| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

From the Boardroom to the War Room: America's Corporate Liberals and FDR's Preparedness Program. By Richard E. Holl. (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2005. x, 191 pp. $75.00, ISBN 1-58046-192-1.)

Richard E. Holl aims to highlight the beneficial influence of a group of corporate liberal businessmen in the war preparedness programs of the late thirties. He follows these businessmen—including Edward Stettinius of U.S. Steel, Gerard Swope of General Electric, William Knudsen of General Motors, and Donald Nelson of Sears, Roebuck, and Company—from their support for welfare capitalism and trade associations in the twenties, through their cooperation with the National Recovery Administration in the early thirties, and into their role as ambassadors between business and the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration in the late thirties. Most significantly, he describes the service of these corporate liberals on a succession of war preparedness boards between 1939 and 1941, including the War Resources Board, the National Defense Advisory Commission, and the Office of Production Management (opm). Holl argues that although they had to deal with bureaucratic disorganization, constant political hostility, and a lack of sufficient authority, they still managed to pull the country out of a state of profound "unreadiness" and build the foundations for a tremendous burst of wartime industrial production.

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