more politically conservative executives, such as Pierre du Pont, worked at least briefly on NRA committees. But by 1934–35, most of them had given up. They did so not just because the NRA was proving to be an unpopular mess but because of how the rest of the New Deal developed.
The business community’s rapid alienation from the New Deal was evident in the experiences of the Du Pont brothers. After the Great War, Pierre, Irénée, and Lammot du Pont, who led the long-standing family business that had become the nation’s leading chemical company, were all multimillionaires. They were also politically active men who gave generously to business associations and conservative political groups, as well as to charitable causes.85 Pierre and his brothers became disturbed by the New Deal’s enthusiasm for public enterprise, which was already being practiced by agencies such as the PWA and TVA. In May 1934, Irénée complained to Pierre of the recent explosion of “governmental capitalism.”86
Three months later, the Du Pont brothers helped to found the American Liberty League. This anti–New Deal group was financed by many of the nation’s most prominent business leaders. Among them were several executives from Du Pont and GM, including John J. Raskob, Alfred D. Sloan, Jr., and William S. Knudsen. Other leading Liberty Leaguers included J. Howard Pew (president of the Sun Oil Company), Raoul E. Desvernine (Crucible Steel Company), and Sewell L. Avery (American Gypsum and Montgomery Ward). A year after its founding in August 1934, the American Liberty League had ten thousand contributing members. In a little over two years, the organization distributed 51 million pamphlets, which pointed out the many dangers of New Deal policies. The league itself spent half a million dollars on the 1936 presidential campaign, in what would turn out to be a totally unsuccessful attempt to unseat Roosevelt. Individual members of the league made major contributions to the GOP that went well beyond this, including more than $1 million donated by the Du Pont and Pew families alone.87
The Liberty League’s hostility toward the New Deal may have been especially pointed, but it was shared by many other organizations of American business leaders. By December 1934, when the NAM and the Chamber of Commerce of the United States held a joint meeting, most of their members had decided that they could not support Roosevelt and the New Deal. This alienation only deepened in 1935, when the Roosevelt administration worked with Congress to roll out a second wave of major reforms and programs. This “second New Deal” included the WPA, as well as the Wagner Act, which provided far more government support for unions. During the 1936 presidential race, the vast majority of business associations and executives supported the Republican candidate, Alf Landon. Even in industries that seemed to be benefiting most from the New Deal, such as construction, many business leaders worked hard to roll back state enterprise and regulation. As one White House staffer concluded in 1936, it was safe to say that “85% of business and industrial men today are against the Boss.”88
The Boss, calculating that he could win reelection without much business support and concerned about containing potential challenges from his political left, launched a vigorous public-relations effort of his own. In June 1934, Roosevelt used a radio address to dismiss the “selfish minority” of men who opposed him. Their cries against “regimentation” (which had been voiced by Hoover, among others) amounted to a wild mischaracterization of the New Deal, Roosevelt complained.89 Over the following months, as business opposition deepened, the president’s rhetoric became even more heated. In his State of the Union address in January 1936, Roosevelt boasted that “we have earned the hatred of entrenched greed.” During the 1936 campaign, the president regularly portrayed his detractors as “economic autocrats” and “economic royalists.” Because he was focused on improving the welfare of the vast majority of Americans, Roosevelt explained, he didn’t mind so much if a few of the country’s most fortunate citizens opposed him. On the contrary, he said, “I welcome their hatred.”90
Such was the general state of national-level government-business relations on the eve of the 1936 elections, which Roosevelt would win in a landslide. The business community was concerned not only about the growth of regulation and government in general under the New Deal; many executives were also worried about the specific evil of government competition, which was starting to occur on a scale that had not been seen since the Great War (see Figure 1). One legacy of that conflict, the Muscle Shoals complex, was actually being used by the New Dealers as the basis for a major new public corporation. But this was not the only important connection between the mobilization of 1917–18 and the development of businessgovernment relations in the 1930s. In the military-industrial sphere, too, the 1930s saw a new push for heightened regulation and public control.
A New Deal for the Defense Sector
In early March 1936, the infant public-opinion polling firm led by George H. Gallup surveyed more than a hundred thousand Americans to ascertain their opinions about the arms trade. Gallup asked, “Should the manufacture and sale of war munitions for private profit be prohibited?” In response, 82 percent of those interviewed—one of the largest majorities Gallup had yet recorded—replied yes. Gallup found no subgroup opposed to the proposition. The idea appealed to 79 percent of Republicans and 85 percent of Democrats, compared with 91 percent of Socialists. (The group least enthusiastic were residents of Delaware, home to the Du Pont company, where only 63 percent approved of the idea.) As some of the widespread press coverage of the poll results pointed out, Americans seemed to be slightly less committed to eliminating private armaments companies than their British counterparts, 93 percent of whom had called for it in a comparable survey the previous year.91 Still, the result was remarkable. It suggested that an overwhelming majority of the American public favored the nationalization of the defense sector.
Figure 1. “Government Competition,” September 1939 cover of Nation’s Business magazine, a publication of the Chamber of Commerce of the United States. This cover suggests the business community’s concerns about the threat of direct competition from government enterprises on the eve of World War II. Courtesy of U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Hagley Museum and Library.
The results of the 1936 Gallup poll suggest the political significance of national (and international) debates over the interwar arms industry, which culminated in the well-publicized Nye Committee hearings in the Senate. Too often, these debates are remembered as little more than the product of a naïve isolationist approach to foreign policy, which would be discredited by the lessons of World War II.92 But this view is seriously deficient. First, it fails to recognize that American critics of the munitions business were participating in a transnational, popular political effort to come to confront systemic problems that might cause another terrible war. In the mid-1930s, Senator Gerald P. Nye (R-ND) and his allies were in many ways less “isolationist” than they were cosmopolitan and internationalist.93
Second, the munitions debate of the 1930s should be understood as a central chapter in the history of economic policy during the New Deal years. Revolving around issues of the relative merits of government and private ownership in an industry that was, in fact, already seminationalized, it was closely related to the TVA fight and other interwar battles over public enterprise. As such, it was taken very seriously by the American business community. Indeed, the struggle over munitions was intertwined with the broader political offensive, launched by conservative business leaders in the mid-1930s, which was designed to combat President Roosevelt and the New Deal.
During and immediately after the Great War, hundreds of thousands of people all over the world voiced their concerns about the intermixture of capitalism and modern warfare. To many people, including soldiers, veterans, and their families, the sorts of profits that had been earned by companies like Du Pont and Bethlehem Steel seemed objectionable, if not obscene. Beyond this, some critics worried that the profitability of munitions manufacture created dangerous economic incentives. The admixture of capitalism and warfare appeared to give companies
