Freedom's Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II

Freedom’s Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II is a fun book because it works on two levels at once. On one level, it is a character-guided history, full of the personalities, relationships, and networks that helped make wartime production happen. On another, it is a business and economic history, focused on how the factories themselves were built, how the firms operated, and how the people behind them actually got the job done.

The book does not come across as especially sympathetic to FDR. It is very much written from the perspective of corporate, Republican, Depression-era business interests. That angle is noticeable throughout. Still, part of what makes it so interesting is that it shines a light on firms that today we might think of primarily as insurance companies or other bland corporate institutions, but which at the time were deeply involved in industrial construction and in building the physical machinery that helped win the war.

Because of that, the book gives you a surprising amount of texture about early American industrial history. It also gives you a feel for the kinds of people who, had Twitter existed from 1926 to 1936, would have been the most active and the most insufferably online. So yes, I would recommend it.