A big part was being asshole dictators. Sorensen was apparently called the Mussolini of Ford. Leaders of this era punched each other up. Still the culture in large-scale manufacturing but less so.
Conversation
1943, Big Labor broken as public and even FDR lose patience with strikes disrupting war effort. This is the weakest part of the book. I’m guessing there was more than this cartoon villainy portrait to labor side of war story. Congress passes War Labor Disputes Act over FDR veto.
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More production go brrr. Kinda gets lost in the record breaking that much of this output was used to bomb Germany to rubble and kill on an industrial scale. The engineering story is great but the slaughtering race is depressing to contemplate.
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Parade of stories big and small, from GM’s plant in Iran to assemble trucks for Russia to small garage startup making machine tools and tank parts. The sheer number of things being made by unlikely companies in impressive. Frigidaire made machine guns for eg. Wtf.
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This is mainly a mechanical, metallurgical and chemical engineering story but tons of electrical too. GE made ridiculous numbers of types of lighting, motors, etc. Also bazookas. The generality of industrial capacity in the 1940s is amazing.
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Key principle: WIB could restrict consumer demand, regulate wages and prices, and stop the production of non-essentials but could not order companies to make specific things. Producers chose how to insert themselves into war effort. Based on skills, benefits.
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Not a free market but not a command economy either. More like a 50-50 mix. Shape demand and restrict supply but leave matching free. Regulate the macro and boundary conditions but not the micro.
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Starting in 1941 Business Week apparently ran an advice column responding to reader queries about war materiel production contracts and opportunities
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This book published in 1942 was a guide to getting into war production. Your business goes to war.
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Half a million new businesses, including Pacific Hut which saved steel by replacing steel Quonset huts with coated plywood huts. The war transformed the economy into modern form.
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On the labor side, 20 million migrated to the new industrial base. A step function in industrialization I guess. Up from what was already the highest level in the world. No wonder 1930s and 1950s seem worlds apart. The 50s seem familiar in a way the 30s do not.
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Wages rose by 70%. About 7 million left farming for military or industry, driving farm automation and fertilizer use. The war was pretty good for the American economy. The US bought itself a modernization via wars wrecking Europe and Asia.
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Blacks fought for a big social level up: executive order 8802, patchy desegregation in industry (though nothin the military), race riots in Detroit. Book skips rather lightly over this bit. Sounds like a whole other book could be written about this alone.
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8802 introduced minimal anti-discrimination protections fir race, color, religion, creed, but not sex. But women made the biggest gains despite headwinds. Kinda tedious how incumbents predictably resist any new entrants to anything.
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“By July 1944, 36% of all workers in prime defense contractors were female”
Steel: 22.3%
GM: 30.7%
Kaiser yards start Richmond: 70%
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“Rosie the riveter” archetype was really 3 women:
Vera Lowe of Lockheed, used in Lockheed PR after a photo appeared in Life magazine
Geraldine Huff for “we can do it” ad council poster by J. Howard Miller
May Doyle, Norman Rockwell’s model for Saturday Evening Post
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Shipyard diary of a woman welder, 1944 bestseller. On google books
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Back to Henry Kaiser. Now he’s building baby aircraft carriers and developing a very high public profile. Then ships cracking mysteriously topple his rising reputation. Brittle steel, not his fault.
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Kaiser partners with Howard Hughes to build an airplane version of the liberty ship, the gigantic Spruce Goose. Spoiler: project went nowhere.
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Now into B-29 story, probably the most complex project of the war, costing more than the Manhattan project. Bridge between early and modern planes, except for jet engines it had most familiar features of today.
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Lots of production innovations: multi lining being the big one. Unlike one long assembly line like at the B-24 Willow Run plant. Interesting that this is still how it’s done if you visit the Boeing plant in Everett. 40k parts instead of 25k for B24. Built at 4 plants.
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Serious crash kills test pilot and sets back B-29. Knudsen called in to rescue the program. Wings prone to catching fire.
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Such a lovely plane. Gotta remember though — only plane yo actually drop nuclear bombs in war.
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I will admit I got sucked into watching a bunch of bomber videos on YouTube today. Well back to the book.
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Knudsen working through endless B-29 production troubles. Manhattan project starting up. Apparently the B-24 and B-17 couldn’t handle the nuke. So if the B-29 hadn’t made it in time, it would have been British Lancasters that did the job.
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“This nation seems to be able to do more by accident than any other country can do on purpose” — Bechtel-Cone B29 modification employee.
Shades of British empire described as created in a fit of absent-mindedness.
Imma call it imperial serendipity. Or serendipitous imperialism.
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The Marianas campaign in the Pacific war was fought just to create a staging base for B-29 missions. I didn’t know that. Must resist WW2 bunny trail. This read is for industrial production story.
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B-29 missions going very poorly until they start using incendiary bombs based on magnesium “goop” developed as a byproduct of Kaiser’s magnesium plant. Hence firebombing of Tokyo. Worst attack of the war after the nuclear bombs. Damn. War is ugly.
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Curtis LeMay, architect of the low-altitude firebombing strategy that brought Japan to its knees. Makes me really question whether Hiroshima was even necessary. Even this was rightly considered over the line. Ender Wiggin level total war.
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83k civilians killed in the firebombing of Tokyo. Dresden was 25k. That’s about the US Covid deaths so far. WW2 was one bloody war.
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Into the epilogue now. Another wall-of-statistics view. The US produced more than all other combatants combined AND did so with smaller fraction of economy AND kept consumer economy growing AND wages rising.
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$183B in arms
141 aircraft carriers
807 other combat ships
203 subs
52m tons of merchant shipping
88,410 tanks
257,000 artillery
2.4m trucks
2.6m machine guns
41b rounds of ammo
324,750 aircraft, 170/day since 1942
Raw materials to UK and USSR
$50B lend-lease
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47% of economy as opposed to 60% for Britain and more for Germany and USSR
YOY consumer goods also grew through war. Americans ate more meat, used more gas, electricity etc than before Hitler invaded France
Guns AND butter. All mostly free market.
Germany used 17m serfs
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Total economy of production doubled, wages rose by 70%,
Americans 2x more productive than Germans and 4x Japan (true even before war started).
Underlined just how qualitatively next-level the US economy was with true mass production tech. Old world was still half artisanal.
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A huge theme of this book has been how artisan production methods got properly mechanized, with British designs being ported being the best illustration. The brits were great at design but sucked at radical industrial scale. This was true since mid 1850s. They never did learn.
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Though this book is almost embarrassingly pro-capitalist and paints a cartoon straw man view of unions, the picture rings true to me (admittedly a proud neoliberal shill). The unions failure was ultimately one of imagination. They never quite navigated the huge 100-year leap leap
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Though the unions evolved from guild/trade union based to general mass organizing, like the British, they never quite mentally came to terms with the vast gap between 1830s artisan tech and 1930s mass tech. No wonder in 2020, dregs of unions are a humanities/liberal arts cause.
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Book says post-war everybody was scared of depression/slump and big demob unemployment. To believe aggregate demand boom would persist into consumer economy was to be contrarian in 1946. Alfred Sloan was one. He turned out to be right.
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Small blip in 1946 with 20% inflation and 3.9% unemployment then of course it’s all history as we know now. 30y of uninterrupted growth as the production engine of a bombed out world.
Private capital investment tripled from 10.6B in 1945 to 30.6B in 1946. Stocks up 92% by 1947.
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3 jobs waiting for every returning soldier. Women went back to homes and feminine mystique era.
2 decades of 4% growth. The China of mid-century
Ofc Cold War superpowernomics and military industrial complex and stuff. Not all rosy. But war machine go brrr in peacetime basically
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1948, Knudsen dies of brain hemorrhage. Health destroyed by the war years.
Book argues that in postwar years the labor/new deal left tried to push a revisionist narrative of this being primarily a labor and government spending success, indication of new deal economics.
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