World War II presented a unique opportunity for American business to improve its reputation after years of censure for inflicting the Great Depression upon the nation. No employers’ organization worked harder or devoted greater resources to reviving business prestige during the war than the National Association of Manufacturers, which spent millions of dollars on promoting the indispensability of private enterprise to the successful mobilization of the American economy in an uncompromising multi-media campaign which spanned the factory floor to the movie theatre. Now, using unpublished primary sources, the full extent of the NAM’s wartime mission to raise the stature of American business in the post-war era is revealed. During the war the NAM erected a vast structure of research on an unprecedented scale numbering more than one hundred persons dedicated to planning the best solutions for restoring American ‘free enterprise’ capitalism after the war in a direct challenge tothe ‘liberal’ prescriptions of the reigning administration. These studies were painstakingly assembled and widely distributed and served as a complimentary arm to the better-known pro-business propaganda message of the organization. What emerges is a unique and telling glimpse into the minds of the corporate class of wartime America that reveals the determination of a major employers’ organization to exploit the exceptional circumstances of total war to influence both the power-brokers in Washington who wrote economic policy and the American public as a whole to embrace a post-war future ruled by private enterprise capitalism.
Tabella dei contenuti
Chapter 1: Introduction.- Chapter 2: The war before the war: Limiting the New Deal, 1933-39.- Chapter 3: Making the most of mobilization, 1939-41.- Chapter 4: Life on the Periphery, 1941-43.- Chapter 5: Coming in from the cold: post-war visions crystalize, 1944-45.- Chapter 6: From strength to strength: the battle over Reconversion, 1945-47.- Chapter 7: Making peace with the moderates, 1947-48.- chapter 8: Conclusions.
Circa l’autore
Charlie Whitham is Senior Lecturer in American History at Edge Hill University, UK. His research focuses on the political, economic and social processes that transformed the USA into a global superpower during the pivotal years of World War II. He has authored Post-War Business Planners in the United States, 1939-1948: The Rise of the Corporate Moderates (2016).
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