Destructive Creation. Mark R. Wilson
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competitive enterprise,” by offering economic education for business executives and promoting the work of antistatist intellectuals such as Ludwig von Mises, Ayn Rand, and Rose Wilder Lane.7
Although there were plenty of continuities in the business community’s public-relations efforts from the 1930s through the Cold War, the World War II emergency brought new challenges and opportunities. Clearly, a massive war mobilization might alter government-business relations and the public understanding of them, perhaps for the worse. However, many business leaders hoped that the war mobilization could offer them a chance to cast off much of the negative public opinion about business that had accumulated over the course of the previous decade.
To some extent, the task of boosting the reputation of business in wartime was simply a matter of sustaining the momentum of the late 1930s. By the time World War II broke out in Europe in autumn 1939, the American business community had already been enjoying a revival of its political fortunes. On the eve of the 1938 midterm elections, B. C. Forbes, the veteran business magazine editor, already sensed that that a new day for business’s public image was dawning. “Torrents of abuse of business leaders, perpetual bespattering of men of affairs with mud mixed with vitriol,” Forbes wrote, “are ceasing to win nationwide applause.”8 The election results in November 1938 seemed to confirm Forbes’s assessment. As Roosevelt headed into the second half of his second term, the New Deal had stalled, as had much of the recent expansion of the organized labor movement.
When military conflict did break out in Europe, the American business community emphasized that it was not eager for war. This attitude was driven by careful economic calculation, as well as memories of the “merchants of death” accusations of the mid-1930s. Some business leaders were devoted isolationists, whose disagreements with President Roosevelt over foreign policy matched their disdain for his domestic programs. But even those more sympathetic to intervention claimed that business wanted to avoid war, which inevitably brought disruptions to markets, high taxes, increased regulation, inflation, the overexpansion of capacity, and the likelihood of postwar recessions. As we have seen in Chapter 1, many executives believed that the Roosevelt administration’s hostility to business made the prospect of converting to war work even less appealing than it might otherwise have been.9
Despite these looming dangers, the business community took great satisfaction from one aspect of the early war mobilization: the transformation of the businessman from villain into national savior. Immediately after the start of war in Europe, NAM-sponsored speakers were telling audiences across the country, “American business is getting out of the dog-house.”10 At once aspirational and descriptive, this theme was reinforced by the president’s moves in mid-1940 to bring William Knudsen, Edward Stettinius, Jr., and other business executives to Washington to help direct the war economy. As a writer for the journal Sales Management noted, there seemed now to be “a universal trend towards putting faith and reliance in private enterprise.”11
For the business community, this revival of faith was a transformation to be savored. “For ten years our business system and business men have been under attack,” the Chamber of Commerce’s official magazine, Nation’s Business, reminded readers in the summer of 1940. But as soon as the nation faced a real security threat, “business leaders were whistled out of the doghouse and put in charge. What irony!”12 Alfred P. Sloan, Jr., the GM chairman, had a similar message for the convention of political scientists he addressed in November 1940. “Ironically the very individuals, the very industrial organizations, which, during the past few years, have been under political attack and held up to public scorn as enemies of the public interest,” Sloan observed, “have now become vital instrumentalities of national defense.”13
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