Author Interview: Arthur Herman on 'Freedom's Forge'

Charlottesville-based historian Arthur Herman is the author of six books, including the Pulitzer-Prize finalist Gandhi & Churchill and the New York Times best-seller How the Scots Invented the Modern World.

Herman’s latest book is Freedom’s Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II.

Earlier this summer, which by coincidence was on the 68th anniversary of the D-Day landings at Normandy, I met Herman at the Boar’s Head Inn to talk about the book, which he sums up as a story about “releasing the innate productive power of American business.”

Herman pointed out there were two business enterprises in Charlottesville that manufactured products that were critical to the American war effort.


Charlottesville’s war effort
One was Ix Mills, located where the Frank Ix building still stands south of downtown.

During the war, he said, Ix Mills “moved from making commercial textiles to making parachute cloth. They really became the center of the parachute cloth making for the Second World War.”

The soldiers “who jumped on D-Day” as portrayed in Stephen Spielberg’s film, Saving Private Ryan, as well as the “airmen who had to jump out over Germany and at sea during the Second World War were using Charlottesville-produced parachutes.”

Historian Arthur Herman

The other Charlottesville company that Herman discovered during his research was Southern Welding, which “made various kinds of iron piping and steel tubing. During the war, they shifted to making the steel tubing for aircraft, to contain all the electric lines and so on in B-24s and B-25s. What they also did, and their real breakthrough, is they developed the parts for arrester gear on navy aircraft carriers.”

The arrester gear allowed planes to land on the carriers without being pulled apart by a braking mechanism.

“Southern Welding, here in Charlottesville, developed the parts and manufactured the parts that went on aircraft carriers all across the Pacific. In fact, at one point, Charlottesville-made arrester gear and tailhook gear was on 43 separate aircraft carriers during the Second World War.”


Remembering D-Day
When Herman thinks about D-Day, in particular, he focuses on two things.

“First of all,” he explained, D-Day was about more than amassing military personnel “but also amassing a vast industrial effort.”

Two thirds of the landing craft and sea-going vessels used on D-Day were produced in American factories, he said, and “it’s a tribute not just to the bravery of our armed forces but also to the huge logistical possibilities that American industry could generate a landing and an enterprise of the sort that the world had never seen.”

The second thing about D-Day that comes to Herman’s mind is that “the very first Americans to get news that the landings were successful were the people working the night shifts in the factories on the East Coast.”

At the Bethlehem Shipyard in Sparrow’s Point in Baltimore, he recalled, “work stopped and everybody sank to their knees and said the Lord’s Prayer as they got the news.”

That, he said, is “really fitting, that the people who produced the tools that made that victory possible were the very first to learn that what they had done, and what they had contributed to, had been a success.”

Stated succinctly, the theme of Freedom’s Forge, is that the growth of industry during World War II was “far from being a kind of Washington, D.C.[-based], bureaucrat-driven production effort” and that, he explained, “what [it] really was about was releasing the innate productive power of American business.”

More widely, he said, the success of America’s wartime industrial production effort came “in spite of” government-imposed rationing and wage and price controls.

“The rationing that everybody remembers,” he pointed out, was the result of “government controls over the consumption of civilian goods.”


‘Minimal control’
For industrial goods needed by the military – airplanes, ships, weapons, and Jeeps – came about because, even before Pearl Harbor “the military learned it was best to let business and manufacturers handle it themselves,” and that it should be decentralized, Herman said.

“They learned that minimal control from Washington -- or even from the military services -- usually ended up getting products on time,” he explained, and “at a continually lower cost as well.”

That, he said, “was really the key ingredient in the whole wartime production effort,” the fact “that the manufacturers and producers found ways to constantly roll the costs down, so it was a huge boon not just for the American military, really giving us the tools to win World War II, but it was also a huge boon to American business and industry because they became leaner, more efficient operating organizations as a result of the wartime effort.”

The business executives and industrialists who are portrayed in Herman’s book – former General Motors president William Knudsen, road- and ship-builder (and health insurance pioneer) Henry Kaiser, Ford Motor Company’s Charles Sorensen, and others – are larger-than-life characters who seem to spring from the pages of an Ayn Rand novel, an assessment with which Herman agrees.


‘Creativity of the human mind’
“What Ayn Rand understood,” he said, “and one of the lessons that you get from her work, which is in some ways is reflected in this book, is that what the arsenal of democracy was really all about wasn’t ships and tanks and planes, any more than national wealth or an economy is about oil wells and gold mines and factories and industrial output or goods and services.”

Rather, he explained, “what it’s really about is creativity. It’s about the creativity of the human mind. It’s about vision. It’s about leadership and problem-solving.”

Throughout its history, he noted, American business has “been really at the forefront of all of those aspects. That’s what drives American business. That’s what drives American civilization.”

What Herman “wanted to chronicle is just how this episode in our history, a crucial moment in world history as well as for the United States, really reflected all of those kinds of powerful virtues that someone like Ayn Rand realized were at work in a free market economy.”

Those characteristics, he said, are “clearly on show in people like Bill Knudsen, the man [whom] Roosevelt brought to construct a system by which you could get this bottoms-up, free-market, private-sector drive to production,” as well as “the other characters [readers will] meet in the book.”

Herman’s previous books, he explained, were “on topics as various as how the Scots invented the modern world and the contribution of the Scottish enlightenment to modern civilization.”

He also wrote a book on the British navy, called To Rule the Waves. Herman explained that “Freedom’s Forge is in some ways an outgrowth” of the research on that earlier book, as he “became more and more interested in the relationship between economics and modern warfare and the links between those two things.”

‘Innate productive power’
What Freedom’s Forge does, he said, is “turn the whole story of how the United States got ready for World War II on its head.” The book argues that, “far from being a kind of Washington, D.C., [led], bureaucrat-driven production effort, what this really was about was releasing the innate productive power of American business.”

Herman’s thesis seems counterintuitive to people whose idea of economics during the Second World War is limited to rationing of sugar, butter, gasoline, and automobile tires.

The war production effort, Herman asserts, succeeded “in spite of” that kind of centralized control, noting that “the rationing that everybody who lived through that period remembers” was about “government controls over the consumption of civilian goods.”

The war production effort began even before Pearl Harbor, “starting in the summer of 1940,” Herman said, and “what the military learned was it was best to let business and manufacturers handle it themselves.”

The War Department, he explained, and President Roosevelt himself “learned that minimal control from Washington or even from the military services usually ended up getting products on time -- getting the tanks and planes and ships built -- at a continually lower cost as well”

The “key ingredient” of wartime production, Herman said, “is that the manufacturers and producers found ways to constantly roll the costs down, so it was a huge boon not just for the American military, giving us the tools to win World War II, but it was also a huge boon to American business and industry because they became leaner, more efficient operating organizations as a result of the wartime effort.”

Quirky and surprising
While doing his research, Herman came across a few quirky stories and surprising facts.

“One that will completely surprise people when they read the book,” he said, “because it’s so at variance from our usual textbook image” that the United States was caught off-guard by the Pearl Harbor attack.

In fact, “the war production effort was well underway well before Pearl Harbor,” Herman pointed out.

“As I explain in the book, it really began in the summer of 1940 when Roosevelt realized war is going to come” and that he had to get the country ready for it,” so FDR called “Bill Knudsen, president of General Motors, and says, how do I do it?”

With the system that Knudsen put in place, with Roosevelt’s blessing, Herman continued, “far from being caught off guard, we had gone from a standing start to a wartime production that was fast approaching that of Hitler’s Germany. A lot of people don’t realize that but this is in fact what American industry could do.”

There was a second surprise that Herman discovered.

“The most interesting statistic, stunning statistic that came out of my research was that in 1942, as this war production effort is going on, the number of Americans killed or injured in war-related industries surpassed the number of Americans in uniform killed and wounded in action in the war by a factor of 20 to 1,” he said.

The civilian sector of “what we call the Greatest Generation were [not] just sitting at home or just comfortably handling jobs while people in uniform were out risking their lives at sea and on land and in the air,” he said.

To the contrary, he explained, war production was “incredibly dangerous work. It involved enormous sacrifice from lots of people, including business executives. One hundred eighty-nine General Motors senior executives died on the job during the war.”

Summing up, Herman said that what is “really the thesis of the book” is that “this was a huge effort [that] was made possible by the productive forces that are part of a free-market American economy,” and not by any centralized planning devised in the Pentagon or the Washington bureaucracy.

The complete interview with Arthur Herman, author of Freedom’s Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II, is available as a podcast on Bearing Drift radio’s “The Score.”

This article is based on three separately published excerpts from the interview, which appeared on Examiner.com on June 6, July 1, and September 2, 2012.

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Author Interview: Jennifer Burns on Ayn Rand's Latter-Day Popularity

To many people, the unusually high level of interest in the works of Ayn Rand and her surge in popularity are puzzling.

In January 2009, the Wall Street Journal’s Stephen Moore published an article called “’Atlas Shrugged’: From Fiction to Fact in 52 Years,” in which he wrote:

“Many of us who know Rand's work have noticed that with each passing week, and with each successive bailout plan and economic-stimulus scheme out of Washington, our current politicians are committing the very acts of economic lunacy that 'Atlas Shrugged' parodied in 1957, when this 1,000-page novel was first published and became an instant hit.”

Two months later, The Economist reported that according to “data from TitleZ, a firm that tracks best-seller rankings on Amazon, an online retailer, the book's 30-day average Amazon rank was 127 on Feb. 21, well above its average over the past two years of 542. On Jan. 13 the book's ranking was 33, briefly besting President Barack Obama's popular tome, ‘The Audacity of Hope.’”

Earlier this year, Marsha Enright and Gen LaGreca noted in The Daily Caller that Moore’s 2009 article “seemed to ignite an explosion of interest in Ayn Rand. Sales of this prescient novel tripled; two Rand biographies have been selling like hotcakes; and references to her in the media have skyrocketed.”

What explains this phenomenon: A philosopher/novelist who died in 1982 is more popular now than when she was actively writing and promoting her books?

On April 15, 2010, after a panel discussion at the University of Virginia on whether libertarians should seek an alliance with liberals (with the resulting combination called “liberaltarian”), I put this question to one of the authors of the two Rand biographies that were published last year, UVA historian and panel moderator Jennifer Burns, who wrote Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right.

Burns said that Ayn Rand “has become a rallying point for the opposition to Obama. Definitely, she has become a really strong presence in the Tea Party. I think a lot of people are seeing her writing as prophetic, both predicting what’s happening now and warning about what can happen if the state gets too big.”

In Burns’ opinion, Rand’s “time has come, in many ways.” She cautioned, however, that “it’s probably a temporary boom. She may fade away and then she’ll probably come back the next time we see this kind of state expansion.”

Burns said that so far her book has received “a very enthusiastic reaction.” Rand, she said, “is a really important figure in American intellectual life [who] hasn’t been recognized as such [and who] hasn’t been treated as such. Most readers of Rand simply appreciate that I take her on her own terms and explain just why she matters.”

(This article originally appeared on April 18, 2010, in slightly different form, on Examiner.com.)

Book Notes 3

These “book notes” were originally published in Volume 1, Number 4, of terra nova (Summer [North] Winter [South] 1992). The theme of that issue was “Religion and Liberty.”

Religion in Politics: A World Guide, by Stuart Mews. (Chicago and London: St. James Press, 1989). 332 pp., $75.00 cloth.
From Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, this reference book is an explication of religion’s interplay with politics in every nation. Obviously, religion is more salient in some countries than others. In Afghanistan, for instance, the defeat of communist rule has left in its wake conflict among competing religious sects, often overlapping with ethnic groups and traditional tribal groupings. In the United States, historical separation of church and state becomes weaker on such issues as abortion and school prayer. In Russia and the former Soviet bloc countries, organized religion was in many ways the only bulwark of civil society that survived through the post-Bolshevik era. Although slightly in need of updating, this volume is a handy reference for those who need basic information about religion and politics around the globe.


Religion and Politics: Major Thinkers on the Relation of Church and State, edited by Garrett Ward Sheldon (New York and Bern: Peter Lang, 1990). 244 pp., $42.95 cloth. This collection of documents and excerpts from the writings of significant thinkers on church-state issues is as notable for what it leaves out as for what it includes. As might be expected, this compilation starts with St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas and moves through the Reformation with Martin Luther and John Calvin. As it approaches the modem era, however, the omissions become quite striking. The volume features an ephemeral figure like Jerry Falwell but omits seminal thinkers like Jacques Maritain and John Courtney Murray, S.J. It includes liberation theologian Gustavo Gutierrez but neglects critics of liberation theology such as Michael Novak. Divided into two parts, the volume’s second “part” is more properly an appendix containing American documents on church and state, such as the Mayflower Compact and Thomas Jefferson’s “Statute for Religious Freedom.” Its excerpts from important Supreme Court decisions are paltry, however, and quite unhelpful.

A Dictionary of Conservative and Libertarian Thought, edited by Nigel Ashford and Stephen Davies. (London and New York: Routledge, 1991). 258 pp., $49.95 cloth. Although 40 years ago some wag might have said the phrase conservative and libertarian thought” is a redundant oxymoron much has changed. Among other things, William Buckley founded National Review in the United States (1955), creating a respectable forum for conservative thought and an umbrella for disparate strands of political philosophy—classical liberal, Southern agrarian, Straussian—to come together for dialogue. Politically, the campaigns of Barry Goldwater (1964) and Ronald Reagan (1976-80-84) energized young conservatives and the premiership of Margaret Thatcher (1979 to 1990) overthrew a half- century of collectivism. Simultaneously, libertarian thinkers were awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics (Friedman, Hayek, Buchanan, Coase) and the Soviet system collapsed. Ashford and Davies have collected short articles into what is more properly termed an encyclopedia than a dictionary, with entries on a wide range of topics, including The Enlightenment. Race, Sociology, Utopianism, and Welfare. A list of thinkers appended to the text also provides a bibliographic reference. This book belongs on the shelf of every conservative or libertarian policymaker and should be useful to their intellectual adversaries as well.

The Ideas of Ayn Rand, by Ronald E. Merrill. (Peru, Ill.: Open Court Publishing, 1991). 210 pp., $32.95 cloth, $15.95 paper.
Ayn Rand’s philosophy has percolated through American society despite the absence of an organized movement and despite outright hostility by academic philosophers and political scientists. As Merrill points out, Rand’s Objectivist thought is often adopted by teenagers and college students who discover Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead, and other works by accident and who find fellow- travelers with whom they enthusiastically discuss her ideas and their impact on politics, economics, and ethics. Rand had a profound influence on the conservative movement in the 1950s and generated the impulse for organized libertarianism in the 1960s and ‘70s, even though Rand herself sharply criticized (one might say anathematized) both conservatives and libertarians. Despite some shortcomings (such as a caricatured portrayal of libertarianism), Merrill provides a clear and concise exposition of Rand’s thought.



Free at Last? U.S. Policy Toward Africa and the End of the Cold War, by Michael Clough. (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1992). 145 $14.95 paper.
This monograph provides a sweeping overview of U.S. policy toward Africa since the end of World War II, following trends through the era of decolonization, the use of Africa as a Cold War testing ground by Washington and Moscow, and the fall of the Soviet Empire. Some readers may question the accuracy of certain observations that Clough makes. He has harsh words for Henry Kissinger, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan. He defines as policy failures the U.S. approaches to Zaire, Liberia, and Sudan and calls Ethiopia and South Africa “success stories,” but in all these cases “success” and “failure” are highly charged and subjective terms. dough is at his best when discussing how to rebuild civil society in Africa and in his last chapter, which provides sensible and pragmatic suggestions for policy reform, including recommendations that government-to-government economic assistance be limited and private sector contacts should be expanded and strengthened.


World Directory of Minorities, edited by the Minority Rights Group. (Chicago and London: St. James Press, 1989). 427 pp., $85.00 cloth.
With the balkanization of the Balkans ten years after Tito’s death, the declaration of Eritrean independence after the fall of Mengistu, racial riots in the streets of Los Angeles, and continuing ethnic conflicts in southern Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia, it is perhaps clearer today than ever before that minority groups (here defined mostly as ethnic minorities) have real or perceived grievances and seek to alleviate them. Few countries are ethnically homogeneous: Iceland and Somalia come to mind, yet one is historically peaceful and the other is engaged in Hobbesian war of all against all. This volume is not comprehensive. It fails to address the Muslims of China, for instance, a group that may gain prominence as the former Soviet republics of Central Asia grasp for greater glory. Neither does it address the African and Caribbean immigrants in Britain. Some groups discussed are obscure, but it may be precisely those that a fact-hungry researcher needs the most help in finding.