United States 1941-1945

Synopsis

The political economy of wartime is unlike any other economic cycle. Raw materials, money, production and shipping capacity, agricultural goods, management skills, and labor are consumed by the war, and the home front must be adequately supplied and protected from destructive inflation. Extensive government intervention is required to deploy resources in the national interest. World War II was an extraordinary series of events marked, more than anything else, by change. United States involvement varied in form and intensity during the war. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's administration set up several wartime agencies to meet shifting military and civilian strategic needs. As employment rose from 44,482,000 in 1938 to a wartime peak of 65,370,000 in 1944, Roosevelt created the National War Labor Board (NWLB) to facilitate labor's war effort. The NWLB modified the impact of industrial disputes; it controlled wages, which, in...