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Knudsen represented the fact that a large segment of Business itself cooperated with the 1940 Revolution. To the other, perhaps larger, segment, he was the Revolution's most convincing legate. He spoke to them as one production man to another. He also spoke to them as Government to Business.
To the whole problem of war orders in 1940, most U. S. manufacturers reacted patriotically but with caution. The Nye Committee was too fresh in their memo ries to give them any stomach for the munitions-makers role. The result was an apparent lack of ardor in the way industry went after war business. But with that coolheaded attitude, coolheaded William S. Knudsen was equipped to deal.
It was best represented by three giants: Du Pont, Chrysler, General Motors. Once a munitions-maker, Du Pont had diversified its business to the point where powder was less than 2% of its sales. Chrysler and G. M., too, wanted no part of the war as an investment. Each of these could have refused the unwelcome orders. None did. With bottomless resources, they could have expanded mightily into munitions, cleaned up for a few years. They did not do that either. Each mobilized its men and skills, agreed to build and operate munitions plants for a very nominal sum above cost, the Government to own the plants. Result of this combination of patriotism and restraint: at industry's own request, a large part of the U. S. arms business was in effect nationalized.
In so acting, Du Pont, G. M., Chrysler and others like them had made their peace with the Revolution. They showed the rest of Business a way both to stay in business and to keep out of trouble. In making that deal, Business might or might not believe in the emergency; it did not care to say. It was of no moment, for Business was no longer in power.
Among things bought by Government during 1940 were 250 copies of M. F. Hopper's How to Play Winning Checkers (Simon & Schuster), for the Navy.
Few were the industries which 1940's boom passed by. But none was more violently struck than aircraft. The planemakers began the year with an order backlog of $675,000,000 and 60,000 men at work. They ended the year with a $3,500,000,000 backlog, 164,000 men at work. Yet, corporately speaking, they ended the year as they had begun: small fry.
The aircraft industry was young, had never been weaned from the Government teat. When 1940's orders poured in, it almost choked to death. Its product had revolutionized the world's ideas of speed; it production methods had not caught up with modern standards of speed in production.
The industry expanded, but not enough. Soon outsiders were creeping in—with no better results. G. M. went painfully into chicken-feed production with its liquid-cooled Allison. Packard bravely took the $125,000,000 British Rolls-Royce order that Henry Ford turned down. In November, Ford himself, who had earlier talked of 1,000 planes a day, took a $122,000,000 order for Pratt & Whitney Double Wasps. His engineers went to Hartford to find out how to make them.