Blunder Food Industry Marketing Triumph War

Prolific munitions production keyed America's triumph in World War II but so did the complex economic controls needed to sustain that production. Artillery, tanks, planes, ships, trucks, and weaponry of every kind were constantly demanded by the military and readily supplied by American business. While that relationship was remarkably successful in helping the U.S. win the war, it also raised troubling issues about wartime economies that have never been fully resolved. Focusing on the mobilization of national resources for a truly global war, Paul Koistinen analyzes all relevant aspects of the World War II economy from 1940 through 1945, describing the nation's struggle to establish effective control over industrial supply and military demand--and revealing the growing partnership between the corporate community and the armed services. Koistinen traces the evolution of federal agencies mobilizing for war--including the National Defense Advisory Commission, the Office of Production Management, and the Supply Priorities and Allocation Board--and then focuses on the work of the War Production Board from 1942-1945. As the war progressed, the WPB and related agencies oversaw the military's supply and procurement systems; stabilized the economy while financing the war; closely monitored labor relations; and controlled the shipping and rationing of fuel and food. Koistinen reveals how representatives of industry and the armed services expanded upon their growing prewar ties to shape policies for harnessing the economy, and how federal agencies were subsequently riven with dissension as New Deal reformers and anti-New Deal corporate elements battled for control over mobilization itself. As thearmed services emerged as the principal customers of a command economy, the military-industrial nexus consolidated its power and ultimately succeeded in bending the reformers to its will.

KEY BENFIT: " Taking political economy as its organizing theme, "Making A Nation" offers an intellectual focus to history that is sensitive to the recent innovations in women's history and environmental history. The book focuses on the relationships that shape and define human identity--cultural, diplomatic, race, gender, class and sectional relations-- and recognizes the importance of such traditional fields as politics and diplomacy. The reference synthesizes the literature in such as way as to allow readers to see the links between the particular and the general, between large and seemingly abstract forces such as globalization and political struggle and the daily struggles of ordinary men and women. The Combined Volume covers U.S. history in its entirety from its early days in 1450 and moves through colonial outposts, the eighteenth-century world, creating a new nation, liberty and empire, the market revolution, securing democracy, reform and conflict, the manifest destiny, the politics of slavery, a war for union and emancipation, reconstruction, the triumph of industrial capitalism, cultural struggles of industrial America, the politics of industrial society, a global power, a great depression and a new deal, the second World War, the Cold War, the consumer society, the rise and fall of the new liberalism, living with less, the triumph of a new conservatism, and a new America. For historians and others interested in a comprehensive overview of the relationships that shape and define U.S. history.