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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