1. On the NWLB and its impact, see Atleson, James B., Labor and the Wartime State: Labor Relations and Law During World War II (Urbana, 1998)Google Scholar; Seidman, Joel, American Labor from Defense to Reconversion (Chicago, 1953), 61–67Google Scholar; Harris, Howell J., The Right to Manage: Industrial Relations Policies of American Business in the 1940s (Madison, 1982), 47–58Google Scholar; Lichtenstein, Nelson, Labor's War at Home: The CIO in World War II (New York, 1982), 26–43, 182–95Google Scholar; Dubofsky, Melvyn, The State and Labor in Modern America (Chapel Hill, 1994), 169–82Google Scholar; Freeman, Joshua, “Delivering the Goods: Industrial Unionism during World War II,” Labor History 19 (Fall 1978): 570–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Willard, Timothy A., “Labor and the National War Labor Board, 1942–1945: An Experiment in Corporatist Wage Stabilization” (Ph.D. diss., University of Toledo, 1984)Google Scholar; Grambsch, Paul V., “The Impact of the National War Labor Board Upon Management Policy and Practice” (Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, 1955)Google Scholar; Workman, Andrew A., “Creating the Center: Liberal Intellectuals, the National War Labor Board, and the Stabilization of American Industrial Relations, 1941–1945” (Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina, 1993)Google Scholar.

2. On the first NWLB, see Conner, Valerie Jean, The National War Labor Board: Stability, Social Justice, and the Voluntary State in World War I (Chapel Hill, 1983)Google Scholar, and the important recent book by McCartin, Joseph A., Labor's Great War: The Struggle for Industrial Democracy and the Origins of Modern American Labor Relations, 1912–1921 (Chapel Hill, 1997), 88–91Google Scholar. The World War I board was bipartite with five representatives each of business and labor and each group chose one of its two co-chairs. On the history and structure of the NLRB, see Gross, James A., The Reshaping of the National Labor Relations Board: National Labor Policy in Transition, 1937–1947 (Albany, N.Y., 1981)Google Scholar; Tomlins, Christopher L., The State and the Unions: Labor Relations, Law, and the Organized Labor Movement in America, 1880–1960 (New York, 1985), 148–96Google Scholar; Dubofsky, , The State and Labor in Modern America, 71–77, 123–67Google Scholar.

3. Historians in the organizational school have been working on similar issues for some time, but much of their work is atheoretical and tends to assume an inevitable trend toward bigness and complexity in government across the century. On the organizational perspective, see Galambos, Louis, “The Emerging Organizational Synthesis in Modern American History,” Business History Review (Autumn 1970): 279–90Google Scholar; idem, “Technology, Political Economy, and Professionalization: Central Themes of the Organizational synthesis,” Business History Review (1983): 471–93; Cuff, Robert, “An Organizational Perspective on the Military-Industrial Complex,” Business History Review (Summer 1978): 250–67Google Scholar. For a supportive but critical perspective on the organizational school, see Brinkley, Alan, “Writing the History of Contemporary America: Dilemmas and Challenges, Daedalus (Summer 1984): 134Google Scholar; Hawley, Ellis “Social Policy and the Liberal State in Twentieth-Century America,” in Critchlow, Donald T. and Hawley, Ellis W., eds., Federal Social Policy: the Historical Dimension (University Park, Pa., 1988), 127Google Scholar; Balogh, Brian, “Reorganizing the Organizational Synthesis: Federal-Professional Relations in Modern America” Studies in American Political Development (Spring 1991): 119–72Google Scholar. On institutionalism, see Marsh, James G. and Olson, Johan P., “The New Institutionalism: Organizational Factors in Political Life,” American Political Science Review 78 (1984): 734–49Google Scholar; Theda Skocpol's “Bringing the State Back In,” and Evans, Peter B., Rueschmeyer, Dietrich, and Skocpol, Theda, “Towards a More Adequate Understanding of the State,” in Evans, Rueschmeyer, and Skocpol, , eds., Bringing the State Back In: Strategies of Analysis in Current Research (New York, 1985), 3–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For two very different critical accounts of the “return to the state” to American social science, see Almond, Gabriel A., “The Return of the State” American Political Science Review 82 (1988): 853–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Mitchell, Timothy, “The Limits of the State: Beyond Statist Approaches and Their Critics,” American Political Science Review 85 (1991): 77–96Google Scholar.

4. Nettle, J. Peter, “The State as a Conceptual Variable,” World Politics (July 1968)Google Scholar; Krasner, Stephen, “Approaches to the State: Alternative Conceptions and Historical Dynamics,” Comparative Politics 16 (1984): 223–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Skowronek, Stephen, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920 (New York, 1982), 3–18Google Scholar, quotation from 285. Institutionalism, or the “new institutionalism” as it is often labeled, has been widely proclaimed as an important shift in the study of politics. Nonetheless, the kinds of studies performed under this banner, their methodology, and even their definitions of institutions have been quite diffuse. See Immergut, Ellen M., “The Theoretical Core of the New Institutionalism,” Politics and Society (March 1998): 5–35Google Scholar, for an excellent discussion of the current state of the field. Here the term institutionalist is used to describe recent works on the history of the state that emphasize the importance of institutions, such as bureaucracies, political parties, and legal systems, in shaping the outcomes of policies. What redeems this work from repeating the mistakes of “one-size-fits-all” theoretical approaches is a methodological individualism that appreciates the contingency and complexity of particular historical situations. At its best, this historical insitutionalism merges the analytical rigor of sociology and political science with the attention to causality and contingency of the field of history. See also Finegold, Kenneth and Skocpol, Theda, State and Party in America's New Deal (Madison, 1995), 31–65Google Scholar. For a thoughtful account of virtues and limits of historical institutionalism, see Katznelson's, Ira “The State to the Rescue? Political Science and History Reconnect,” Social Research (Winter 1992): 719–37Google Scholar, and “The Doleful Dance of Politics and Policy: Can Historical Institutionalism Make a Difference?” American Political Science Review 92 (March 1998): 191–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5. Sparrow, Bartholomew H., From the Outside In: World War II and the American State (Princeton, 1996)Google Scholar; Katznelson, Ira and Pietrykowski, Bruce, “Rebuilding the American State: Evidence from the 1940s” Studies in American Political Development 5 (Fall 1991): 301–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Katznelson, Ira, Geiger, Kim, and Kryder, Daniel, “Limiting Liberalism: The Southern Veto in Congress, 1933–1950,” Political Science Quarterly 108 (Summer 1993): 283–307CrossRefGoogle Scholar. James B. Atleson's Labor and the Wartime State provides a useful account of labor policy during the war and is particularly strong in its analysis of the legal changes that emerged from the war. Atleson's text does not, however, offer a systematic account of the wartime state or its development and does not put forward a theoretical position on the matter.

6. Sparrow, , From the Outside In, 3–32Google Scholar.

7. Ibid., 67–96, 261–65. On other scholars' interpretations of the negative impact of state on the labor movement during World War II, see Nelson Lichtenstein, Labor's War At Home, passim; Atleson, James, “The Law of Collective Bargaining and Wartime Labor Relations,” in Miller, Sally and Cornford, Daniel, eds., American Labor in the Era of World War II (Westport, Conn., 1995), 38–63Google Scholar. For a more positive view of labor's experience at the hands of the state, see Freeman, Joshua, “Delivering the Goods: Industrial Unionism during World War II,” 570–93Google Scholar. Although I have some disagreements with Sparrow's interpretation of industrial relations policy, I applaud his book as a whole for raising the level of discussion on state building and for compelling me to sharpen my own thinking on the issue.

8. Katznelson and Pietrykowski, “Rebuilding the American State, 301–39; Michael K. Brown, “State Capacity and Political Choice: Interpreting the Failure of the Third New Deal”; Ira Katznelson and Bruce Pietrykowski, “On Categories and Configurations: Further Remarks on Rebuilding the American State,” and Michael K. Brown, “On Evidence and Interpretation: Reply to Katznelson, and Pietrykowski, , all in Studies in American Political Development 9 (Spring 1995): 187–228CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Brown is critical of Katznelson and Pienykowski's argument that there was a true battle between a developmental and fiscalist approach to organizing the state and argues that it was rather a contest between two variants of the fiscalist approach. Of interest here is not so much which of these interpretations is correct, but the importance of a particular kind of partisan alignment in determining the ultimate shape of the state. Such a motive force for state development can work as well with either interpretation.

9. Katznelson, Ira et al. , “Limiting Liberalism,” 283–307Google Scholar. This article does discuss the U.S. Employment Service, but this agency managed labor supply and had no responsibility for resolving disputes during the war.

10. On Roosevelt and the early mobilization, see Burns, James M., Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox (New York, 1956), 457–61Google Scholar; Brinkley, Alan, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (New York, 1995), 175–200Google Scholar; Cuff, Paul, “War Mobilization, Institutional Learning, and State Building in the United States, 1917–1941,” in Furner, Mary O. and Lacey, Michael, eds., The State and Social Investigation in Britain and the United States (New York, 1993), 409–19Google Scholar; Koistinen, “Warfare and Power Relations in America,” 91–95Google Scholar; Dubofsky, The State and Labor, 173–78; Katznelson, et al. , “Limiting Liberalism: The Southern Veto in Congress, 1933–1950,” 283–307Google Scholar.

11. Interview, Frances Perkins, Columbia Oral History Program (Microfilm edition), Book VIII, 209–10, [hereafter Perkins Interview]; Interview, Isador Lubin, Columbia Oral History Program (Microfilm edition), 123–27,204–6 [hereafter Lubin Interview]; Fraser, Steen, Labor Will Rule: Sidney Hillman and the Rise of American Labor, (New York, 1991), 452–58Google Scholar; Josephson, Matthew, Sidney Hillman: Statesman of American Labor, (New York, 1952), 503–65Google Scholar; Polenberg, Richard, War and Society: The United States, 1941–1945 (Philadelphia, 1972), 7–8Google Scholar; Purcell, Richard J., Labor Policies of the National Defense Advisory Commission and the Office of Production Management May 1940 to April 1942 (Washington, D.C., 1946), 168–69Google Scholar; Hooks, Gregory, Forging the Military-Industrial Complex: World War II's Battle of the Potomac (Urbana, 1991), 100–103Google Scholar.

12. Gardner Jackson to Franklin D. Roosevelt, 7 November 1940 and 13 November 1940, both in OF 407, Box 2, Franklin D. Roosevelt Papers, Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial Library, Hyde Park, N.Y. [hereafter Roosevelt Papers]; Fraser, , Labor Will Rule, 458–65Google Scholar; Josephson, , Sidney Hillman, 518–28Google Scholar, Zieger, Robert H., The CIO, 1935–1955 (Chapel Hill, 1995), 102–10Google Scholar.

13. New York Times, 26, 27, 28, and 29 November 1940. On the role of Stimson and Knox in the mobilization apparatus, see Attorney General Robert Jackson, “Memorandum to the President,” 29 April 1941, Box 141, Robert Patterson Papers, Library of Congress Manuscript Division, Washington D.C. [hereafter Patterson Papers]; Stimson Dairies, v. XXIII, 3 and 4 April 1941, and v. XXXIV, 1 May 1941 (Microfilm edition, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library, New Haven) [hereafter Stimson Diaries]. See also Cochran, Bert, Labor and Communism: The Conflict That Shaped American Unions (Princeton, 1977), 166–76Google Scholar, and Koistinen, Paul A. C., “The Hammer and the Sword: Labor, the Military, and Industrial Mobilization, 1920–1945” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1965), 106–13Google Scholar; Hooks, Gregory, Forging the Military-Industrial Complex, 85–86Google Scholar; Catton, Bruce, The War Lords of Washington (New York, 1948), 23Google Scholar. On Hillman's health, see Fraser, , Labor Will Rule, 406–8, 490, 499Google Scholar.

14. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Strikes in 1941 and Strikes Affecting Defense Production, Bulletin #711 (Washington, D.C., 1942), l, 4, 29Google Scholar; Bureau of Demobilization, Civilian Production Administration, Industrial Mobilization for War: History of the War Production Board and Predecessor Agencies, 1940–1945 (Washington, D.C., 1947), 121–40Google Scholar; “Unemployment in September, 1941,” Monthly Labor Review (November 1941): 1346–47Google Scholar; Bureau of Labor Statistics, Strikes in 1941 and Strikes Affecting Defense Production, Bulletin #711 (Washington, D.C., 1942), 6–7Google Scholar. For accounts of union mobilization, see Bernstein, Irving, Turbulent Years: A History of the American Worker, 1933–1941 (New York, 1970), 727–67Google Scholar, and Zieger, , The CIO, 90–140Google Scholar.

15. Howard Smith to Franklin D. Roosevelt, 14 March 1941, and James Rowe to President, 10 April 1941; “Summary of Labor Bills,” n.d. Entry 75, Box 474, Record Group 202, National War Labor Board Papers, National Archives, Washington D.C. [hereafter NWLB Papers]. See also Workman, Andrew A., “Manufacturing Power: The Organizational Revival of the National Association of Manufacturers 1941–1945,” Business History Review 72 (Summer 1998): 279–317CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16. William H. Davis, “A Plan to Minimize Interruptions in the Production of Defense Materials by Mutual Agreement Between Managements and Workers,” n.d., Box 8, William H. Davis papers, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison [hereafter Davis Papers]; Davis Papers; Martin, George, Madam Secretary: Frances Perkins (Boston, 1976), 242, 283–86Google Scholar; Dubofsky, , The State and Labor, 108Google Scholar; Testimony, Hillman, Inquiry as to National-defense Construction: Hearing before the Committee on Military Affairs, 8 April 1941, House, 77, 1st sess., (Washington, D.C., 1941), 104Google Scholar.

17. “Minutes of the Second Meeting, Twentieth Century Fund Special Committee on the Role of Government in Labor,” Box 41, File: “Twentieth Century Fund,” William M. Leiserson Papers, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison [hereafter Leiserson Papers]; “Labor and Collective Bargaining Studies, 1934–1949” n.d., Twentieth Century Fund Papers, Twentieth Century Fund, New York City [hereafter Twentieth Century Fund Papers]; New York Times, 4 September 1934. For the role of various groups of industrial relations policy intellectuals in the development of labor policy before and during the war, see Gross, James A., The Making of the National Labor Relations Board: A Study in Economics, Politics, and the Law, 1933–1937 (Albany, N.Y., 1974)Google Scholar; James A. Gross, The Reshaping of the National Labor Relations Board; Schatz, Ronald W., “From Commons to Dunlop: Rethinking the Field and Theory of Industrial Relations,” in Lichtenstein, Nelson and Harris, Howell, eds., Industrial Democracy in America, 89–91Google Scholar; Irons, Peter, The New Deal Lawyers (Princeton, 1982)Google Scholar; Christopher L. Tomlins, The State and the Unions; Harris, Howell J., “The Snares of Liberalism? Politicians, Bureaucrats, and the Shaping of Federal Labour Relations Policy in the United States, ca 1915–1947,” in Toliday, Stephen and Zeitlin, Jonathan, eds., Shop Floor Bargaining and the State: Historical and Comparative Perspectives (New York, 1985), 151–98Google Scholar; Ernst, Daniel, “Common Laborers? Industrial Pluralists, Legal Realists, and the Law of Industrial Disputes,” Law and History Review 11 (Spring 1993): 59–100CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Barenberg, Mark, “The Political Economy of the Wagner Act: Power, Symbol, and Workplace Cooperation,” Harvard Law Review 106 (May 1993): 1379–1496CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Manza, Jeffrey, “Policy Experts and Political Change During the New Deal” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1995), 89–292Google Scholar; and Plotke, David, Building a Democratic Political Order: Reshaping American Liberalism in the 1930s and 1940s (New York, 1996), 108–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18. The term “industrial pluralist” is now used quite generally to describe the postwar system of industrial relations. The first developed use of this term may be found in Stone, Katherine Van Wezel, “The Post-War Paradigm in American Labor Law” Yale Law Journal 90 (June 1981): 1509–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For Stone, postwar industrial relations thinkers shared an ideology that falsely characterizes the workplace as a “mini-democracy” in which the corporations and the unions bargain on equal terms, advocated the substitution of a system of grievance procedures to resolve disputes in lieu of direct action or legal procedures, and that they are generally responsible for the sorry state of the labor movement after the 1970s. Whatever the merits of this interpretation (for a vigorous, and largely convincing, point-by-point critique of Stone's argument, see Finkin, Matthew, “Symposium: Directions in Labor Law–Concern for the Dignity of the Worker: Revisionism in Labor Law” Maryland Law Review 43 [Fall 1984]: 22–90)Google Scholar, the term industrial pluralist has come to stand as a broad label for those professors and lawyers in the postwar field of industrial relations and, more narrowly, to a clearly identifiable network of policy intellectuals who followed the ideas of Commons, as distinguished from those of the “legal realists,” “Hawthorne school” industrial psychologists, and advocates of other labor relations strategies. See Tomlins, Christopher L., “The New Deal, Collective Bargaining, and the Triumph of Industrial Pluralism,” Industrial and Labor Relations Review 39 (October 1985): 19–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ernst, Daniel, “Common Laborers? Industrial Pluralists, Legal Realists, and the Law of Industrial Disputes,” Law and History Review 11 (Spring 1993): 59–100CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Barenberg, Mark, “The Political Economy of the Wagner Act: Power, Symbol, and Workplace Cooperation,” Harvard Law Review 106 (May 1993): 1379–1496CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Manza, , “Policy Experts and Political Change During the New Deal,” 89–292Google Scholar. The second of these meanings is adopted here in part to place this argument within the debate over the role of prewar policy intellectuals and also because it provides a useful means of describing the ideas of people like Leiserson and Davis. Care must be taken, however, so as not to reify the ideas of industrial pluralists. They were a contentious bunch who, like intellectuals generally, were prone to change their minds, accept compromises, and even to learn from their experiences and mistakes. On commons's ideas, see Commons, John R., Institutional Economics: Its Place in Political Economy (New York, 1934), 241–42Google Scholar; Ernst, , “Common Laborers?” 62–69Google Scholar; Schatz, , “From Commons to Dunlop,” 89–91Google Scholar; Wunderlin, Clarence, Visions of a New Industrial Order: Social Science and Labor Theory in America's Progressive Era (New York, 1992), 113–29Google Scholar.

19. Millis, Harry A., “Some Observations on Labor and a National Defense Program,” 15 June 1940Google Scholar, Box 8; Edwin Witte to Evans Clark, 1 July 1940, Box 9; “Minutes of Special Meeting of the Labor Committee,” 21 June 1940Google Scholar, 2 July 1940, 30 October 1940, and 6 December 1940, Box 9; William H. Davis, “A Plan to Minimize Interruptions in the Production of Defense Materials by Mutual Agreement Between Managements and Workers,” n.d., Box 8, all in Davis Papers. Davis's plan was based in part on the Railway Labor Act, which he and Leiserson believed to be a model for Commons-style government intervention in labor relations. See Leiserson, William, Right and Wrong in Labor Relations (Berkeley, 1938), 73–86Google Scholar; Leiserson, William, Labor's Right to Organize, Day and Hour Series 22 (Minneapolis, 1939), 13–19Google Scholar. See also Dubofsky, , The State and Labor, 100–101Google Scholar, for a less rosy view of the Railway Labor Act.

20. Dr. John Boland to William H. Davis, 2 December 1940, Box 9, unprocessed section, Davis Papers; Interview, William H. Davis, Columbia Oral History Program, micro I, 1959, 78 [hereafter Davis Columbia Interview]; Hillman testimony, Inquiry as to National-defense Construction: Hearing before the Committee on Military Affairs, 8 April 1941, House, 77, 1st sess., (Washington, D.C., 1941), 104Google Scholar; New York Times, 14 March 1941.

21. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States (Washington, D.C., 1958), 236Google Scholar. NAM organized only manufacturing companies and hence excluded many sectors of the economy from its membership. Even among manufacturers it directly represented, at its height in 1945, only 14,500 employers, about 5.5 percent of the total number of manufacturers. See Gable, Richard W., “A Political Analysis of an Employers' Association: The National Association of Manufacturers” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1951), 187–88Google Scholar, and Workman, , “Manufacturing Power”: 284–93Google Scholar. The CCUS was a much broader organization than NAM, comprised of more than seventeen hundred affiliated local groups and trade associations with a combined membership of three-quarters of a million, but its main purpose was to gauge and project “business opinion,” not impose policies on its members. Despite questions as to their ability to represent the interests of American industry at large, NAM and CCUS were considered by policymakers to be the most legitimate choices available to serve such a role in negotiations with the government. See Blaisdell, Donald C., Economic Power and Political Pressures (Washington, D.C., 1941), 25–37Google Scholar. On the prewar period for NAM and CCUS, see Gordon, Colin, New Deals: Business, Labor, and Politics in America, 1920–1935 (New York, 1994), 166–203Google Scholar, and on the inadequacy of both business and labor organizations to serve as corportist peak associations during the war, see Willard, , “Labor and the National War Labor Board,” 79–113Google Scholar.

22. “Minutes National Defense Labor Problems Subcommittee,” 13 February 1941, Box 2, Group 1412, Papers of the National Association of Manufactures, Hagley Museum and Library, Wilmington, Del. [hereafter NAM Papers]; Koistinen, , “The Hammer and the Sword,” 99–104Google Scholar; New York Times, 10 December 1940; Harris, Right to Manage, passim.

23. Minutes of Meetings, Executive Council of the American Federation of Labor, 7 February 1941, 2–6, and 11 February 1941, 14–16, George Meany Memorial Archives, Silver Springs, Md. [hereafter AFL Minutes]; New York Times, 12 February 1941.

24. Philip Murray to William H. Davis, 12 December 1940, Box 9, unprocessed section, Davis Papers; Zieger, , The CIO, 143–44Google Scholar. This proposal was echoed by United Auto Workers (UAW) leader Walter P. Reuther, who captured headlines with his assertion that the auto industry could be converted to produce 500 planes a day under an industrial council. Reuther, Walter P., “500 Planes a Day–A Program for the Utilization of the Automobile Industry for Mass Production of Defense Planes,” in Walter P. Reuther: Selected Papers, Christman, Henry M., ed. (New York, 1961), 1–12Google Scholar; New York Times, 1 January and 12 February 1941; “Murray Flays Proposal for Mediation Board Urges Defense Plan,” CIO News, 17 March 1941Google Scholar.

25. “Defense Industries Labor Board” n.d., Reel 17, Records of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, Holdings of the Labor-Management Document Center, Microfilm edition, Martin P. Catherwood Library, Cornell University [hereafter ACWA Papers].

26. Philip Murray, 28 February 1941, Reel 17, ACWA Papers; “Murray Flays Proposal for Mediation Board Urges Defense Plan,” CIO News, 17 March 1941Google Scholar.

27. Interview, William H. Davis, Cornell University, 25 June 1958, Tape 3, Side 2, p. 6 [hereafter Davis Cornell Interview]; Gardner Jackson to Franklin Roosevelt, 13 November 1940, OF 407, Box 2, Roosevelt Papers; Complete Presidential Press Conferences of Franklin D. Roosevelt, vol. 17 (New York, 1972), 169–71, 174–79, 193; Richard Gable, W., “NAM: Influential Lobby or Kiss of Death?” Journal of Politics 15 (1953): 254–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cleveland, Alfred S., “NAM, Spokesman for Industry?” Harvard Business Review 26 (1948): 353–69Google Scholar.

28. “The National Defense Mediation Board Is Established, Executive Order 8716,” The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Rosenman, Samuel, ed., The Call to Battle Stations (New York, 1950), 76–80Google Scholar.

29. Ibid.

30. New York Times, 16 and 17 March 1941. In order to make the board as amenable as possible to a favorable view of labor, Roosevelt stacked the deck with business moderates such as Cyrus Ching, a rubber company executive who advocated compliance with the Wagner Act; Roger Lapham, a shipping business owner who had made his peace with labor in San Francisco; Standard Oil's Walter Teagle, a corporate liberal; and Eugene Meyer, publisher of the Washington Post and a strong supporter of Roosevelt's foreign policy, if not always of the labor movement. Three men were asked to represent the public: Clarence Dykstra, an old-time progressive and president of the University of Wisconsin, who was named chair; Frank Porter Graham, liberal president of the University of North Carolina; and Davis. See E. M. Watson to President, 17 March 1941, OF 4630, Roosevelt Papers; Bureau of Labor Statistics, Report on Work of the National Defense Mediation Board 39Google Scholar; New York Times, 17 and 20 March 1941.

31. I use the term “ersatz corporatism” here to distinguish the system created by Roosevelt from those forms of corporatism described by political scientist Philip Schmitter. Schmitter has analyzed what he calls “societal corporatist” arrangements, which emerged in a number of nations after World War II. He distinguishes these systems from their less savory cousins in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany by the degree to which the state compels compliance with them. In Schmitter's societal corporatism, labor and management, represented by national “peak” associations, make agreements on economic policy that they then implement with the help of the state. In the case under consideration here, neither business nor labor organizations could come close to functioning in this way. See Schmitter, Philip, “Still the Century of Corporatism?” in Pike, Fredrick B. and Stritch, Thomas, eds., The New Corporatism (Notre Dame, 1974)Google Scholar; Panitch, Leo, “Recent Theorizations of Corporatism: Reflections on a Growth Industry,” British Journal of Sociology 31 (June 1980): 159–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, “The Development of Corporatism in Liberal Democracy,” and Gerhard Lehmbruch, “Liberal Corporatism and Party Government,” both in Comparative Political Studies 10 (April 1977). See Willard, “Labor and the National War Labor Board, 1942–1945,” 79–113, for an excellent discussion of corporatism and the NWLB.

32. David Plotke's important work on this era is relevant here. In Building A Democratic Political Order, he goes far beyond earlier efforts to explain the process of regime building during the New Deal. He sees the role of “progressive liberal leadership,” a tight core of politicians, intellectuals, and government officials among whom Leiserson and Davis would clearly fall, as essential in framing and passing the Wagner Act and much of the New Deal at large. Plotke ignores the war years in his book, but his analysis of the importance of this group during the New Deal can indeed be carried ahead. At the same time, Plotke's analysis of the role of political factors in building the state indicates that this process is subject to variability at any particular moment in the balance of political power and the needs of the regime. In the case of the defense era under consideration here, the intellectual wing of the progressive liberal leadership clearly did not have the ability to shape policy to the degree that they might have had in 1935.

33. New York Times, 5 April 1941; Bernstein, Turbulent Years, 744–50; Zieger, , The CIO, 121–25Google Scholar.

34. “Minutes of the NDMB,” 25 March 1941, Entry 6, Box 3, NWLB Papers; NDMB Executive Session Transcript, 10 April 1941, Entry 25, Box 6, 40–45, NWLB Papers; Report on the National Defense Mediation Board, 23–25; Frank P. Graham to Ralph T. Seward, 10 January 1950, Box 4, unprocessed section, Davis Papers. William Leiserson, however, never accepted the structure of the NDMB and became a bitter critic of the administration's politically driven policy. See Leiserson, William M., “The Public and Labor Relations,” Survey Graphic (November 1941): 613–14Google Scholar.

35. Franklin D. Roosevelt to William H. Davis, 23 June 1941 and Franklin D. Roosevelt to William H. Davis, 1 September 1941, OF 4360, Roosevelt Papers; Davis Cornell Interview, Tape 3, Side 2, 9; Davis Columbia Interview, 179; “Executive Order 8773, June 9 1941,” The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, (1941), 205–9Google Scholar; Cochran, , Labor and Communism, 176–84Google Scholar; Lichtenstein, , Labor's War at Home, 58–59Google Scholar; Mortimer, Wyndam, Organize!: My Life as a Union Man, ed. Fenster, Leo (Boston, 1971), 166–73Google Scholar.

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40. Mary Norton to Franklin Roosevelt, 14 November 1941, and Frances Perkins to Franklin D. Roosevelt, 24 November 1941, and Sidney Hillman to Franklin D. Roosevelt, 24 November 1941, all in OF 407, Box 3, Roosevelt Papers; New York Times, 20, 25, and 26 November, 3 and 4 December 1941; Congressional Record, 77th Cong., 1st sess., 1941, 87Google Scholar, pt. 9: 9306, 9368–70, 9397.

41. Sidney Hillman to Franklin D. Roosevelt, 24 November 1941, OF 4684, Box 1, Roosevelt Papers; Frances Perkins to Franklin D. Roosevelt, 25 November 1941, OF 407, Box 3, Roosevelt Papers; Davis Cornell Interview, Tape 3, Side 2, 19–23; Benjamin Stephansky, “The Wartime Industry-Labor Conference of December 17–23, 1941,” Entry 75, Box 475, NWLB Papers. On the CIO plan for labor-management conference, see the New York Times, 7 December 1941, and “Radio Speech by Philip Murray, delivered over the NBC Blue Network,” 8 December 1941, reprinted in CIO News, 15 December 1941. See also the many telegrams from CIO affiliates demanding a conference, Department of Labor Papers, Office of the Secretary, 1940–45, RG 174, National Archives, Box 134 [hereafter DOL-OS Papers]; New Republic, 24 November 1941, 693–95; Lloyd Garrison to President [Franklin D. Roosevelt], 19 November 1941, Box 176, DOL-OS Papers.

42. “The President Calls a Conference to Draft a Basic Wartime Labor Policy,” 11 December 1941, The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt; Rosenman, , ed., The Call to Battle Stations, 533–34Google Scholar; Perkins Interview, 205–14.

43. For NAM comment on the idea of an industry-labor conference, see the New York Times, 11 December 1941; NDMB Executive Session Transcript, 11 December 1941, Entry 25, BOX 6, 3, NWLB Papers.

44. Stephansky, “The Wartime Industry-Labor Conference,“ 5; “Report of President Green to the Executive Council of the American Federation of Labor on the Conference of Labor and Industry called by President Roosevelt,” n.d., Office of the president, Series II, File B, William Green Papers, George Meany Library, Silver Spring, Md. [hereafter Green Papers]; Franklin D. Roosevelt to William Baa, 11 December 1941, and William Batt to president [Franklin D. Roosevelt], 13 December 1941, in NWLB Papers, Entry 75, Box 474. On the BAC, see McQuaid, Kim, Big Business and Presidential Power: From FDR to Reagan (New York, 1982)Google Scholar, chaps. 1 and 2, and Collins, Robert M., The Business Response to Keynes, 1929–1964 (New York, 1981), 56–62Google Scholar.

45. Roosevelt's remarks are recounted in full in the New York Times, 18 December 1941; Frances Perkins to President, “War Labor Conference: Possible Points to be raised,” December 1941, Box 134, DOL-OS Papers; Frances Perkins to President, 16 December 1941, OF 4684, Roosevelt Papers; “Report of President Green to the Executive Council,” Green Papers; Davis Cornell Interview, Tape 3, Side 2, 24–28; Proceedings of the Thirty-Seventh Constitutional Convention of the United Mine Workers, vol. 1, 100–101Google Scholar; Davis, William H., Thomas, Elbert D., and Pritchard, Edward F. Jr., “Memorandum Report of the Deliberations of the War-Labor Conference Convened by the President in the City of Washington, on December 17, 1941,” Congressional Record, 15 January 1942, 77th Cong., 2d sess., 372–73Google Scholar. NAM's and CCUS's experience in 1941 stands in marked contrast to that of the 1945 labor-management conference. See “Significant Features of the Labor Management Conference,” n.d. Box 19, file: National Labor Management Conference, 1945–46, NAM Papers; Workman, “Manufacturing Power”: 300–317.

46. NWLB Executive Session Transcript, 16 January 1942, Entry 25, Box 8, 8–36, NWLB Papers; Robert P. Patterson and James Forrestal to Secretary of Labor, 1 January 1942, Box 119, DOL-OS Papers; Stephansky, “Wartime Industry-Labor Conference,” 24–25.

47. Walter D. Fuller and William P. Witherow to Frances Perkins, 30 December 1941, Box 119, DOL-OS Papers; Minutes of Meetings, Executive Council of the American Federation of Labor, 12–17 January 1942, 60–62, AFL Minutes; CIO News, 5 January 1942, 1; W. Jett Lauck Diary, 29, 30, and 31 December, 1941, Reel 2, University of Virginia, Microfilm Edition.

48. Executive Order 9017, 12 January 1942. In addition to Davis, Graham came from the NDMB to the NWLB. The other two public members were George Taylor, a labor economist from the University of Pennsylvania who had extensive experience in grievance arbitration, and Wayne Morse, then dean of the University of Oregon Law School who had a strong reputation as an effective and fair labor mediator.

49. On labor during the war, see Lichtenstein, , Labor's War at Home, 233Google Scholar; Atleson, James, “The Law of Collective Bargaining and Wartime Labor Relations,” 38–63Google Scholar; Dubofsky, , The State and Labor in Modern America, xvi, 171Google Scholar. Dubofsky offers a nuanced analysis of the state and its relationship to labor in his book, but tends to emphasize the relative marginalization of unions leaders and the predominance of conservatives in his account of World War II. In his introduction, Lichtenstein presents a neo-Marxist theory of state action which argues that structural forces made the board, despite the generally prolabor stance of its public members, one of the “most effective tools in regulating industrial conflict in a way that ultimately strengthened corporate hegemony.” But this approach is not systematically developed. On the larger story of the mobilizaiton, see Koistinen, “The Hammer and the Sword”; Bruce Catton, The War Lords of Washington; Nelson, Donald M., Arsenal of Democracy: The Story of American War Production (New York, 1946)Google Scholar; Alan Brinkley, Tne End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War. For sophisticated recent work in this vein, see Waddell, Brian, “Economic Mobilization for World War II and the Transformation of the U.S. State,” Politics & Society (June 1994): 165–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hooks, Forging the Military-Industrial Complex.