Tungsten in Peace and War, 1918–1946

Chapter 7. AMERICAN WARTIME METAL POLICY AND PRACTICE

America’s belated entry into World War II changed the focus if not the scope of national security. Before Pearl Harbor, the chief aims of policy makers had been to mobilize the military to keep American shores safe and spur industry to keep Britain in the war. During the two-year conversion to a wartime economy, government planners had imposed a series of “mechanisms” to encourage greater production of war goods, prevent or offset labor and material shortages, and counter inflationary pressures. Mobilization brought the nation out of a prolonged economic slump, but trying to balance competing industrial and military needs required coordinated planning and an increased federal presence.1 After Pearl Harbor the pace of military and industrial mobilization accelerated , and so did the size and power of the federal bureaucracy. fdr’s “trial and error” approach to emergency management complicated wartime planning and gave his political enemies much to criticize. Internal differences continued to surface between liberals in the administration and conservatives from business and industry called upon to help make and implement wartime economic policies. Frequent changes in policy and personnel added to the impression that Washington was a bureaucratic battleground. To quell the confusion and ensure the success of the wartime economy, federal planners had to confront four tough but familiar issues: how to maximize production without running short of raw materials; how to distribute the workforce to serve both military and industrial needs, as well as increase its number and productivity, while at the same time remain responsive to basic labor demands; how to keep production high without inflating prices, and productivity high without inflating wages; and finally, how to plan ahead, both for war and for peace. Every American at every level of organization and industry was affected, directly or indirectly, by the government’s effort to deal with these questions of production, labor, inflation, and planning. To Charles AMERICAN WARTIME METAL POLICY AND PRACTICE 7 American Wartime Metal Policy and Practice 151 Segerstrom they were the bedrock issues of the tungsten business. His career as industry spokesman and president of Nevada-Massachusetts depended on his ability to run a successful private business within the constrictive limits of a wartime economy. It was time to apply the lessons of World War I. THE EVOLVING SUPERSTRUCTURE OF WARTIME BUREAUCRACY The Roosevelt administration also tried to avoid repeating mistakes of previous wars, but formulating effective action plans during wartime was difficult under any circumstances. As the shooting war began on the Atlantic the slow pace of conversion from a peacetime to a wartime economy remained the administration’s chief concern. Instead of replicating the Baruch model of a one-man economic “czar” as in World War I, the president had experimented with multiple mobilization agencies. By mid-1941, the mixed results proved only that America’s wartime industrial capacity still lagged far behind its potential.2 That fall Roosevelt moved closer to the Baruch formula. He replaced the cumbersome two-person leadership of the Office of Production Management with a single director, Donald M. Nelson, a former Sears executive who had served since 1940 as coordinator of national defense purchases. After Pearl Harbor, another reorganization replaced the opm with a centralized command structure under a new agency, the War Production Board. To run it the president turned again to Nelson, whose efforts to help small businesses secure government contracts had won friends in Congress. With the president’s support and congressional approval, Nelson became “the Boss” of war production, with powers greater than Baruch’s in World War I. In the patriotic fervor of a nation under attack, businessmen were expected to fall in line. “More and more,” wrote a journalist, “industry will be told what to do and asked about it later.”3 Nelson’s job performance did not match his public image as “dictator of war production.” Critics said he lacked the courage to exercise power, that “too often his flexibility became vacillation.” The administration’s deference to military opinion, as well as Nelson’s lack of control over labor and prices, left him more cautious than decisive. His undue circumspection dismayed impatient New Deal professionals. John Kenneth Galbraith, an assistant to Leon Henderson in the Office of Price Administration, thought little of Nelson and other hesitant “industrial bureaucrats.”4 In retrospect, the personality clashes within the War Production Board reflected deep-seated differences between military and civilian views of the 152...