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Reason for this was plain. Despite the production boom, nothing Business really wanted had been achieved. Taxes, far from easing, were made tougher by an excess-profits tax and likely to grow more so. Government spending was multiplied; the 76th Congress appropriated more than $17 billions. Interest rates on capital continued to fall. The National Labor Relations Board underwent a personnel shakeup, but Wagner Act modification was less likely than ever. Government regulation in general, previously little more than a list of "Don'ts," began to turn into positive control. Every well-editorialized reason why Business should hold back was more conspicuous than ever.
Knowing the economic consequences of war, businessmen naturally disliked the defense boom. They were swept downstream almost against their will, steering as cautiously as they could. They ploughed their profits back into debt retirement or new plant, drove good bargains with the Government in answer to its demands for industrial expansion. When the boom ends, this caution may help Business to face a buyer's market with efficient plant, low overhead—may ease post-war adjustments. But the engine of industry did not speed up because of confidence burning within. It was sped up from without by the energy of wartime economy. Not moneymen but politicos had started it, and supplied the power to keep it going.
Yet of all who helped enthrone politics above economics in 1940, the three most important were businessmen.
Henry Edward Miller, East St. Louis barber, borrowed $150 from the RFC for a new chair. The salesman skipped town with the $150, never delivered Miller's chair, but the loan was repaid with interest: $2.50.
The Hjalmar Schacht of the U. S. Revolution was brought to Washington by Herbert Hoover. He was a Texas businessman who had almost gone broke in Depression. By 1940 he was rich again, and the Revolution had made him Secretary of Commerce and Federal Loan Administrator. Business thought of Jesse Jones as its friend at court, the Old Deal's borer from within the New. Tactful and unobtrusive, Jesse Jones did not act like a revolutionary. He did not set up any industrial TVAs; he merely "took what the banks left over." By Dec. 1, 1940 he had made commitments of $14,842,000,000 to banks, insurance companies, railroads, industries and other Government agencies. He had in fact usurped the first J. P. Morgan's job as U. S. moneybags No. 1.
Throughout 1940, Business still looked on Jesse Jones as its man. Yet he was tolerated by the New Deal as a candidate for two of its most sacred jobs: 1) integrating the U. S. with Latin America; 2) being President in 1944. If businessmen were unlucky to have the avowed New Dealers as enemies, they were not much luckier to have the New Deal's Schacht as a friend. He saved Business from the courts in order to put it to work for the Government. He helped make the Revolution respectable—more like evolution than it might have been.