Warhogs by Stuart D. Brandes

Author:Stuart D. Brandes [Brandes, D. Stuart]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780813189680
Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
Published: 2021-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

9

Profits or Peace?

If we face the choice of profits or peace, the Nation will answer—must answer—we choose peace.

FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT, CAMPAIGN ADDRESS (1936)

The probe of war profits that surfaced periodically in the 1920s became a more pressing matter during the troubled 1930s. Commencing in the first year of the Hoover administration, a contentious debate on how to limit profits in a future war proceeded throughout the Depression. The renewed scrutiny of war profits was partially an aftershock of the Great War, but in the 1930s worldwide economic collapse and the rising danger of American involvement in a new and even more frightening European war gave the dispute fresh urgency.

In the 1930s there were two major focal points in the review of the extent and effects of war profiteering. The two inquiries were the Hoover administration’s War Policies Commission of 1930 and the more contentious Senate Munitions Investigation of 1934-35 (the Nye-Vandenberg committee). Both took place against the setting of the more general question of how the nation should mobilize for war. Both investigations revealed the lingering effects of the Great War, and both demonstrated the difficulty of reaching agreement on national defense policy in its aftermath. The principles of that policy would be shaped by the costs of each option, as well as by who would profit and who would forfeit in each instance.

The problem of restricting the profits of munitions firms often reflected other public concerns of the period in which it was considered. During the Progressive era, the campaign against munitions profits had been an important part of the struggle against the evils of monopolistic capitalism. In the postwar period, Herbert Hoover’s associationalist attempt to improve business-government relations also addressed the issue of war profits in its management of reconversion. In turn, the problem of regulating defense profits would be affected by the economic policies of the New Deal.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s limited Keynesianism included deficit spending on public works as a countercyclical device. One aspect of Roosevelt’s recovery plan included an accelerated program of naval construction. This inescapably raised the issue of how much the shipbuilders and other defense contractors should properly gain from the New Deal’s anti-Depression medicine. The New Deal also featured a policy of redistributing wealth, and the fact that some Americans had gained immensely as a result of the Great War became a major justification for Roosevelt’s redistributional policy.

The embittered veterans, committed pacifists, disaffected intellectuals, and agrarian radicals who had long fought against war profiteering renewed their efforts during the 1930s. They were joined in the Roosevelt years by a new clamor of angry voices: dejected workers, determined isolationists, younger feminists, and aggressive publicists all worked toward the idealistic goal of constructing a defense policy that was completely unaffected by selfish interest. They remembered the carnage in France, harbored grudges from countless quarrels between capital and labor, and spoke and wrote with a biting style fashioned in the acrimony of the Progressive era. The perennial struggle to control war profits reached an angry crescendo in the 1930s.

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