Once again, therefore, needed changes in America’s social structure—action toward achieving equal rights for women—were subordinated to the need to vanquish fascism. Once again, the forestalling of change meant that the evils Americans were presumably fighting to overcome would continue at home after the military campaign abroad was over.
The war brought full employment and decisively ended the Depression of the thirties, as Roosevelt’s New Deal measures had failed to do. Still, it left intact the same basic features of the American economic system, which had produced, throughout American history, poverty amidst abundance, profiteering by big business, and alliances between giant corporations and the government at the expense of the American public. In The Crucial Decade, Eric Goldman writes:
The America of V-J was prosperous, more prosperous than the country had been in all its three centuries of zest for good living. The boom rolled out in great fat waves, into every corner of the nation and up and down the social ladder. Factory hands, brushing the V-J confetti out of their hair, laid plans for a suburban cottage. Farmers’ children were driving to college classes in glossy convertibles. California border police, checking the baggage of Okies returning east, came across wads of hundred-dollar bills.
Goldman exaggerates the reality; there were also the decaying slums, the shortage of housing, the ghettos, the unsatisfying jobs held by most people. He is closer to the truth when he talks of the “tonic sense of new possibilities” that many people felt. Yet the trouble was that even though trade unions, representing only a fifth of the working population, had become stronger during the war, the power of large corporations had increased in much greater proportion. The war accentuated the traditional American economic scheme in which business profit and power were the first considerations.
The alliance between big business and government has been a keystone in the American system ever since Alexander Hamilton’s economic program was presented to Congress during the nation’s first, peacetime administration. In wartime, the alliance has always become tighter, and World War II was no exception. The mobilization of production was essential to waging and winning the war, and this required the cooperation of those who controlled production—the executives of industry. Roosevelt, in one of his boldest speeches, had denounced the “economic royalists” of America, although his administrations did little to dislodge them from power. As historian Bruce Catton saw it from his post in the War Production Board: “The economic royalists, denounced and derided through two terms of the administration, had a part to play now. …”
In his book The War Lords of Washington, Catton described the process by which industrial mobilization during the war was carried on in such a way as to leave the economic status quo untouched. The United States began a drastic increase in war production after France’s defeat, and according to an official report of the Office of Production Management, as early as 1941 three-fourths of the total dollar value of military supply contracts was concentrated in the hands of fifty-six corporations. A year after the fall of France, on the eve of Pearl Harbor, the auto industry had received $4 billion in war contracts; it was, however, delaying the fulfillment of those contracts while it brought out the 1942 model cars, decorated with more chromium than had ever been used before—and chromium was one of the scarcest and most critically needed materials.
Hitler might be on the rampage, but American businessmen were concerned mostly with business. Moreover, they went to Washington in large numbers as dollar-a-year men to direct industrial mobilization; they drew no salary but they maintained profitable corporate connections. The alliance between America’s governmental and business leaders, in effect, was not going to permit the war to cause any basic changes in the American capitalistic system. The government’s decision to employ dollar-a-year men, as Catton says,
grew logically out of the fundamental decision that while we were fighting an all-out war we were going to fight it for limited objectives—which is to say, for purely military objectives—and it was a decision of the most far-reaching importance. In effect, even if not by conscious intent, it was a decision to cling to the status quo.
For the decision to keep on using dollar-a-year men did nothing less than preserve the existing corporate control of American industry; not just because the dollar-a-year man did things on purpose to safeguard that control, but because the possible alternatives to the dollar-a-year man system were all so far-reaching.
“Far-reaching” alternatives might have included giving the rank-and-file workers in industry an important say in economic decisions, and reducing corporate profit in order to give the benefits to the nation’s low-income groups. If the war was to bring about any genuine extension of democracy at home as well as abroad, it would have to do something about industrial democracy—at the point of production, where trade unions had fought for a small voice in conditions of work. (Walter Reuther, president of the United Automobile Workers, did suggest labor’s participation in production decisions, and ultimately labor-management committees were set up in about five thousand factories; but they came to function as devices for increasing production and cutting down absenteeism—that is, as disciplinary groups rather than as forums for democratic decision-making.)
A report submitted shortly after the end of the war to the Senate Small Business Committee, entitled “Economic Concentration and World War II,” noted that the government spent a billion dollars during the war years for scientific research in industry, aside from money spent on atomic research. The billion dollars went to two thousand corporations, with sixty-eight of them getting two-thirds of the total and the ten largest corporations in the United States getting 40 per cent of the total. Furthermore, in 90 per cent of the contracts, the patents for new developments were handed over to the contractor, who then controlled the commercial applications of the government-financed research.
Catton, recollecting his experiences in war mobilization, writes: “We had been put in the position of fighting for the preservation of the status quo; the status quo at home, where reaction had found its voice again, and, by logical extension, the status quo abroad as well. … The big operators who made the working decisions had decided that nothing very substantial was going to be changed.” One of the most important elements of the status quo was that, despite all the self-congratulatory talk in the United States about democracy, decisions would continue to be made at the top. Whether conservatives or liberals were in power in Washington, the decision-making process and the intent of the decisions would remain the same. As Catton describes it: “Hidebound businessmen had one approach and doctrinaire New Dealers had another. Different as they were, both groups shared one controlling emotion: a distrust of the naked processes of democracy.”
This distrust manifested itself in something which, much later in the postwar period, during the Vietnam War, was termed the “credibility gap”—a growing realization that the government was concealing facts, distorting truths, and just plain lying. The wartime government became obsessed with what was said and shown to the people, rather than what was actually done. It seemed easier to get the people to believe that something had been done than to do it; the most important consideration was what became known as “image.” In November, 1942, a dollar-a-year consultant on the staff of the War Production Board wrote a memo entitled “Public Relations.” It proposed the use of advertising men to promote public goodwill, and suggested: “The deficiencies of WPB are naturally seized upon by press and radio with more glee than its successful achievements. Methods must be found, therefore, to give true value to WPB’s really significant results.”
As suggested earlier, though the Allied powers won the war, antidemocratic, even totalitarian, ideas dominated the postwar world to a significant degree. One of these ideas was that dissenters