The War Against the New Deal: World War II and American Democracy By Brian Waddell. DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2001. 236p. $39.00

Donald R. Brand

American Political Science Review, 2002, vol. 96, issue 3, 650-631

Abstract: This book argues that the transition from the New Deal to a mobilized wartime economy during World War II restored corporate hegemony in collaboration with a state apparatus dominated by military elites. The purported losers in this transition were New Deal reformers committed to a planned economy and an extensive social welfare state, and groups like labor and small business whose interests were represented by reform elites. Organized chronologically, Waddell's account traces the development of the military-industrial complex from the War Industries Board in World War I to what Waddell asserts is a neocorporatist pattern of governance that had become established by the late 1940s and early 1950s. For the intervening years, he devotes attention to the trade association movement of the 1920s, the National Recovery Administration in the early 1930s, the New Deal turn to Keynesian economics, Harry Truman and the Marshall Plan, and the National Security Act of 1947; but the book focuses on the three periods associated with mobilization for World War II. These three periods are prewar mobilization from September, 1939 to December, 1941; the institutionalization of wartime mobilization from early 1942 through early 1943; and the battles over postwar reconversion that began in 1943 and continued into the immediate postwar era.

Date: 2002
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