Trump, too, can rally US’s industrial might

It would be charitable to describe the federal government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic as sloppy and uncoordinated. Thankfully, there is a model for an epic national comeback. It dates back to the weeks following the attack on Pearl Harbor in late 1941, when President Roosevelt created the War Production Board, one of the most dynamic public-private partnerships in history.
The US entered World War II woefully unprepared. It possessed staggering economic power, but almost none of it was directed towards defense. As it sought to ramp up the war effort, supply disruptions for much-needed commodities like rubber would slow it back down. To have a fighting chance, the government would need to recruit hundreds of thousands of factories to wartime
production while simultaneously smashing countless bottlenecks in the supply chains that fed them.
Roosevelt didn’t believe the free market was going to solve those problems on its own — at least not in time. He also rejected the idea of nationalising key industries. So he opted for a hybrid approach. Businesses took their marching orders from the WPB. But they would still make money and run their enterprises on a for-profit basis. Secretary of War Henry Stimson described the philosophy behind the effort when he famously confided to his diary, “If you are going to war in a capitalist country, you have to let business make money out of the process or business won’t work.”
Who, though, could possibly run such a monumentally complex effort? A chemical engineer by training, as it turned out. Donald Marr Nelson’s first job was at retail giant Sears, Roebuck and Company. Starting as head of the company’s testing laboratory, his preternatural management skills would carry him all the way to chairman of the executive committee.
Nelson’s ability to manipulate the supply chains behind the company’s vast mail order business — which offered 100,000 items alone — as well as hundreds of brick-and-mortar stores made him a logical choice to run the WPB. But so, too, was the fact that Nelson did not share the business community’s antipathy towards the federal government. He was what one biographer has described as a businessman-bureaucrat, joining the New Deal in the 1930s, among other government posts. He was put in charge of the WPB in January 1942.
The US made $61.6 billion worth of military weapons and supplies in 1941. From 1942 to 1945, it produced $3.2 trillion. The WPB was central that astonishing shift.
Nelson created a flexible bureaucracy that mediated between the military on the one hand and private industry on the other. The military told the WPB what it wanted and when. Then it fell to Nelson and his subordinates to make sure that private industry could secure the necessary raw materials — often by invoking rationing powers — and deliver the goods on time. What Nelson realized, though, was that the country did not have time to encourage the construction of new factories.
—Bloomberg