152 e lusive v ictories
If political considerations hindered military readiness, they had the
opposite eff ect on the production of armaments. Unemployment had
remained stubbornly high throughout the 1930s, despite many New
Deal initiatives. Increased government spending on relief and public
works had not suffi ced to off set the loss of aggregate spending power.
But with the beginning of large orders for military hardware, fi rst from
abroad and then from the American armed services, defense con-
tractors started hiring in large numbers. Th e demand was so large that
new factories had to be established. Every new job and new defense
plant, of course, was located in some senator’s state and congressman’s
district, so there was ample political credit to be shared. Th e Roosevelt
administration thus discovered that Congress was eager to appropriate
funds for the military buildup. By fall 1940, total military appropria-
tions exceeded $17 billion, more than nine times the 1939 total.
Problems arose in the administration’s attempts to impose some kind
of rational order on the procurement and production processes. Much
as in 1917–1918, no organizational structure existed to establish prior-
ities or identify bottlenecks. Bernard Baruch, who had directed the War
Industries Board eff ectively under Wilson, advised Roosevelt to vest
overarching mobilization authority in a similar business-guided struc-
ture. But the president, still smarting from his antagonistic relations
with much of corporate leadership, did not want to turn over control of
economic mobilization to the private sector. He also refused to cede so
much authority to a single economic czar of the kind that Baruch
himself had been. Instead, Roosevelt approached the challenge with a
succession of improvised agencies, frequently reshuffl ing and renaming
them. Th e administrative confusion resulted in competition for scarce
resources and slow production of war materials. By summer 1941, they
amounted to a mere 10 percent of total industrial output, and the
latter still refl ected sluggish private demand.
As a result, the American armed forces approached the war lacking
modern weapons and equipment. Every battleship at Pearl Harbor on
December 7, 1941, was more than twenty years old, a holdover from the
First World War. When conscription fi nally yielded a substantial infl ux
of new men, the U.S. Army had little to put in their hands that might
defeat an enemy. Th e shortage was exacerbated by the president’s decision
to ship the most modern equipment to Great Britain. Photographs of