Freedom's Forge by Arthur Herman

Author:Arthur Herman [Herman, Arthur]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: cookie429, Kat, Extratorrents
ISBN: 978-0-679-60463-1
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2012-05-07T14:00:00+00:00

Unlike Knudsen, Donald Nelson was no industrial production man. He was a chemical engineer, with a degree from the University of Missouri—a handy degree when later he had to look at priority claims for materials from the engineers and scientists running the Manhattan Project.12

In 1912, Sears and Roebuck, for almost a quarter century America’s emporium for every product from sewing machines and tractors to overcoats and underwear, hired him to study the chemical composition of the textiles their suppliers were buying. Later they made him check the scientific descriptions of merchandise with what appeared in the catalogue copy. From that day until the day he became president, Sears never gave him a full-time contract.13

In the meantime Donald Nelson learned more about how nearly every one of the 135,000 products in the catalogue was made by some five thousand companies—from the sources of raw materials to costs and manufacturing methods—than he could have learned from a lifetime in the businesses themselves.

Sears had been a business of razor-thin margins, where lowering cost, even by a few pennies, was everything. Sears had taught Nelson how to get one manufacturer to convert to a line of products suddenly in high demand in the catalogue, like stoves or nylon stockings, and to drop all others. At times he would even act as purchasing agent for a Sears-run company, to make sure the brass or cotton or plate glass it needed to make the product came at a cheaper price.14

It was good training for running SPAB, and later the War Production Board. Nelson was conditioned to see the big picture behind the steadily rising mountain of data: how to coordinate the flow of materials from a myriad of sources to an equally complex network of suppliers and manufacturers, and then how to move the finished goods to the distributors on a nationwide scale so that ultimately they reached the customer on time—in this case, the Army and Navy and the Army Air Forces.† This also meant a myriad of toes to be stepped on, in trying to coordinate the intermeshing of an entire economy for one purpose, winning the war. But Nelson in his quiet way persisted, defying newspaper columnists, congressional investigators, outraged labor leaders, Army and Navy brass, and furious businessmen who thought they were being shortchanged or overburdened by Nelson’s system—and sometimes both. As one of his own staff, and one of his fiercest critics, admitted, “The most striking thing about the whole war production program was not that there were so many controls but that all of them fell within the established patterns of industry.”15

One of his first big battles was with organized labor. Walter Reuther and others hoped that Nelson’s appearance on the scene would revive the idea of joint labor-management committees, to handle the war conversion process and give unions a direct say in how the factories and production lines would be run. Nelson’s dealings with the National Recovery Administration, however, made him wary of opening the door to the union way of doing things.

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