1944); Chairman Crawford Committee (1948)

Crosby, E S

Johns-Manville International Corporation Advisory Group on Specific Foreign Trade Problems (1945); WTC Subcte on International Trade Relations (1945); Advisory Group to Committee on International Economic Relations (1947); Advisory Group on International Relations (1948)

Cumberland, Will W

Wellington & Company Adviser, International Relations Subcommittee of PWC (1943); Economic Textbook Committee (1943); Economic Principles Commission (1943); Advisory Group WTC (1945); Advisory Group to Committee on International Economic Relations (1947); Advisory Group on International Relations (1948)

Cummins, C L

Cummins Engine Company PWC (1943)

Curtis, Harry B

The Bridgeport Hardware Manufacturing Corporation PWC (1943)

Daley, Frederick M

Sponge Rubber Products Company NAM Corporation Peacetime Planning Committee (Guides) (1943)

Dalton, Charles J

American Type Founders, Inc. NAM Corporation Peacetime Planning Committee (Guides) (1943)

Dana, Philip

Dana Warp Mills PWC (1943)

Darlington, C F

Socony-Vacuum Oil Company Advisory Group to Committee on International Economic Relations (1947); Advisory Group on International Relations (1948)

Davidson, William H

Harley Davidson Motor Company PWC (1943)

332  Appendix Davis, Jack B

Werner G. Smith Company Advisory Group WTC (1945)

de Bretteville, Alex

J D & A B Spreckels Company PWC (1943)

de Fremery, James

Onox, Inc. Committee on International Economic Relations (1947)

DeLong, James E

Waukesha Motor Company PWC (1942); War Control Termination Committee (1944)

Derby, H L

American Cyanamid & Chemical Corporation VP NAM (1943)

DeRidder, W A

General Motors Corporation PWC (1942)

DeVos. A R

Breinig Brothers, Inc. PWC (1943)

Dietz, Paul

Allis-Chalmers Manufacturing Corporation International Business Conference (1944); Advisory Group on Specific Foreign Trade Problems (1945); Advisory Group WTC (1945); Advisory Group to Committee on International Economic Relations (1947); Advisory Group on International Relations (1948)

Dingle, Howard

The Cleveland Worm & Gear Corporation PWC (1942); Transition Period Subcte (1943); War Control Termination Committee (1944)

Disston, W D

Henry Disston & Sons, Inc. PWC (1943)

Dodge, H T

The Texas Company Guest PWC International Relations Subcommittee (1943)

Appendix

Dolan, George W

  333

Mathieson Alkali Works, Inc. International Transportation and Communications Subcommittee of WTC (1945)

Dorwin, Oscar John

The Texas Company International Relations Committee (1948)

Downey, J O

General Motors Corporation Adviser, ‘Postwar Principles’ Subdivision of Subcommittee on International Relations of PWC (1942)

Drefs, Arthur G

McQuay-Norris Manufacturing Company PWC (1943); NAM Board (1943); Transition Period Subcte (1943)

du Pont, Lammot

E. I. du Pont de Nemoure and Company, Inc. PWC Steering Cte (1943); NAM Board (1943); WTC Subcte on International Trade Relations (1945); NIIC Board (1945)

Dulin, E S

Byrin Jackson Company International Relations Committee (1948)

Dye, Alexander V

National Foreign Trade Council Adviser, International Relations Subcommittee of PWC (1942); Advisory Group WTC (1945)

Edwards, D F

Saco-Lowell Shops NAM Corporation Peacetime Planning Committee (Guides) (1943)

Eldridge, F H

S C Huyck & Sons International Relations Committee (1948)

Emery, James A

Lawyer General Counsel, 1938-47; Economic Review Group (1942)

Engman, E G

Eclipse Moulded Products Company PWC (1943)

334  Appendix Evans, Morton E

S W Evans & Son Committee on International Economic Relations (1947); International Relations Committee (1948)

Eveleth, George S

International General Electric Company Advisory Group to Committee on International Economic Relations (1947); Advisory Group on International Relations (1948)

Everest, D C

Marathon Paper Mills Company PWC (1942)

Fageol, Frank R

Twin Coach Company Transition Period Subcommittee (1943)

Falk, Alfred T

Bureau of Research & Educ, Advertising Fed. Of America Advisor, PWC Distribution Committee (1943)

Farley, Edward P

American-Hawaiian Steamship Company International Transportation and Communications Subcommittee of WTC (1945)

Farrar, John F P

Chicago Metal Hose Corporation PWC (1943)

Fassnacht, Paul H

Precision Shapes, Inc. Committee on International Economic Relations (1947); International Relations Committee (1948)

Feldman, W H

Electric Machinery Manufacturing Company PWC (1942)

Fennebresque, D W

Lambert Pharmacals Advisor PWC (1944); Advisory Group on Specific Foreign Trade Problems (1945); Advisory Group WTC (1945)

Fernstrom, F O

Fernstrom Paper Mills, Inc. Committee on International Economic Relations (1947)

Appendix

Field, L Dudley

  335

Defender Photo Supply Company PWC (1943)

Fish, Thomas

Ready Tool Company War Controls Termination Committee (1944)

Fisher, R E

Pacific Gas and Electric Company PWC (1943)

Fiske, R B

American Cyanamid Company (Proxy member) WTC Subcte on International Financial Relations (1945)

Flershem, R B

Buffalo Bolt Company WTC Subcte on International Trade Relations (1945)

Fletcher, R P

Booth Fisheries Corporation PWC (1943)

Fletcher, J D

Caterpillar Tractor Company Advisory Group on Specific Foreign Trade Problems (1945); WTC Subcte on International Cooperation (1945); Advisory Group to Committee on International Economic Relations (1947); Advisory Group on International Relations (1948)

Fogler, Raymond H

W T Grant Company PWC (1943); NIIC Board (1943)

Forse, H Don

Forse Corporation War Controls Termination Committee (1944)

Fowler, R L

Florence Stove Company Post-War Purchasing Power Subcte of PWC (1942)

Freeman, E M

The Texas Company Guest, PWC International Relations Subcommittee (1943)

Fuller, Walter D

Curtis Publishing Company PWC Steering Cte (1943); NAM Board (1943); Wampler Committee also CED

336  Appendix Gage, Charles S

Lentheric Perfumes, Inc. Advisory Group to Committee on International Economic Relations (1947); Advisory Group on International Relations (1948)

Gamble, Willard S

Brownville Board Company War Controls Termination Committee (1944)

Garretson, C D

Electric Hose & Rubber Company International Relations Subcommittee of PWC (1942)

Gaskin, Mervyn G

Taylor & Gaskin, Inc. International Relations Committee (1948)

Gaunt, Alfred C

Merrimac Mills Company WTC Subcte on International Trade Relations (1945); Committee on International Economic Relations (1947); International Relations Committee (1948)

Gaylord, Robert M

The Ingersoll Milling Machine Company NAM Board and NIIC Board (1943); International Relations Committee (1948); Crawford Committee (1948)

Gebhart, John C

Economist NAM Staff (former Sec Committee on Economic Policy) (1942); Economic Review Group (1943); Economic Principles Commission (1943)

Geist, Walter

Allis-Chalmers Manufacturing Corporation PWC (1942); NAM Board (1943)

Gerity, Jr., James

Gerity-Adrian Manufacturing Corporation PWC (1943)

Gifford, Roy W

Norge Division, Borg-Warner Corporation Advisory Group on Specific Foreign Trade Problems (1945); WTC Subcte on International Trade Relations (1945); Advisory Group to Committee on International Economic Relations (1947); Advisory Group on International Relations (1948)

Appendix

Gilbert, F W

  337

A. C. Gilbert Corporation War Controls Termination Committee (1944)

Gillis, John L

Monsanto Chemical Company Advisory Group on International Relations (1948)

Gilmore, R E

Sperry Gyroscope Steering Committee of NAM War Committee (1942)

Gorodiz, Joseph

Akeley Camera, Inc. Committee on International Economic Relations (1947); International Relations Committee (1948)

Gottlieb, M M

M M Gottlieb Associates, Inc. Committee on International Economic Relations (1947)

Gould, G S

Fitchburg Grinding Machine Corporation PWC (1942)

Gould, Norman J

Gould Pumps, Inc. Committee on International Economic Relations (1947)

Grant, E E

The Crystal Tissue Company PWC (1943)

Graves, Otho M

The General Crushed Stone Company Principles of Government Relations to Industry Subcommittee of PWC (1942); WTC Subcommittee on International Cooperation (1945)

Greene, Herbert A

M L Snyder & Son WTC Subcte on International Trade Relations (1945); Committee on International Economic Relations (1947); International Relations Committee (1948)

Greenwood, Heman

Carrier Corporation Advisory Group on Specific Foreign Trade Problems (1945); Advisory Group WTC (1945); Advisory Group to Committee on International Economic Relations (1947); Advisory Group on International Relations (1948)

338  Appendix Greiner, A T

American Coach & Body Company Committee on International Economic Relations (1947)

Greinetz, Phil

Los Wigwam Weavers Committee on International Economic Relations (1947); International Relations Committee (1948)

Guiler, Cameron

Marcus Mason & Company, Inc. Committee on International Economic Relations (1947); International Relations Committee (1948)

Gunn, Jr., George

Webster Brinkley Company PWC (1943)

Hagger, J M

Hagger Company PWC (1942)

Hale, James P

A & G J Caldwell, Inc. PWC (1942)

Hamilton, Frank W

Ulster Iron Works PWC (1942)

Hamilton, Alex M

American Locomotive Company Committee on International Economic Relations (1947); International Relations Committee (1948)

Hamlin, E W

Hamlin Metal Products Company NAM Corporation Peacetime Planning Committee (Guides) (1943)

Hardenbrook, Don J

Union Bag & Paper Company Economic Principles Committee (1943)

Hardy, Jr., Tom W

Hardy Salt Company Committee on International Economic Relations (1947); International Relations Committee (1948)

Appendix

Hargrave, Thomas J

  339

Eastman Kodak Company NAM Board (1943); NAM Corporation Peacetime Planning Committee (Guides) (1943)

Harrington, Guy L

Macfadden Publications, Inc. PWC (1942); Economic Review Group (1942)

Harrison, Jr., Cliff E

Publicist Head NIIC (1944)

Haskell, Borderick

Guaranty Trust Company of New York PWC (1943); WTC Subcte on International Financial Relations (1945); International Relations Committee (1948)

Hayward, R A

Kalamazoo Vegetable Parchment Corporation Chair War Controls Termination Committee (1944); International Relations Committee (1948)

Healy, R P

American Chain & Cable Corporation NAM Corporation Peacetime Planning Committee (Guides) (1943)

Heilman, Wesley M

Gibbs Underwear Company PWC (1943)

Heilperin, Michael A

Bristol-Myers Company Advisory Group to Committee on International Economic Relations (1947); Advisory Group on International Relations (1948)

Hemphill, William A

Day & Zimmerman, Inc. International Relations Committee (1948)

Hickok, Ward R

North Star Woolen Mill Company NAM Corporation Peacetime Planning Committee (Guides) (1943)

Hill, Lyman

Servel, Inc. PWC Distribution Committee (1943)

340  Appendix Hirt, Herman

International General Electric Company Advisory Group WTC (1945)

Holberg, A S

Alabama Clay Products Company PWC (1943)

Holmes, John

Swift & Company PWC Steering Cte (1943); NAM Board and NIIC Board (1943)

Hook, Charles R

The American Rolling Mill Company PWC (1943); NAM Board (1943); also CED

Hooker, H M

Hooker Electrochemical Company Post-War Purchasing Power Subcte of PWC (1942)

Hoover, H W

The Hoover Company Post-War Purchasing Power Subcte of PWC (1942)

Hopkinson, F L

Willys-Overland Motors, Inc. Chair WTC Subcte on International Trade Relations (1945)

Hopkinson, Frank

Graham-Paige Motors Corporation Committee on International Economic Relations (1947); International Relations Committee (1948)

Horelbein, Edwin W

The Gibson & Kirk Company PWC (1942)

Hormel, Jay C

Geo. A Hormel & Company PWC (1942)

Hoskins, R R

National Rubber Machinery Company PWC (1943)

Houghton, Amory

Corning Glass Works Speaker ‘Industry looks to the future’ (1944)

Appendix

Houston, George H

  341

General Machinery Corporation Steering Cte PWC (1942); Subdivision to Formulate Principles for Post War World of International Relations Subcte of PWC (1942); WTC Subcte on International Cooperation (1945); Committee on International Economic Relations (1947)

Howell, George B

Tampa Shipbuilding Company, Inc. International Transportation and Communications Subcommittee of WTC (1945)

Hoyt, G C

International Harvester Export Company Subdivision to Study Practical Problems of International Relations Subcte PWC (1942); WTC Subcte on International Trade Relations (1945)

Hudson, Manley O

Harvard Law School; World Court Adviser ‘Postwar Principles’ Subdivision of Subcommittee on International Relations of PWC (1942); International Relations Subcommittee (1943); Advisory Group WTC (1945); Advisory Group to Committee on International Economic Relations (1947); Advisory Group on International Relations (1948)

Hummel, R A

Lone Star Cement Corporation WTC Subcte on International Trade Relations (1945); Steering Cte WTC; Committee on International Economic Relations (1947); International Relations Committee (1948)

Hungerford, D C

Hungerford Research Corporation International Transportation and Communications Subcommittee of WTC (1945)

Huntington, E

Yale University Adviser International Relations Subcommittee of PWC (1942); Advisory Group WTC (1945)

Huston, Howard

American Cyanamid Corporation Advisor PWC (1943); International Relations Subcte (1943); International Business Conference (1944); Advisory Group on Specific Foreign Trade Problems (1945); Advisory Group WTC (1945); Advisory Group to Committee on International Economic Relations (1947)

342  Appendix Hutchinson, B E

Chrysler Motor Corporation PWC (1942); NAM Corporation Peacetime Planning Committee (Guides) (1943); Crawford Committee (1948)

Ingalls, R I

Ingalls Shipping Corporation PWC (1943)

Ingersoll, William H

Ingersoll Plastic Company NAM Corporation Peacetime Planning Committee (Guides) (1943)

Jacobs, Whipple

Belden Manufacturing Company Committee on International Economic Relations (1947)

Jessop, F W

Ohio Electric Manufacturing Corporation NAM Corporation Peacetime Planning Committee (Guides) (1943)

Johnson, George H

Gisholt Machine Company WTC Subcte on International Trade Relations (1945); Committee on International Economic Relations (1947); International Relations Committee (1948)

Johnson, Herbert F

S C Johnson & Son, Inc. Committee on International Economic Relations (1947); International Relations Committee (1948)

Jolly, John W

Dr Peter Fahrney & Sons Company War Controls Termination Committee (1944)

Jones, Lee Warren

Vulcan Tool Company PWC (1942)

Jones, Otis L

Illinois Clay Products Corporation PWC (1942); War Controls Termination Committee (1944)

Kellems, Vivien

Kellems Company Committee on International Economic Relations (1947); International Relations Committee (1948)

Appendix

Kelley, McClure

  343

Western-Austin Company NAM Committee on Price Control (1942)

Keltie, George R

American Wringer, Inc. PWC (1942)

Kendig, CM

Hamilton Watch Company Committee on International Economic Relations (1947); International Relations Committee (1948)

Kendrick, Charles

Schlage Lock Company VC PWC (1943)

Kenner, A J

Ever Ready Label Corporation NAM Corporation Peacetime Planning Committee (Guides) (1943)

Kenny, John W

Columbia Aircraft Corporation International Transportation and Communications Subcommittee of WTC (1945)

Kent, Fred I

Bankers Trust Company PWC (1943)

Keplinger, L B

Rheem Manufacturing Company PWC (1943)

Keresey, H Don

Anaconda Wire & Paper Corporation PWC (1942); WTC Subcte on International Cooperation (1945); Committee on International Economic Relations (1947)

Kerr, B W

Railway and Industrial Engineering Corporation Transition Period Subcte (1943); Wartime Controls Group of Transition Subcommittee (1943)

Killheffer, Alvin H

E I du Pont de Nemours, Inc. Adviser, International Relations Subcte of PWC (1942)

344  Appendix Kindelberger, J H

North American Aviation, Inc. PWC (1943)

King, Willford I

New York University, School of Commerce and Accounts Economic Review Group (1942); Economic Principles Commission (1943)

Kirkpatrick, C N

Landis Machine Company WTC Subcte on International Trade Relations (1945)

Klein, Harry T

The Texas Company Principles of Government Relations to Industry Subcommittee of PWC (1942)

Koeppel, M Herbert

King Refrigerator Corporation PWC (1943); Committee on International Economic Relations (1947)

Kohler, Herbert V

Kohler Company NAM Board (1943); VC War Controls Termination Committee (1944)

Kokins, I W

Warren Telechron Company PWC (1943)

Kraut, Ralph J

Giddings & Lewis Machine Tool Company Committee on International Economic Relations (1947); VC International Relations Committee (1948)

Kridel, Samuel

The Bethlehem Silk Company Committee on International Economic Relations (1947); International Relations Committee (1948)

Kunz, Eric C

Givaudan-Delawanna, Inc. International Relations Committee (1948)

Kurth, Ernest L

Angelina County Lumber Company PWC (1943)

Appendix

Landis, Walter S

  345

American Cyanamid Corporation PWC (1943); guest International Relations Subcte (1943)

Lane, David F

W T Lane & Brothers, Inc. Principles of Government Relations to Industry Subcommittee of PWC (1942); International Relations Subcommittee (1943)

Lane, H R

The Kendall Company PWC Distribution Committee (1943)

Larsen, C F

The Chas H Lilly Company WTC Subcte on International Trade Relations (1945)

Layte, Ralph R

Purolator Products Company PWC (1943); NAM Board (1943); War Controls Termination Committee (1944)

Lazrus, Benjamin

Benrus Watch Company WTC Subcte on International Trade Relations (1945); Committee on International Economic Relations (1947); International Relations Committee (1948)

LeClere, J B

F J Kress Box Company PWC (1942)

Leverone, Nathaniel

Automatic Canteen Company of America PWC (1943); War Controls Termination Committee (1944)

Levy, M D

Angelica Jacket Corporation PWC (1942); Transition Period Subcommittee (1943)

Lincoln, Edmond E

E I du Pont de Nemours, Inc. Advisor PWC (1942); Subdivision to Study Certain Practical Problems of International Relations Subcte of PWC (1942); Advisory Group WTC (1945); Advisory Group to Committee on International Economic Relations (1947); Advisory Group on International Relations (1948)

Lisle, C V

Lisle Corporation International Relations Committee (1948)

346  Appendix Loftin, L K

The Lane Company PWC (1942)

Lucas, John

Yoder Company Committee on International Economic Relations (1947)

Lutz, Harley L

Princeton University NAM Economic Review Group (1942); Economic Textbook Committee of PWC (1942); Economic Principles Commission (1943)

Lykes, Joseph L

Lykes Brothers Steamship Corporation International Transportation and Communications Subcommittee of WTC (1945)

Mackey, Joseph T

Mergenthaler Linotype Company Subdivision to Study Certain Practical Problems of International Relations Subcte of PWC (1942); VC WTC Subcte on International Cooperation (1945)

MacMillan, J A

The Dayton Rubber Manufacturing Corporation NAM Board (1943); War Controls Termination Committee (1944)

Mahn, Holbrook

Band-It Company International Relations Committee (1948)

Mahon, R J

Lone Star Cement Corporation International Business Conference (1944); Advisory Group on Specific Foreign Trade Problems (1945); Advisory Group WTC (1945)

Mallon, Alfred E

Pillsbury Flour Mills Corporation Subdivision to Study Certain Practical Problems of International Relations Subcte of PWC (1942); member WTC Subcte on International Trade Relations (1945); Committee on International Economic Relations (1947)

Malmo, C O

Eagle Logging Company PWC (1942)

Appendix

Marlatt, Clyde D

  347

The Martin Dennis Company International Relations Committee (1948)

Marr, James

Marr Duplicator Company, Inc. International Relations Committee (1948)

Marsh, Ralph

The Parrafine Company WTC Subcte on International Trade Relations (1945)

Martindale, E H

The Martindale Electric Corporation WTC Subcte on International Trade Relations (1945); Committee on International Economic Relations (1947); International Relations Committee (1948)

Maxant, William H

Maxant Button & Supply Company International Relations Committee (1948)

Mayo, E C

Gorham Manufacturing Company PWC (1943)

McAfee, W Keith

Universal Sanitary Manufacturing Corporation Principles of Government Relations to Industry Subcte of PWC (1942); Transition Period Subcte (1943); chair Wartime Controls Group of Transition Subcte (1943)

McCann, H T

Commercial Credit Corporation Advisor PWC (1943)

McDaniel, J S

Cordage Institute NIIC Advisor to WTC Subcte on International Cooperation (1945)

McDonough, J Kirby

The Murray Company Committee on International Economic Relations (1947)

McFall, Robert J

Magazine Marketing Service Advisor PWC Distribution Committee (1943)

348  Appendix McHenry, A T

Bowen Products Corporation PWC (1942)

McKee, Arthur G

Arthur G McKee & Company PWC (1943)

McKee, Paul B

Portland Gas & Coke Company PWC (1943); NAM Board (1943)

McKenna, Roy C

Vanadium-Alloye Steel Company WTC Subcte on International Trade Relations (1945); Committee on International Economic Relations (1947); International Relations Committee (1948)

McKittrick, Tom H

Chase National Bank Advisory Group to Committee on International Economic Relations (1947)

McMenemy, W S

Mark Cross Company WTC Subcte on International Financial Relations (1945); Committee on International Economic Relations (1947); International Relations Committee (1948)

Menzel, Steven J

Motors Metal Manufacturing Corporation PWC (1942); Transition Period Subcte (1943); War Controls Termination Committee (1944)

Mertes, Joseph F

R S Bacon Veneer Company WTC Subcte on International Trade Relations (1945); Committee on International Economic Relations (1947)

Merz, August

Calco Chemical Division, American Cyanamid Corporation Committee on International Economic Relations (1947); International Relations Committee (1948)

Meyeringh, P W

Hercules Powder Company PWC (1943); NAM Corporation Peacetime Planning Committee (Guides) (1943)

Appendix

Miner, Edward G

  349

Pfaudler Company PWC (1943)

Minor, Clark H

International General Electric, Inc. PWC (1942); Subdivision to Formulate Principles for Post War World of International Relations Subcte of PWC (1942)

Moffat, C Aird

Barger Box Company Committee on International Economic Relations (1947)

Mohn, John D

Mohn Brothers Company WTC Subcte on International Trade Relations (1945)

Montague, Theo G

Borden Company PWC (1943); NAM Board (1943)

Moore, R W

Canada Dry Ginger Ale, Inc. Post-War Purchasing Power Subcte of PWC (1942); NAM Board (1943)

Morrison, Donald S

American-Hawaiian Steamship Company Advisor PWC (1944)

Mosher, Ira

Russell Harrington Cutlery Company Crawford Committee (1948)

Muir, Malcolm

Newsweek Chair, NAM War Committee (1942)

Mullendore, W C

Southern California Edison Company PWC (1943)

Muller, A E

H K Lorentzen, Inc. International Relations Committee (1948)

Munce, M G

York Corporation War Controls Termination Committee (1944)

350  Appendix Murphy, Elsie M

S Strook & Company, Inc. PWC (1942)

Nadler, Marcus

New York University Adviser ‘Postwar Principles’ Subdivision of Subcommittee on International Relations of PWC (1942)

Neumiller, L B

Caterpillar Tractor Company PWC (1943); NAM Board (1943); Transition Period Subcte (1943)

Newman, James J

B F Goodrich Company NAM Corporation Peacetime Planning Committee (Guides) (1943)

Noblitt, Q G

Noblitt-Sparks Industries, Inc. War Controls Termination Committee (1944)

O'Connor, Hugh

Public Relations Advisor NAM Staff (1943); Public Relations Advisor National Post-War Conference (1944)

O'Daniel, E V

American Cyanamid Corporation PWC (1942); Economic Textbook Committee (1942)

Ogsbury, James S

Fairchild Aviation Corporation PWC (1943)

Olds, Jr., E A

Packers Tar Soap, Inc. PWC (1942)

Olpin, A R

Ohio State University Research Foundation Chair, NAM Research Advisory Group (1943)

O'Neil, William P

General Tire & Rubber Company Vice Chair, Committee on Peacetime Corporation Planning (1943)

Appendix

O'Neill, Edward E

  351

American-La France-Foamite Corporation PWC (1942)

Orcutt, Reginald

Mergenthaler Linotype Company Advisory Group on Specific Foreign Trade Problems (1945); Advisory Group WTC (1945); Advisory Group to Committee on International Economic Relations (1947); Advisory Group on International Relations (1948)

Overmyer, C P

Overmyer Industries War Controls Termination Committee (1944); WTC Subcte on International Trade Relations (1945)

Pace, Anderson

Illinois Central System, Industrial Department War Controls Termination Committee (1944)

Paine, Sidney S

Tabardrey Manufacturing Company PWC (1942)

Palmer, Carleton H

E. R. Squibb & Sons War Controls Termination Committee (1944)

Palmer, Arthur J

International Projector Corporation NAM Corporation Peacetime Planning Committee (Guides) (1943)

Parker, John C

Consolidated Edison Corporation Principles of Government Relations to Industry Subcte of PWC (1942); Economic Textbook Committee (1942); Economic Principles Commission (1943)

Parrot, W E

Ebasco Services, Inc. Transition Period Subcommittee (1943)

Patch, Richard H

E F Houghton & Company PWC (1942); International Relations Subcommittee (1943); WTC Subcte on International Trade Relations (1945)

352  Appendix Payson, Aurin E

American Thermos Bottle Company Committee on International Economic Relations (1947)

Pearlman, Dorothy R

Enterprise Galvanizing Company PWC (1942); Transition Period Subcommittee (1943)

Pelz, H V

General Foods Corporation Advisor PWC Distribution Committee (1943)

Penn, Albert

Penn Electric Switch Company PWC (1942); International Relations Subcommittee (1943)

Pew, J Howard

Sun Oil PWC Steering Cte (1943); NAM Board and NIIC Board (1943); Wampler Committee (1944-45); Crawford Committee (1948)

Peyton, Bernard

New York Air Brake Company NAM Corporation Peacetime Planning Committee (Guides) (1943)

Pierce, R V

Pierce’s Proprietaries, Inc. WTC Subcte on International Trade Relations (1945)

Pierson, E F

The Vendo Company Committee on International Economic Relations (1947)

Pogue, Joseph E

Chase National Bank Advisor PWC (1943); Advisory Group WTC (1945)

Portteus, Paul H

Stratos Corporation International Relations Committee (1948)

Pratt, M E

Continental Gin Company PWC (1943)

Prentis, Henning W

Armstrong Cork Chair NAM Executive Cte (1942); NAM Board (1943); NIIC Board (1944)

Appendix

Prestholdt, H L

  353

Monite Waterproof Glue Company PWC (1943); International Relations Subcommittee (1943)

Prince, D C

General Electric Corporation NAM Corporation Peacetime Planning Committee (Guides) (1943); also CED

Putney, R Emerson

Philadelphia Felt Company International Relations Committee (1948)

Queeny, Edgar M

Monsanto Chemical Company PWC (1943)

Ramsey, Justin H

John Royle & Sons PWC (1942)

Ray, Jr., George W

The Texas Company PWC Steering Cte (1942); Advisor PWC (1942); Transition Period Subcte (1943); International Business Conference (1944); Advisory Group on Specific Foreign Trade Problems (1945); Advisory Group WTC (1945); Steering Cte WTC (1945); WTC Subcte on International Cooperation (1945); Committee on International Economic Relations (1947); International Relations Committee (1948)

Reed, Henry M

American Radiator & Standard Sanitary Corporation PWC (1943)

Reed, Chester T

Reed & Prince Manufacturing Company Committee on International Economic Relations (1947); International Relations Committee (1948)

Reimold, A G H

Woburn Chemical Corporation Committee on International Economic Relations (1947)

Renton, Stanley H

Vulcanized Rubber Company WTC Subcte on International Trade Relations (1945)

354  Appendix Resch, R J

McQuay, Inc. Committee on International Economic Relations (1947); International Relations Committee (1948)

Rich, Joseph E

The Simoniz Company Committee on International Economic Relations (1947); International Relations Committee (1948)

Richards, Charles A

Interchemical Corporation Advisory Group on Specific Foreign Trade Problems (1945); Advisory Group to Committee on International Economic Relations (1947); Advisory Group on International Relations (1948)

Riddle, H M

Ashbury Graphite Mills, Inc. WTC Subcte on International Cooperation (1945)

Riggin, F L

Mueller Brass Company Transition Period Subcommittee (1943)

Riley, Edward

General Motors Corporation International Business Conference (1944); Chair WTC Subcte on International Cooperation; WTC Subcte on International Trade Relations (1945)

Ripley, George K

Troy Blanket Mills, Inc. PWC Distribution Committee (1943)

Robey, Ralph W

Columbia University (later Associate Editor Newsweek) Advisor NAM (later chief economist) (1942)

Robins, James H

American Pulley Company VC PWC (1942); Steering Cte (1942); Advisor PWC (1942); chair International Relations Subcommittee (1943); WTC Subcte on International Cooperation (1945)

Robinson, Ray

Crowell-Collier Publishing Company Advisor PWC Distribution Committee (1943)

Appendix

Robinson, Claude

  355

Opinion Research Corporation Adviser; NAM Economic Review Group/Economic Textbook Committee of PWC (1942)

Rocca, B T

Pacific Vegetable Oil Corporation WTC Subcte on International Trade Relations (1945)

Rogers, C S

Norfolk Shipbuilding and Drydock Corporation International Transportation and Communications Subcommittee of WTC (1945)

Roseborough, W A

Cox and Stevens Aircraft Corporation International Transportation and Communications Subcommittee of WTC (1945)

Roseborough, H W

American Viscose Corporation Advisory Group on International Relations (1948)

Ross, George T

Langley Aviation Corporation PWC (1942)

Rothert, M H

Camden Furniture Company Committee on International Economic Relations (1947)

Rush, J H

Rush Lumber Company PWC (1942)

Ruthenberg, Louis

Servel, Inc. PWC (1943)

Rutherford, G H

National Dairy Products, Inc. PWC (1943)

Ryan, J C

Blake Manufacturing Corporation International Relations Committee (1948)

Sacra, M R

Black & Decker Manufacturing Company Advisory Group to Committee on International Economic Relations (1947); Advisory Group on International Relations (1948)

356  Appendix Salisbury, H R

Airco Export Corporation WTC Subcte on International Trade Relations (1945)

Salsich, Neil E

The Jeffrey Manufacturing Company PWC (1942)

Sargent, Noel

Economist Secretary PWC (1942); Economic Principles Commission (1943); Committee Exec International Relations Committee (1948)

Sargent, Jr., Ben F

Merrimac Hat Corporation Committee on International Economic Relations (1947)

Saxon, O Glenn

Yale University Advisory Group to Committee on International Economic Relations (1947); Advisory Group on International Relations (1948)

Sayre, Morris

Corn Products Refining Company NAM President (1948)

Schell, Herbert H

Sidney Blumenthal & Company, Inc. PWC (1943); chair Steering Cte WTC (1945); WTC Subcte on International Trade Relations (1945); chair International Transportation and Communications Subcte (April-June 1945); Committee on International Economic Relations (1947); International Relations Committee (1948); Crawford Committee (1948)

Scherf, J G

Andala Company PWC (1943)

Schloss, Hugo N

Liberty Lace & Netting Works Subdivision to Study Certain Practical Problems of International Relations Subcte of PWC (1942)

Schmitt, J R

Tiona Petroleum Company Committee on International Economic Relations (1947); International Relations Committee (1948)

Appendix

Schoppmeyer, W G

  357

Canada Dry International, Inc. Advisory Group to Committee on International Economic Relations (1947); Advisory Group on International Relations (1948)

Schram, Rose

Twin Coach Company PWC (1942)

Schuchman, F E

Homestead Valve Manufacturing Company PWC (1942)

Schuman, F L

Williams College; Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service Adviser ‘Postwar Principles’ Subdivision of Subcommittee on International Relations of PWC (1942)

Schuman, Helmut W

Precise Products Company International Relations Committee (1948)

Schwartz, Bernard L

Pilot Industries, Inc. WTC Subcte on International Financial Relations (1945); Committee on International Economic Relations (1947)

Scott, R G

Revere Copper & Brass, Inc. PWC (1942)

Scott III, W R

Scott Paper Company PWC (1942)

Scoville, John

Chrysler Motor Corporation Advisor PWC (1943); International Relations Subcte (1943)

Selby, Roger A

The Selby Shoe Company PWC (1943); NAM Board (1943)

Shakespeare, M

Shakespeare Company Transition Period Subcte (1943); War Controls Termination Committee (1944)

Shaughnessy, C

The Stanley Works NAM Corporation Peacetime Planning Committee (Guides) (1943)

358  Appendix Shields, Murray

Irving Trust Company/Bank of the Manhattan Company Economic Textbook Committee (1942);Economic Principles Commission (1943); Advisory Group on Specific Foreign Trade Problems (1945); Advisory Group to Committee on International Economic Relations (1947)

Shotwell, James T

Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Advisor PWC (1944); Advisory Group WTC (1945)

Shumann, Frank E

Lehigh Foundries, Inc. War Controls Termination Committee (1944)

Sibley, George H

E R Squibb & Sons Committee on International Economic Relations (1947); International Relations Committee (1948)

Sieg, W W

Titan Metal Manufacturing Company PWC (1942)

Simmons, Richard J

Birtman Electric Company War Controls Termination Committee (1944); Committee on International Economic Relations (1947)

Sisto, J A

Barium Steel Corporation WTC Subcte on International Financial Relations (1945); International Relations Committee (1948)

Skelton, W A

Meisel Press Manufacturing Company NAM Corporation Peacetime Planning Committee (Guides) (1943)

Slepian, Arthur

The Wheeler Insulated Wire Company PWC (1942)

Sloan, Alfred P

General Motors Corporation Founder/Chairman Governing Board of NIIC (1934)

Smethurst, Raymond

Lawyer NAM Counsel (1947)

Appendix

Smith, Brad Bixby

  359

United States Steel Corporation Economic Review Group (1942); NAM economic adviser; Economic Principles Commission (1943)

Smith, Carlton W

The American Envelope Company Steering Cte PWC (1942); Principles of Government Relations to Industry Subcommittee of PWC (1942)

Smith, Edgar W

General Motors Corporation Advisor PWC (1942); International Business Conference (1944); Subdivision to Formulate Principles for Post War World of International Relations Subcte of PWC (1942); Advisory Group on Specific Foreign Trade Problems (1945); Advisory Group WTC (1945); Committee on International Economic Relations (1947); International Relations Committee (1948)

Smith, F Goodwin

Hartford-Empire Company Steering Cte PWC (1942); Economic Textbook Cte (1942)

Smith, Purcell L

The Middle West Corporation PWC (1942)

Smith, John H

Hawley Pulp & Paper Company PWC (1943)

Smyth III, E A

Balfour Mills, Inc. PWC (1943); NAM Board (1943)

Snyder III, Ben

United States Typewriter Ribbon Manufacturing Company Advisory Group to Committee on International Economic Relations (1947); Advisory Group on International Relations (1948)

Somervell, Brehon B

Koppers Company, Inc. Committee on International Economic Relations (1947)

Sommers, F F

Chicago Rubber Clothing Company/Rainfair, Inc. NAM Board (1943); War Controls Termination Cte (1944)

360  Appendix Spang, Jr., J P

Gillette Safety Razor Company Committee on International Economic Relations (1947); International Relations Committee (1948)

Sparre, F

E I du Pont de Nemours, Inc. NAM Corporation Peacetime Planning Committee (Guides) (1943)

Sperling, Miklos M

Love Machine & Tool Company Committee on International Economic Relations (1947)

Spruance, F P

American Chemical Paint Company WTC Subcte on International Trade Relations (1945)

Stanley, C F

The Fafnir Bearing Company PWC Distribution Committee (1943)

Starr, W A

Soundview Pulp Company PWC (1943); WTC Subcte on International Trade Relations (1945)

Stauffer, Grant

Sinclair Coal Company PWC (1942)

Stern, Jacob

Evinrude Division of Outboard Marine & Manufacturing Co. Committee on International Economic Relations (1947)

Stevens, W M

Consulting Economist Guest PWC International Relations Subcommittee (1943)

Stevens, F E

Armstrong Cork Company War Controls Termination Committee (1944)

Stewart, Paul W

Paul Stewart and Associates Advisor PWC Distribution Committee (1943)

Stieh, W M

Metalsalts Corporation WTC Subcte on International Trade Relations (1945)

Appendix

Stifel, Arthur C

  361

J L Stifel & Sons, Inc. Committee on International Economic Relations (1947)

Stilwell, Charles J

Warner & Swasey Company PWC (1943); NAM Board (1943)

Strickland, C K

Strickland Furniture Company International Relations Committee (1948)

Stuart, R Douglas

Quaker Oats Company PWC (1943)

Stuhr, William S

United Paperboard Company Transition Period Subcte (1943); War Controls Termination Committee (1944); Committee on International Economic Relations (1947); International Relations Committee (1948)

Suman, John R

Humble Oil & Refining Company PWC (1942); Board (1943); chair Committee on International Economic Relations (1947); Crawford Committee (1948)

Sutton, Donn

Borg-Warner Corporation International Relations Committee (1948)

Swartwout, D K

The Swartwout Company International Relations Committee (1948)

Sweatt, Harold W

Minneapolis-Honeywell Regulator Company International Relations Committee (1948)

Sykes, Wilfred

Inland Steel Company Chair PWC (1943); NAM Board (1943); NIIC Board (1944); WTC Subcte on International Cooperation (1945); Committee on International Economic Relations (1947)

Thomas, Edwin Joel

Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company PWC (1943)

362  Appendix Thompson, M W

The Hall China Company WTC Subcte on International Trade Relations (1945); Committee on International Economic Relations (1947)

Tilford, T G

Nacogdoches County Lumber Company International Relations Committee (1948)

Titmus, E H

Titmus Optical Company, Inc. PWC (1942)

Todd, H A

Wisconsin Motor Corporation WTC Subcte on International Trade Relations (1945)

Tomkins, Stirling

New York Trap Rock Corporation Principles of Government Relations to Industry Subcommittee of PWC (1942)

Trent, Bertram J

Bert Manufacturing Company International Relations Committee (1948)

Tucker, Rufus S

General Motors Corporation Advisor, WTC Subcte on International Financial Relations (1945)

Tucker, R B

Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company Committee on International Economic Relations (1947); International Relations Committee (1948)

Turcotte, Lawson P

Puget Sound Pulp & Timber WTC Subcte on International Trade Relations (1945); Committee on International Economic Relations (1947); International Relations Committee (1948)

Tuttle, Edward X

Giffels & Vallet, Inc. Advisory Group on International Relations (1948)

Tweedell, J C

York Corporation Advisory Group WTC (1945); Advisory Group to Committee on International Economic Relations (1947); Advisory Group on International Relations (1948)

Appendix

Upson, Maxwell M

  363

Raymond Concrete Pile Company Committee on International Economic Relations (1947); International Relations Committee (1948)

Upton, Louis C

Nineteen Hundred Corporation PWC (1942)

Vagim, Edward J

Vagim Packing Company International Relations Committee (1948)

van Valkenburg, S

Clark University Advisor Subcommittee on International Relations of PWC (1942); Advisory Group WTC (1945); Advisory Group to Committee on International Economic Relations (1947); Advisory Group on International Relations (1948)

van Walsem, H F

North American Philips Company International Relations Subcommittee (1943); WTC Subcte on International Trade Relations (1945)

von Mises, Ludwig

Graduate School of Business Admin., New York University Advisor PWC (1943); Economic Principles Commission (1943); International Relations Subcommittee (1943); Advisory Group WTC (1945); Advisory Group to Committee on International Economic Relations (1947); Advisory Group on International Relations (1948)

Waite, George

Irving Air Chute Company WTC Subcte on International Trade Relations (1945)

Wallace, James A

Jasper Office Furniture Company PWC (1942)

Wampler, E Cloud

Carrier Corporation Post-War Purchasing Power Subcte of PWC (1942); reviewed Weisenburger/Harrison proposals (1944-45)

Wanvig, C O

Globe-Union, Inc. Committee on International Economic Relations (1947); International Relations Committee (1948)

364  Appendix Ward, Wilbert

National City Bank of New York Advisory Group on Specific Foreign Trade Problems (1945); Advisory Group WTC (1945); Advisory Group to Committee on International Economic Relations (1947); Advisory Group on International Relations (1948)

Warner, William B

McCall Corporation PWC Steering Cte (1943); NAM Board (1943); NIIC Board (1944)

Warner, Charles F

Warner Company PWC (1943)

Wason, Robert R

Manning, Maxwell & Moore, Inc. VC PWC (1942); ex-officio member PWC Steering Cte (1942); chair Economic Textbook Committee (1942); Board (1943); Economic Principles Commission (1943); President (1946); Crawford Committee (1948)

Weaver, Norwood

Magazine Marketing Service Advisor, PWC Distribution Committee (1943)

Webb, Earle W

Ethyl Corporation Steering Cte WTC (1945); Committee on International Economic Relations (1947); International Relations Committee (1948)

Webster, William R

Bridgeport Brass Company Post-War Purchasing Power Subcte of PWC (1942)

Wedin, I T

I T Wedin and Company WTC Subcte on International Trade Relations (1945)

Weisenburger, W B

Journalist NAM Executive Director and Head NAM Public Relations Program (1934)

Welch, James A

The Crowell-Collier Publishing Company PWC Distribution Committee (1943)

Appendix

Welch, Leo

  365

Standard Oil Company, Inc. Advisory Group to Committee on International Economic Relations (1947); VC International Relations Committee (1948)

Welser, Brinton

Chain Belt Company PWC (1942)

Werthmann, F J

Werthmann Radio Company Committee on International Economic Relations (1947); International Relations Committee (1948)

Westerfield, R B

Yale University Economic Textbook Committee (1942); Economic Principles Commission (1943); Advisor WTC Subcte on International Financial Relations (1945)

Weyl, Raymond

Burkaw Electric Company Committee on International Economic Relations (1947)

Wheeler, Charles L

Pope & Talbot, Inc. VC Committee on International Economic Relations (1947); VC International Relations Committee (1948)

White, John W

Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company WTC Subcte on International Trade Relations (1945)

White, Malcolm R

Chester Cable Corporation Committee on International Economic Relations (1947)

Whiteley, J C R

Scott Paper Company Advisory Group on International Relations (1948)

Whiting, Justin R

Commonwealth & Southern Corporation Post-War Purchasing Power Subcte of PWC (1942)

Whitlock, Jr., Theo

The Loyal T. Ives Company Committee on International Economic Relations (1947)

366  Appendix Whitman, Ray P

Bell Aircraft Corporation WTC Subcte on International Cooperation (1945)

Wieland, W F

Mount Vernon Car Manufacturing Company Transition Period Subcte (1943)

Wild, E K

General Motors Corporation Advisory Group to Committee on International Economic Relations (1947); Advisory Group on International Relations (1948)

Wilkens, John A

Sweeney Lithograph Company, Inc. Committee on International Economic Relations (1947); International Relations Committee (1948)

Wilkie, L A

The Doall Company, Inc. Committee on International Economic Relations (1947)

Williams, Llewellyn

York Ice Machinery Corporation PWC Distribution Committee (1942)

Williams, S Riley

Worthington Pump and Machinery Corporation Advisory Group on Specific Foreign Trade Problems (1945); Advisory Group WTC; Advisory Group to Committee on International Economic Relations (1947); Advisory Group on International Relations (1948)

Williams, A N

Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company International Relations Committee (1948)

Wilson, Norman W

Hammermill Company ex-officio member PWC (1943); NAM Board (1943); chair NAM Corporation Peacetime Planning Committee (Guides) (1943)

Wilson, Eugene E

United Aircraft Corporation VC International Transportation and Communications Subcommittee of WTC (1945)

Appendix

Wilson, L E

  367

Everite Pump & Manufacturing Company, Inc. NAM Corporation Peacetime Planning Committee (Guides) (1943)

Winner, H T

Winner Manufacturing Company NAM Corporation Peacetime Planning Committee (Guides) (1943); International Transportation and Communications Subcommittee of WTC (1945)

Witherow, William P

Blaw-Knox Company NAM President (1942)

Wittnebel, A S

Commonwealth Color & Chemical Company NAM Corporation Peacetime Planning Committee (Guides) (1943)

Wood, S V

Minneapolis Electric Steel Castings Company NAM Board (1943); War Control Termination Committee (1944)

Woodhead, Harry

Consolidated Vultee Aircraft Corporation PWC (1943)

Wulsin, Lucien

The Baldwin Piano Company Steering Cte PWC (1942); chair Principles of Government Relations to Industry Subcommittee of PWC (1942); VC Transition Period Subcte (1943); Wartime Controls Group of Transition Subcte (1943)

Yates, W H

United Wall Paper Factories, Inc. PWC (1943)

Yetter, H D

Western Flaterite Roofing Company Committee on International Economic Relations (1947)

Young, Charles E

Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company Advisor PWC (1943); Advisor, Transition Subcte of PWC (1943); Wartime Controls Group of Transition Subcte (1943)

368  Appendix Young, Howard I

American Zinc Lead & Smelting Company Steering Cte PWC (1942); chair PWC Subcte International Relations; Board (1943); Committee on International Economic Relations (1947)

Young, James T

Univ. of Pennsylvania, School of Finance & Commerce

Zehrlaut, H A R

Economic Textbook Committee (1942); Economic Principles Commission (1943) US Machine Tool Manufacturing Corporation WTC Subcte on International Financial Relations (1945); WTC Subcte on International Cooperation (1945)

Zellers, John A

Remington Rand, Inc. VC WTC Subcte on International Financial Relations (1945); Committee on International Economic Relations (1947)

Ziebell, A C

Universal Foundry Company WTC Subcte on International Trade Relations (1945); International Relations Committee (1948)

Zinsser, John S

Sharp & Dohme speaker ‘Industry looks to the future’ (1944); WTC Subcte on International Trade Relations (1945)

Note This list has been collated from numerous documents found throughout the NAM collection at the Hagley Museum and Library.

Bibliography

Primary Sources Government Archives Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum, Hyde Park, New York, USA. The Papers of Charles W. Taussig The Papers of Alexander Sachs Harry S. Truman Presidential Library, Independence, Missouri, USA. Dallas C. Halverstadt Papers Charles W. Jackson Papers John T. Gibson Papers Private Archives Hagley Museum and Archives, Delaware, USA. The Records of the National Association of Manufacturers, 1895–1990 (Accession 1411) The Records of the United States Chamber of Commerce (Accession 1960) National Foreign Trade Council Records (Accession 2345) Western Reserve Historical Society, Cleveland, Ohio, USA. The Frederick C. Crawford Family Papers (MS4856) NAM Publications Primer for Americans, 1940. The Future of America: A Program adopted by the Congress of American Industry, December 1940, 1940. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 C. Whitham, Corporate Conservatives Go to War, Palgrave Studies in American Economic History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43908-8

369

370  Bibliography Can We Afford Another Post-War Depression? 1940. The 1941 Challenge to the Association, 1940. Internal Prosperity Essential for External Defense, 1940. Industry, Speak Up, 1940. The Real Issue We Must Decide, 1940. A Stoic America, 1940. The World Ahead, 1940. Industry Meets the Challenge of Defense, 1940. Post-War Economic Prospects, 1941. Iron and Steel Industry in the Defense Economy, 1941. Vigilance Today for a Free Enterprise Tomorrow, 1941. Can We Avoid a Post-Armament Depression? A Survey of Opinions submitted by members of the American Economic Association to the NAM, 1941. The Public’s View of War and Profits, 1942. Initiative Will Win the War: An Address delivered by J. Howard Pew before the War Congress of American Industry, 1942. Discussions on the Postwar Outlook: Including Two Addresses and a Symposium from the War Congress of American Industry, December 1942, 1943. Working Together for Postwar America, 1943. An Advertising Program for the NAM, 1943. Peacetime Plans of Industrial Companies, 1943. The Freedom We Defend, 1941, 1943. Peacetime Plans of Industrial Companies, 1943. What can we do starting now? 1943. Posters for Production, 1943. Jobs, Freedom, and Opportunity: Preliminary Views of the Postwar Problems Committee of the NAM, 1943. The Postwar Prospect: A Series of Seven Newspaper Articles, 1943. Post-War Jobs: Address at opening Fall Session of the Economic Club of Detroit, 11 October 1943 (by Alfred P. Sloan, Jr.), 1943. Let’s Look at These Bugaboos: An Address by Frederick C. Crawford, 1943. Questions and Answers about Postwar Problems: As Developed in Panel Discussions at NAM Postwar Conferences, 1943. Production for Victory: Two Years after Pearl Harbor, 1943. Second Report of the Postwar Committee of the NAM, 1943. Postwar Conditions and Trends: Analysis by Noel Sargent, 1943. A Better America: Industry’s Program and Excerpts from Addresses by Crawford, Prentis and Weisenburger, at the Second War Congress of American Industry, 1943. The Challenge: Address by Alfred P. Sloan, Jr., before the Second War Congress, 1944.

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Industry and Victory: Addresses by Charles E. Wilson, Joseph B. Eastman, Major General L. H. Campbell, Jr., Rear Admiral W. H. P. Blandy, and Tom M. Girdler, delivered at the Second War Congress of American Industry of the NAM, 1944. Jobs in Peacetime: A Panel Discussion (from Second War Congress of American Industry), 1944. Industry’s View on Postwar Problems, 1944. Postwar Distribution of Goods and Services: from the Second Report of the Postwar Committee, 1944. Sound International Relations: from the Second Report of the Postwar Committee, 1944. Reconversion and Reemployment Problems of American Corporations, 1944. Guide to Internal Organization for Corporation Postwar Planning, 1944. Guide to Postwar Sales Planning, 1944. Guide to Postwar Product Development, 1944. Guide to Cost Study in Corporation Postwar Planning, 1944. Guide to Postwar Corporate Financial Planning, 1944. How Americans can Earn More, Buy More, Have More, 1944. A Time for Action: The Job That Industry Must Do Now, 1944. Vigilance Today for a Free Enterprise Tomorrow, 1944. Foreign Trade of Twenty One European Countries for One Pre-War Year, 1937, 1944. A Summary of Plans for International Monetary Stabilization, 1944. Get Set to Sell: a Top Management View of Postwar Distribution Planning and Organization, 1944. Women in Postwar Industry, 1944. Women and the Top Jobs, 1944. Digest of Findings of Public Opinion Polls on the Subject of Post-War Problems and Planning, 1944. What Can Industry Contribute to a Better America after the War? 1944. Final Reports of the International Business Conference, 1944. Speak Up Management – Tell the “Folks”, 1944. Our New War in Europe: An Informal Report on a Tour of the Western Front (Crawford), 1945. Bretton Woods Proposals for Monetary Stabilization and International Loans, 1945. International Organizations in Which the United States Participates, 1945. Export-Import Bank of Washington, 1945. Administrative Law Reform, 1945. What Bureaucracy Means to You, 1945. Retooling for Sales, 1945. Trends in Education-Industry Cooperation, 1945. Prices, Profits and Production, 1945.

372  Bibliography Patents and Your Tomorrow, 1945. NAM Tells Industry’s Story on Patents, 1945. The Economic Background for Social Action, 1945. Labor Relations Today and Tomorrow, 1945. Readjustment to Civilian Jobs, 1945. Some Facts of Foremen Reorganization, 1945. Keeping Fit for a Profit, 1945. Industry Reports on Veterans, 1945. Industry Reports to the Veteran on Jobs, 1945. Jobs and the Woman, 1945. Community Relations in Business Education, 1945. Competitive Enterprise vs. Planned Economy, 1945. To What Shall We Return? 1945. Survey of Employment and Reconversion, 1945. Problems of Reconversion, 1945. Management’s Views on the Labor-Management Conference, 1945. You Have the Power to Shorten the War, 1945. NAM Looks at Cartels, 1945. Industry Will Finish the Job, 1945. NAM: Achievement for Industry in the Year of Victory, 1945 Annual Report, 1945. Full Production Means Full Employment – Plus: An Address by Ira Mosher, 1946. America Has No Limits: Address by Robert W. Wason, 1946. The Proposed Financial Arrangements with United Kingdom, 1946. The American Individual Enterprise System, 1946. A Businessman looks at the National Economy, 1946. Three Keys to Industry’s 1946 Job, 1946. The NAM and Its Leaders, 1947. The Public and the Taft-Hartley Law, 1947 Are Attacks on the Taft-Hartley Law Justified? 1947. Statistical and Economic Background to the ‘Marshall Plan’, 1947. Recommendations of the NAM on the Principles, Conditions, and Administration of Economic Aid to Europe, 1947. Who Wrote the Taft-Hartley Bill? 1948. Great Britain and the Marshall Plan, 1948. The European Recovery Program: A Survey, 1948. Economic Potentials Behind the Iron Curtain, 1948. Trade and Trade Policies behind the Iron Curtain, 1948. Telling the Profit Story – In Your Town! 1948. Significant Highlights of the Organization and History of the NAM, 1948. The Havana Charter for an International Trade Organization: An Appraisal, 1949.

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374  Bibliography Baumol, William, Robert Litan, and Carl Schramm, Good Capitalism, Bad Capitalism, and the Economics of Growth and Prosperity, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. Beard, Charles A., An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States, New York: Macmillan, 1913. Beder, Sharon, Free Market Missionaries: The Corporate Manipulation of Community Values, London: Earthscan, 2006. Behrman, Greg, The Most Noble Adventure: The Marshall Plan and the Reconstruction of Postwar Europe, New York: Aurum, 2008. Bennett, Michael J., When Dreams Came True: The GI Bill and the Making of Modern America, Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 1999. Bennett, Wallace F., The Very Human History of NAM, New York: Newcomen Society, 1949. Berle, Adolf A., Leaning Against the Dawn: An appreciation of the Twentieth Century Fund and Its Fifty Years of Adventure in Seeking to Influence American Development toward a More Effectively Just Civilization, 1919–1969, New York: Twentieth Century Fund, 1986 edition. Bernstein, Irving, The Lean Years: A History of the American Worker, 1920–1933, New York: Haymarket Books, 2010 edition. Bernstein, Michael A., The Great Depression: Delayed Recovery and Economic Change in America, 1929–1939, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Best, Gary, Pride, Prejudice and Politics: Roosevelt versus Recovery, 1933–1938, New York: Praeger, 1991. Blackford, Mansel and Austin Kerr, Business Enterprise in American History, New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1994 (third edition). Blaisdell, Donald C., and Jane Greverus, Economic Power and Political Pressures, Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1941. Blum, John Morton, V Was for Victory: Politics and American Culture during World War II, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976. Bordo, Michael, Claudia Goldin, and Eugene White, The Defining Moment: The Great Depression and the American Economy in the Twentieth Century, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1997. Bowen, Michael, The Roots of Modern Conservatism: Dewey, Taft, and the Soul of the Republican Party, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. Boyce, Robert, The Great Interwar Crisis and the Collapse of Globalization, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Bradford, Ralph, Along the Way, Washington, DC: Judd and Detweiler, 1949. Brady, Robert A., Business as a System of Power, New York: Columbia University Press, 1943. Braeman, John, Robert Bremner, and David Brody (eds), The New Deal: The National Level, Volume One, Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1975.

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Brandes, Stuart D., Warhogs: A History of War Profits in America, Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997. Braverman, Jordan, To Hasten the Homecoming: How Americans Fought World War II through the Media, Lanham: Madison Books, 1996. Brinkley, Alan, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War, New York: Vintage, 1996. Brinkley, Alan, Liberalism and Its Discontents, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998. Brinkley, David, Washington Goes to War, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988. Budd, Alan, The Politics of Economic Planning, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1978. Bundy, William P., The Council on Foreign Relations and Foreign Affairs: Notes for a History, New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1994. Burch, Philip H. Jr., Elites in American History, Volume 3: The New Deal to the Carter Administrations, New York: Holmes & Meier, 1980. Burgin, Angus, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets since the Depression, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012. Canterbery, E. Ray, The President’s Council of Economic Advisers, New York: Exposition Press, 1961. Carew, Michael G., Becoming the Arsenal: The American Industrial Mobilization for World War II, 1938–1942, New York: University Press of America, 2010. Carlisle, Norman V., and Frank B. Latham, Miracles Ahead! Better Living in the Postwar World, New York: Macmillan, 1944. Casdorph, Paul D., ‘Let the Good Times Roll’: Life at Home in America during World War Two, New York: Paragon House, 1989. Caton, Bruce, The War Lords of Washington, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1948. Cesarano, Filippo, Monetary Theory and Bretton Woods: The Construction of an International Monetary Order, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Chandler, Alfred D. Jr. (ed), Strategy and Structure: Chapters in the History of American Industrial Enterprise, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1962. Chandler, Alfred D. Jr., The Visible Hand, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977. Clark, Neil M., These Tremendous Years, 1912–1937: Flashes from the History of a Quarter Century of Business Achievement, Washington, DC: US Chamber of Commerce, 1937. Clawson, Marion, New Deal Planning: The National Resources Planning Board, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981. Cochran, Thomas C., The Great Depression and World War Two, 1929–1945, New York: Glenview, 1968. Cochran, Thomas C., and William Miller, The Age of Enterprise: A Social History of Industrial America, New York: Harper & Row, 1961 edition.

376  Bibliography Collins, Robert M., The Business Response to Keynes, 1929–1964, New York: Columbia University Press, 1981. Collins, Robert M., More: The Politics of Economic Growth in Postwar America, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Cooling, Benjamin F. (ed), War, Business and American Society: Historical Perspectives on the Military-Industrial Complex, New York: National University Publications, 1977. Couch, Jim and William Shughart II, The Political Economy of the New Deal, Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 1998. Dallek, Matthew, Defenseless Under the Night: The Roosevelt Years, Civil Defense and the Origins of Homeland Security, New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Davis, Kenneth, FDR: The War President, 1940–1943: A History, New York: Random House, 2000. Davis, M. W. R., Detroit’s Wartime Industry: Arsenal of Democracy, Mount Pleasant: Arcadia Publishing, 2007. De Chazeau, Melvin G., Albert G. Hart, Gardiner C. Means, Howard B. Myers, Herbert Stein, and Theodore O. Yntema, Jobs and Markets – How to Prevent Inflation and Depression in the Transition, New York: McGraw Hill, 1946. Diamond, Sara, Roads to Dominion: Right-Wing Movements and Political Power in the United States, New York: Guilford, 1995. Divine, Robert A., Second Chance: The Triumph of Internationalism in America during World War II, New York: Atheneum, 1967. Domhoff, G. William, The Higher Circles, New York: Vintage, 1965. Domhoff, G. William, Who Rules America? Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1967. Domhoff, G. William, The Power Elite and the State: How Policy Is Made in America, New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1990. Domhoff, G. William, The Myth of Liberal Ascendancy: Corporate Dominance from the Great Depression to the Great Recession, Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2013. Domhoff, G. William and Michael J. Webber, Class and Power in the New Deal: Corporate Moderates, Southern Democrats, and the Liberal-Labor Coalition, Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2011. Donovan, Robert J., Conflict and Crisis: The Presidency of Harry S. Truman, 1945–1948, New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1996. Dreisziger, N. F. (ed), Mobilization for Total War: The Canadian, American, and British Experience, 1914–1918, 1939–1945, Waterloo, Canada: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1980. Eakins, David and James Weinstein, For a New America, New York: Random House, 1970.

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Eckes, Alfred E. Jr., A Search for Solvency: Bretton Woods and the International Monetary System, 1941–1971, Austin: Texas University Press, 1975. Eckes, Alfred E. Jr., and Thomas W. Zeiler, Globalization and the American Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Eiler, Keith, Mobilizing America: Robert P. Patterson and the War Effort, 1940– 1945, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997. Elliott, Osborne, Men at the Top, New York: Harper & Brothers, 1959. Farber, David, Sloan Rules: Alfred Sloan and the Triumph of General Motors, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Feldman, Glen, Great Melding: The Dixiecrat Rebellion and the Southern Model for America’s New Conservatives, Birmingham: University of Alabama Press, 2015. Ferrell, Robert H., Harry S. Truman: A Life, Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1994. Flanagan, Maureen A., America Reformed: Progressives and Progressivisms, 1890s–1920s, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Flash, Edward S., Jr., Economic Advice and Presidential Leadership: The Council of Economic Advisers, New York: Columbia University Press, 1965. Fleming, Thomas, The New Dealer’s War, New York: Basic Books, 2001. Flynn, George Q., The Mess in Washington: Manpower Mobilization in World War II, Westport: Greenwood Press, 1979. Folly, Martin, The United States and World War II: The Awakening Giant, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002. Folsom, Burton and Anita Folsom, FDR Goes to War: How Expanded Executive Power, Spiraling National Debt, and Restricted Civil Liberties Shaped Wartime America, New York: Threshold Editions, 2013. Fones-Wolf, Elizabeth, Selling Free Enterprise: The Assault on Labor and Liberalism, 1945–60, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994. Fossedal, Gregory A., Our Finest Hour: Will Clayton, the Marshall Plan, and the Triumph of Democracy, Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1993. Fox, Frank W., Madison Avenue Goes to War: The Strange Military Career of American Advertising, 1941–1945, Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press, 1975. Fraser, Steve and Gary Gerstle (eds), The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930–1980, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989. Fussell, Paul, Wartime: Understanding and Behaviour in the Second World War, New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Galbraith, John K., How Keynes Came to America, New York: Overbrook Press, 1965. Galloway, George B., Planning for America, New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1941.

378  Bibliography Galloway, George B., Postwar Planning in the US: An Organizational Directory, Washington, DC: McGraw Hill, 1943. Gardner, Richard N., Sterling-Dollar Diplomacy: Anglo-American Collaboration in the Reconstruction of Multilateral Trade, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956. General Motors Corporation, American Battle for Abundance: A Story of Mass Production, Detroit: General Motors, 1947. Gordon, Colin, New Deals: Business, Labor, and Politics in America, 1920–1935, London: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Gordon, John Steele, An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power, New York: HarperCollins, 2004. Graham, Otis L., Toward a Planned Society: From Roosevelt to Nixon, New York: Oxford University Press, 1976. Gregory, Ross, America 1941: A Nation at a Crossroads, New York: Macmillan, 1989. Gross, James A., The Reshaping of the National Labor Relations Board: National Labor Policy in Transition, 1937–1947, Albany: State University of New York, 1981. Hamby, Alonzo, Beyond the New Deal: Harry S. Truman and American Liberalism, New York: Columbia University Press, 1973. Hamilton, Nigel, The Mantle of Command: FDR at War, 1941–1942, New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2014. Hanahoe, Tom, America Rules: US Foreign Policy, Globalization and Corporate USA, New York: Brandon Press, 2003. Hansen, Alvin H., America’s Role in the World Economy, New York: Penguin, 1946 edition. Hansen, Alvin H., The Postwar American Economy: Performance and Problems, New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1964. Hardisty, Jean, Mobilizing Resentment: Conservative Resurgence from the John Birch Society to the Promise Keepers, Boston: Beacon Press, 1999. Harris, Howell John, The Right to Manage: Industrial Relations Policies of American Business in the 1940s, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982. Harris, Nigel, Of Bread and Guns: The World Economy in Crisis, London: Penguin, 1983. Harris, Seymour E. (ed), Postwar Economic Problems, New York: McGraw Hill, 1943. Harris, Seymour E., The New Economics: Keynes’ Influence on Theory and Public Policy, New York: Knopf, 1947. Harris, Seymour E., Saving American Capitalism, New York: Knopf, 1948. Harrison, Mark (ed), The Economics of World War II: Six Great Powers in International Comparison, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

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Hartz, Louis, The Liberal Tradition in America, New York: Harcourt Brace, 1955. Hawley, Ellis W., The New Deal and the Problems of Monopoly: A Study in Economic Ambivalence, New York: Fordham University Press, 1995 edition. Heale, M. J., Franklin D. Roosevelt: The New Deal and War, New York: Routledge, 1999. Heale, M.J., Twentieth Century America: Politics and Power in the United States, 1900–2000, London: Hodder Arnold, 2004. Heide, Robert and John Gilman, Home Front America: Popular Culture of the World War II Era, San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1995. Henthorn, Cynthia Lee, From Submarines to Suburbs: Selling a Better America, 1939-1959, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2006. Herman, Arthur, Freedom’s Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II, New York: Random House, 2012. Hess, Gary R., The United States at War, 1941–45, Illinois: Harlan Davidson, 2011 edition. Higgs, Robert, Depression, War and Cold War: Studies in Political Economy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Hildebrand, Robert C., Dumbarton Oaks: The Origins of the United Nations and the Search for Post-War Security, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1990. Hilmes, Michele, Radio Voices: American Broadcasting, 1922–1952, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Hiltzik, Michael, The New Deal: A Modern History, New York: Free Press, 2011. Himmelberg, Robert F., The Great Depression and the New Deal, Westport: Greenwood Press, 2000. Himmelberg, Robert F. (ed), Government-Business Cooperation, 1945–1964: Corporatism in the Post-War Era, New York: Garland Publishing, 1994. Himmelstein, Jerome, To the Right: The Transformation of American Conservatism, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Hogan, Michael J., The Marshall Plan: America, Britain and the Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1947–52, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Holl, Richard E., From the Boardroom to the War Room: America’s Corporate Liberals and FDR’s Preparedness Program, Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2005. Homan, Paul T., and Fritz Machlup (eds), Financing American Prosperity: A Symposium of Economists, New York: Twentieth Century Fund, 1945. Hooks, Gregory, Forging the Military-Industrial Complex: World War Two’s Battle of the Potomac, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1991. Horowitz, David (ed), Corporations and the Cold War, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1969.

380  Bibliography Hull, Cordell, The Memoirs of Cordell Hull: Volume Two, London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1948. Hyde, Charles K., Arsenal of Democracy: The American Automobile Industry in WWII, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2013. Hyman, Sidney, The Lives of William Benton, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1969. Ikenberry, G. John, Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis and Transformation of the American World Order, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011. Jacoby, Sanford, Modern Manors: Welfare Capitalism since the New Deal, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. James, Harold, The End of Globalization: Lessons from the Great Depression, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. Janeway, Eliot, The Struggle for Survival: A Chronicle of Economic Mobilization in World War II, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1951. Jeffries, John W., Wartime America: The World War II Home Front, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996. Jenkins, Alan, The Forties, New York: Universe Books, 1977. John, Richard R., and Kim Phillips-Fein (eds), Capital Gains: Business and Politics in Twentieth Century America, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017. Johnston, Christopher (ed), The Selected Speeches and Writings of Frederick Coolidge Crawford, Cleveland: (unknown), 1992. Johnston, Christopher (ed), Storyettes: Reminiscences of Frederick Coolidge Crawford, Cleveland: The Press at Cropthorne, 1992. Johnston, Eric, America Unlimited: The Case for a People’s Capitalism, New York: Doubleday, 1944. Jones, Jesse H., Fifty Billion Dollars: My Thirteen Years with the RFC, 1932– 1945, New York: Macmillan, 1951. Kaiser, Henry, Management Looks at the Postwar World: An Address before the 47thAnnual Meeting of the NAM, 4 December 1942, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1943. Kennedy, David M., Freedom from Want: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945, New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Kersten, Andrew E., Labor’s Home Front: The AFL during World War Two, New York: New York University Press, 2009. Kirzner, Israel, Ludwig von Mises: The Man and His Economics, Wilmington: ISI Books, 2001. Klein, Maury, A Call to Arms: Mobilizing America for World War II, New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2013. Koistinen, Paul A. C., The Military-Industrial Complex: A Historical Perspective, Westport: Praeger, 1980.

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382  Bibliography McCabe, Thomas B., The Committee for Economic Development – Its Past, Present and Future: An Address to the Board of Trustees, CED, November 19, 1949, New York: McGraw Hill, 1949. McCormick, Thomas Carson (ed), Problems of the Postwar World: A Symposium on Postwar Problems, New York: McGraw Hill, 1945. McCormick, T. J., America’s Half Century: United States Foreign Policy in the Cold War, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins press, 1989. McCoy, Donald, The Presidency of Harry S. Truman, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1984. McCraw, Thomas H., American Business, 1920–2000: How It Worked, Wheeling: Harlen Davidson, 2000. McElvaine, Robert, The Great Depression: America, 1929–1941, New York: Three Rivers Press, 1993 edition. McGerr, Michael, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870–1920, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. McKee, Captain and Louis Wiesen (eds), American Economic Objectives, New Wilmington: McGraw Hill, 1942. McQuaid, Kim, Big Business and Presidential Power: From FDR to Reagan, New York: William Morrow and Co., 1982. McQuaid, Kim, A Response to Industrialism: Liberal Businessmen and the Evolving Spectrum of Capitalist Reform, 1886–1960, New York: Taylor and Francis, 1986. McQuaid, Kim, Uneasy Partners: Big Business in American Politics, 1945–1990, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. Mead, Chris, The Magicians of Main Street: America and Its Chambers of Commerce, New York: John Cruger Press, 2014. Miller, Sally M., and Daniel A. Cornford (eds), American Labor in the Era of World War II, Westport: Greenwood Press, 1995. Mills, Nicolaus, Winning the Peace: The Marshall Plan and America’s Coming of Age as a Superpower, New York: Wiley, 2008. Mills, C. Wright, The Power Elite, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000 edition. Milward, Alan S., The Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1945–1951, New York: Routledge, 1987. Milward, Alan S., War, Economy and Society, 1939–1945, London: Penguin, 1987 edition. Moe, Richard, Roosevelt’s Second Act, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Moulton, Harold G. and Associates, Capital Expansion, Employment and Economic Stability, Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1940. Muccigrosso, Robert (ed), Manufacturing in America: A Legacy of Excellence, New York: National Association of Manufacturers, 1995. Nash, Gerald D., The Great Depression and World War Two: Organizing America, 1933–1945, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979.

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Index

A Airey, John, 71, 79, 98, 105, 106, 138, 162, 251, 321 American Chamber of Commerce (London), 170 American Economic Foundation, 11, 20 American Enterprise Association, 11, 20 American Federation of Labor (AFL), 39, 150, 173, 184, 206, 226, 228, 229, 252, 269, 276, 306 Atlantic Charter, 132 Aviation, 146, 170, 190, 197 B Bankers, 6, 56, 240, 241 Baruch, Bernard, 144, 166, 171, 198 Batt, William L., 53, 54, 144 Better America campaign, 148, 181 Bretton Woods proposals, 220, 240, 241, 265, 266

Britain, 2, 40, 43, 49, 51, 55, 56, 99, 109, 132, 159, 160, 170, 193, 197, 203, 244, 245, 291 British-US loan, 245, 246, 269, 284, 295 Brown, Donaldson, 62, 158, 327 Brown, Millard, 79, 89, 105, 264, 327 Bunting, Earl, 281, 292, 299 Business Advisory Council (BAC), 9, 53, 54, 63, 72, 120, 150, 166, 188, 275 Business Week, 90, 277, 329 C Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 196, 208, 278, 303, 358 Chase, Stuart, 63, 103, 108, 120, 203 Chevalier, 92, 93, 99 Clayton, William L., 166, 217 Closed shop, 25, 31, 32, 54, 85, 119, 219, 226, 232, 251, 273, 274, 276, 277, 292

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 C. Whitham, Corporate Conservatives Go to War, Palgrave Studies in American Economic History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43908-8

395

396  Index Colgate, S. Bayard, 70, 73, 75, 77, 78, 80, 81, 89, 136, 137, 153, 158, 173, 243, 329 Colmer Committee, 185, 251 Colonial policy, 157, 170 Committee for Economic Development (CED), 9, 10, 72, 73, 100, 102, 106, 112, 113, 120, 121, 144, 146, 150, 152, 156, 166, 173, 180, 183–185, 187, 196, 225, 241, 254, 274, 278, 287, 303, 309, 310, 313 Congress (US), 31, 32, 42, 47, 48, 50, 51, 53, 54, 63, 95, 114, 118, 122, 124, 127, 128, 134, 139, 143, 144, 149, 154, 165, 167, 171–174, 185, 188, 201, 217, 227, 235, 241–243, 248, 250, 251, 268, 271, 272, 274, 276, 282, 283, 285, 287, 292, 294, 305, 308, 309, 311, 315, 318 Congress of Industrial Organisations (CIO), 150, 173, 226, 228, 229, 252, 275, 276, 306 Conservatism, 2, 10, 11, 20, 21, 39, 58, 72, 125, 274, 293, 311, 313, 314, 320 Controls, 6, 48, 51, 74, 77, 80, 82, 85, 97, 98, 102, 118, 125, 127, 131, 132, 139, 143, 145, 156, 166, 171, 174, 183, 186, 188, 199, 220, 222, 224, 235, 245, 246, 248–251, 271, 275, 286, 291, 305, 307, 308 Crawford, Frederick C., 21, 36, 157, 299 and ‘Crawford Committee’ (1948), 330, 331, 336, 342, 349, 352, 356, 361, 364 and Seven-Point Program, 125, 126

D Democratic Party, 11, 111, 277 Department of Commerce, 24, 245 Disposal of government-owned plants, 162, 268 Dumbarton Oaks. See United Nations du Pont, Lammot, 30, 138, 178, 181, 243, 333 E Economic and Social Council, 236– 238, 247, 278, 288, 309 Economic Principles Commission, 129, 137, 274, 278, 308, 331, 336, 344, 346, 351, 356, 358, 359, 363–365 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 11, 314, 319 Export-Import Bank, 235, 244, 245 Exports, 187, 191, 192, 241, 280, 284 F Foreign policy, 11, 56, 85, 146, 280, 314 Foreign relations, 287, 290 Fortune, 133, 160, 187, 207, 220, 261, 289, 298 Fuller, Walter D., 46, 83, 84, 86, 137, 173, 224, 231, 294, 335 G Galbraith, John K., 64, 144 Gallup, 146, 261 Gaylord, Robert M., 170, 183–185, 187, 190, 196, 237, 247, 254, 267, 284, 289, 296, 336 Gebhart, John C., 82–84, 106, 137, 336 George, Walter F., 207, 244, 266

Index

Germany, 2, 4, 55, 61, 117, 157, 160, 218, 252, 284 G.I. Bill of Rights, 167, 310 Golden Anniversary Congress of Industry (1945), 263, 267 Great Depression, 2, 5, 12–14, 19, 27, 28, 32, 38, 116, 200, 293, 309, 312 Green, William, 150, 152, 226, 227, 276 H Hansen, Alvin H., 17, 64, 108, 121 Harrison, Clifford E., 35, 73, 75, 113, 133, 221–224, 229, 306, 307, 339 Havana Charter, 281–283, 295, 296 Henderson, Leon, 64, 144 Hoffman, Paul G., 72, 121, 150–152, 208, 287 Hook, Charles, 30, 72, 113, 254, 294, 340 Hudson, Manley O., 90, 92, 108, 130, 140, 141, 208, 341 Hull, Cordell, 33, 40, 113, 122, 217 I Ickes, Harold L., 42 Imperial Preference, 197, 235, 245 Imports, 280 industrial relations, 27, 113, 177, 231 Inflation, 64, 68, 74, 127, 131, 148, 200, 248, 250, 256, 272, 275, 276, 286, 304 International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), 208, 240, 241 International Business Conference, 189, 193, 201, 208, 234, 306,

  397

326, 332, 341, 346, 353, 354, 359 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 239–241, 309 International relations, 82, 91, 93, 94, 115, 120, 137, 138, 144, 171, 210, 235, 264, 265, 267, 270, 285, 289, 291, 295–298, 308, 316 International Trade Organization (ITO), 192, 240, 246, 279–281, 283, 288, 295, 296, 309, 310, 313 and Havana Charter, 282, 283 J Jobs, Freedom, Opportunity, 118–122, 128, 138, 140–142, 144, 145, 158, 168 Johnston, Eric, 72, 73, 102, 120, 183, 186, 190, 207, 208, 225, 227–229, 253, 254, 258, 262, 306 Jones, Jesse H., 53, 63, 72, 143, 217 K Keynesianism, 8, 13, 21, 28, 38, 62 Keynes, John Maynard, 3, 8, 28, 62, 240, 245, 265, 311 Knox, Frank, 44, 63 L Labor, 24–25, 30, 45, 54–55, 85, 113, 119, 120, 125, 139, 145, 151, 155, 172, 184, 219, 225, 274, 276, 308 Labor-Management Charter, 226, 263, 306

398  Index Labor-Management Conference, 53, 55, 61, 63, 73, 101, 225, 227, 232, 252–255, 257, 258, 268, 269, 273, 302, 307, 308 La Follette, Robert, 35, 46 Latin America, 155, 186, 187, 207, 245 Lend-Lease, 16, 47, 51, 58, 90, 129, 140, 142, 162, 164, 170, 192, 197, 198, 203, 242, 244, 245, 266, 306 Lincoln, Edward E., 71 Lund, Robert, 30, 33, 37, 40 M Marshall, George C., 283, 285 Marshall plan, 288, 291, 297, 298, 309, 314, 319 and Economic Cooperation Act, 287 Means, Gardiner, 108 Mobilization, 4, 5, 7, 13, 23, 42, 44, 45, 47, 48, 50–52, 55, 61–64, 69, 74, 75, 102, 119, 126, 138, 143, 144, 202, 229, 301, 302, 308, 310, 317 Mosher, Ira, 226–229, 232, 253–257, 259, 270, 289, 349 Motion picture, 32, 179 Multilateralism, 33, 94, 122, 196, 208, 281, 282 Murray Bill (Fair Employment Act), 218, 257 Murray, Phillip, 150, 152, 226, 227 Mutual Aid Agreement, 162, 170, 192 N National Committee to Uphold Constitutional Government, 11, 20 National Foreign Trade Council (NFTC), 90, 173, 186, 187, 189, 190, 196, 204, 280, 296, 337

National Industrial Council, 25, 37 National Industrial Information Committee (NIIC), 34, 35, 50, 71, 73, 78, 117, 124, 134–136, 156, 168, 175–182, 199, 220, 221, 223, 224, 230, 252, 257, 273, 312 National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), 30, 31, 54, 112, 277 National Planning Association (NPA), 62, 67, 70, 89, 120, 121, 144, 150, 166, 180, 187, 225, 254, 278, 287, 303, 309, 313 National Post-War Conferences, 183, 201 National Resources Planning Board (NRPB), 64, 70, 82, 117–119, 143, 155, 303 National War Labor Board (NWLB), 54, 112, 113, 154, 225, 226 Nelson, Donald M., 63, 127, 144 New Deal, 2–5, 27–28, 42, 54, 62, 96, 111, 118, 143, 155, 165, 218, 301 Newsweek, 46, 97, 112, 158, 274, 289, 349 O O’Daniel, E.V., 78, 79, 98, 106 Office of Price Administration (OPA), 64, 144, 248, 250, 272, 275, 276 Opinion Research Corporation, 53, 66, 79, 134, 183, 261, 273, 293, 355 P Pearl Harbor, 42, 44, 51, 53, 59, 61, 75, 95, 114, 225, 302 Pew, J. Howard, 49, 52, 109, 138, 224, 352 Post-War Committee (PWC)

Index

formation, 156, 241 and Jobs, Freedom, Opportunity, 118, 119, 121, 128, 142, 144, 168 and Second Report, 144, 146, 168, 169, 171 Prentis, Henning W., 46, 48, 49, 58, 65, 149, 196, 254, 294, 352 Progressive movement, 25 Protectionism, 24, 77, 79, 82, 122, 124, 146, 243, 251, 282, 293 R Radio, 32, 35, 43, 45, 116, 121, 153, 176, 177, 179, 181, 221, 252, 257, 258, 281, 310 Rationing, 96, 98, 109, 162, 251 Ray, Jr., George, 191, 208, 244, 353 Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act (RTAA), 122–124, 129, 243, 244, 283, 288, 307 Reconstruction, 79, 85, 90, 92, 100, 173, 242, 243, 245, 282, 284, 285, 296 Republican Party, 11, 43, 146, 155, 217, 314 Robey, Ralph W., 46, 97, 98, 106, 109, 164, 289, 354 Robins, James H., 71, 137, 162, 354 Robinson, Claude, 66, 79, 183, 355 Rockefeller, Nelson B., 186, 191, 217 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 2–4, 27, 28, 30, 31, 42–44, 47, 48, 50– 55, 61, 63, 64, 73, 91, 94, 96, 102, 103, 118, 144, 155, 165, 167, 191, 206, 219, 227, 302 S Sargent, Noel, 71, 116, 129, 130, 227, 356 Second Report of the Postwar Committee of the NAM, 144, 163

  399

Second War Congress of Industry (1943), 147, 163 Shipping, 197, 235 Shotwell, James, 196, 208, 358 Sloan, Jr., Alfred P., 30, 34, 126–128, 148, 153, 159, 163, 358 Smith–Connally (Labor Disputes) Act, 155 Smith, Edgar W., 87, 107, 208, 236, 267, 296, 359 Soldiers of Production, 134, 161, 177, 205, 209, 212, 220, 258, 260, 305 Soviet Union, 2, 4, 51, 55, 99, 207, 272, 283, 288, 291, 315 Speak-Up Management campaign, 200 Stimson, Henry L., 44, 63 Strikes, 25, 30, 96, 125, 225, 254, 269, 272–274, 276, 292, 294, 308 Surplus War Property, 166 Sykes, Wilfred, 71, 105, 129, 130, 132, 133, 136, 137, 153, 160, 168, 173, 189, 206, 236, 237, 297, 361 T Taft-Hartley (Labor-Management Relations) Act (1947), 277 Taft, Robert, 11, 191, 243, 266, 276 Tariffs, 24, 33, 58, 79, 80, 82, 89, 94, 100, 108, 122, 141–143, 156, 169, 170, 197, 243, 245–248, 255, 256, 280, 286, 306 Taxes, 9, 74, 85, 180, 182, 186, 202, 223, 256, 275, 286, 318 Taylor, Wayne C., 245 Three to be Served, 179 ‘Textbook controversy’, 45, 97, 176 Trade, 24, 26, 32, 33, 58, 68, 76, 79, 81, 89–91, 94, 95, 99, 108, 113, 115, 120, 122–124, 127,

400  Index 128, 140–142, 145, 146, 154, 158, 164, 170, 189, 191, 192, 194–198, 201, 203, 207–209, 220, 223, 226, 231, 233–235, 239–248, 256, 278–284, 286, 290, 291, 306 Trades unions, 2, 4, 25, 30, 39, 112, 120, 135, 150, 308, 312 Transportation, 56, 91, 170, 190, 197 Truman, Harry S., 219, 241, 252, 254, 260, 265, 272, 273, 282, 285, 287, 292, 293, 308, 314 Twentieth Century Fund (TCF), 9, 34, 62, 89, 103, 120, 180, 187, 225, 254, 303, 309 U United Nations, 94, 141, 142, 236, 237, 278, 295, 309 United States Chamber of Commerce (USCC), 11, 20, 26, 37, 54, 72, 73, 100, 102, 113, 120, 150, 182, 186, 187, 189, 190, 220, 225, 227, 228, 250, 253, 280, 284, 287, 306 V von Hayek, Ludwig, 315 von Mises, Ludwig, 71, 137, 140, 142, 236, 315, 380 W Wages, 3, 61, 66, 74, 132, 136, 144, 162, 252, 273, 280 Wagner Act, 31, 32, 39, 54, 85, 117, 188, 225, 227, 228, 233, 254, 274, 276, 277, 301, 306, 308, 310

Wampler, Cloud, 173, 178, 206, 224, 230, 231, 233, 247, 251, 289, 307, 363 War and Reconversion Congress of Industry (1944), 198, 209 War Congress of American Industry (1942), 109, 110 War contracts, 50, 118, 138, 145, 151, 166, 185, 188, 219, 235 Warner, William B., 43, 44, 56, 62, 161, 364 War Production Board (WPB), 63, 64, 104, 127, 144, 149, 157, 173, 187, 249, 250, 262 Wason, Robert, 72, 78, 80, 81, 98, 99, 116, 117, 137, 158, 173, 251, 255, 256, 263, 268, 270, 276, 284, 289, 381 Weisenburger, Walter B., 34, 35, 65– 67, 75, 86, 99–104, 110, 113, 114, 116, 124, 127, 133, 148, 153, 199, 201, 209, 221–223, 225, 227, 229–233, 247, 251, 252, 255, 260, 261, 263, 267, 269, 273, 306, 307, 364 White, Harry Dexter, 240, 265 Wilson, Charles E., 144, 149, 163, 224 Witherow, William P., 54, 55, 59, 63, 69, 70, 83, 84, 86, 87, 107, 119, 186, 191, 367 Wood, Robert E., 49, 58 World Trade Committee (WTC), 321–3331, 333–337, 339–349, 351–358, 360–368 Wulsin, Lucien, 72, 78, 106, 137, 162, 367