all homesick by nature—and it is contagious.”53
Fletcher and Ahmanson were each driven by more than just the desire to return to private life. Charlie had been infected by his time in Washington and was considering a run for Congress. Meanwhile Howard, aware that the reconversion of the economy was already under way, wanted to get back to business.
Howard's desire to go home was made urgent by the other member of the threesome, Howard Edgerton. Still in Southern California and keeping an eye on business, Edgerton had appealed to the federal circuit court after being sentenced to prison for his role in the Railway Mutual scheme. On September 26, 1944, the circuit court reversed the judgment of the lower court and ordered the entire indictment dismissed.54 With the specter of incarceration removed and the end of the war in sight, Edgerton was understandably excited about the future and anxious for his good friends and business associates to return to California.
“Edgie” hounded Gould Eddy for information about Howard and Charlie's plans. On October 31, 1944, he wrote to both men to let them know that a looming fight in the legislature and the industry association needed their attention. Mixing the ribald character of their friendship with hard news about business, he chided Ahmanson and Fletcher for their lack of communication—not even a postcard from a nightclub. He needed to know their plans, he said, so that he could “guard my company against any shock it might receive from the public reaction. Bringing Stillwell home from Burma or replacing Roosevelt with Dewey will create only slight public diversion compared to Ahmanson and Fletcher pulling out of Washington at the same time.”55
“On the home front,” Edgerton continued, “we are carrying on as good stooges should. From a business standpoint we are continuing to shove National American fire policies down the throats of both willing and unwilling borrowers, and on the political horizon we are letting the public get a bellyful of the present group of candidates waiting for Fletcher to come home and run for something really serious.”
Edgerton went on to highlight the news from the savings and loan industry. After describing the petty arguments and displays of bravado at a recent meeting of the California Savings and Loan League, Edgerton noted that “it was my first group meeting since returning to civilian life,” and he was appalled by the lack of discipline and focus. “It just goes to show, Charlie, that you have got to come back and start running this damned league again so that we can worry more about defeating our business competitors and less about sticking a knife in each other's backs.”56
Edgerton followed his letter with a trip to Washington several weeks later. He socialized with Fletcher and Ahmanson and talked about his own postwar plans. He had served as part-time president and CEO of California Federal Savings & Loan since 1939, but with the boom that all three men expected in the housing market in Southern California, he knew that he needed “to decide whether to continue practicing law and hire a chief executive for the Association, or take over full-time management responsibilities and hire lawyers.” Ahmanson and Fletcher encouraged him to become a full-time corporate executive.57
COOPERATING FRIENDS
Working in different markets, with Home Federal based in San Diego and California Federal in Los Angeles, Fletcher and Edgerton could strategize together on their investment strategies. They could also collaborate on regulatory issues. Shortly after he returned to California, for example, Edgerton found out that there was a move afoot in the legislature to restrict one of their main sources of profit—the tie between lender and property insurer.
Once again, independent insurance agents were trying to pass a law forbidding lenders from engaging in exclusive contracts with an insurance agent and forcing borrowers to buy fire and property insurance from only one agency. Although Howard and his best clients in the mortgage industry had been able to kill this proposal in previous years, Gould Eddy told Edgerton that it looked as though they were in for a “tougher scrap” in 1945. The mortgage bankers were lining up to support the bill, along with the independent insurance agents. Even their longtime allies at Mortgage Guarantee, including Morgan Adams and Frank Gross, would provide only “behind-the-scenes support after the matter got into committee.” Edgerton bemoaned the fact that Ahmanson and Fletcher were not on the scene to help with lobbying. He complained about the lack of support from other mortgage lenders. “They are the ones who will yell the loudest if this bill ever passes,” he wrote, “and every damn insurance agent representing the large mortgage companies loses thousands a year in commissions as a result of this legislation.”58
Fortunately, Ahmanson already had one foot out the door of the navy. He was waiting only for a resolution from the board of National American attesting that the company needed to have him on the job. Hayden was working on this paperwork. Morgan Adams had agreed to help push the paperwork through—"my first and only request for influence,” Howard wrote home to Dottie.59
LOOKING FORWARD
Much has been made of the effect of the Depression and World War II on the lives of what some have called the “Greatest Generation.” The Depression taught them to be conservative about money, to avoid debt and favor savings, and to take care of one another in hard times. The war brought the nation together, smoothed some of the edges of social, racial, and ethnic boundaries, and conditioned a generation to think of the common good. Howard Ahmanson's experiences during this era ran counter to the usual story. The Depression made him rich. Managing the home front from a desk in Washington, D.C., was at times fascinating and at other times boring and frustrating. Still, the defining era of his generation changed him as it did so many others.
Ahmanson's experiences shaped his perspective on government. Like many Americans, he saw it as necessary and well intentioned, though not always efficient. In one letter he marveled at “the way that American industry has produced all the big and little items that we require.”60 Yet he was genuinely proud of his department's ability to aid the war effort. In January 1944, when James Foster, the president of National American, wanted to send a circular to the company's agents criticizing Roosevelt and his administration, Howard reacted strongly: “Being personally sympathetic to many Administration reforms and agencies,” he wired Hayden, “I for one would resent capricious literature on subject from any public corporation.”61
Historian James Sparrow has described the transformation of the relationship between business and government during World War II as a “new iteration” of the associational state that Herbert Hoover had championed in the 1920s. Corporate interests gained powerful positions in what Dwight Eisenhower would later describe as the military-industrial complex, and corporate influence extended to the administrative offices of virtually every regulatory body as well. But the government was not simply “captured” by this process, as Sparrow points out: “If federal power became critically dependent on business in the war the reverse was also true, making those business figures who entered public service at least as much creatures of the state as they were servants of capital.”62
By the end of the war, Howard, Charlie Fletcher, and Howard Edgerton had tired of the military bureaucracy but had gained greater respect for government and the stronger sense of public purpose that Sparrow describes. This doesn't mean they were any less self-involved, ambitious, or eager to continue building their fortunes, but in the years ahead these experiences shaped their approaches to business, politics, and philanthropy.
FIVE
Building Home
WHILE SOME SOLDIERS and sailors moved home with their parents, doubled up in apartments, or lived in converted garages, Howard and Dottie Ahmanson arrived at the Beverly Hills Hotel on New Year's Eve, 1944, intending to stay for a while.1 Day and night, the hotel was a social center, a community forum, and a watering hole for Hollywood stars. Women's groups
