Roosevelt Rallied America’s Industrial Might. So Can Trump.
The War Production Board, founded after the attack on Pearl Harbor, is a template for rallying manufacturers to help defeat the coronavirus.
He opted for a hybrid approach to redirecting U.S. industrial might.
Photographer: Keystone Features/Hulton ArchiveIt would be charitable to describe the federal government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic as sloppy and uncoordinated. Thankfully, there is a model for an epic national comeback. It dates back to the weeks following the attack on Pearl Harbor in late 1941, when President Roosevelt created the War Production Board, one of the most dynamic public-private partnerships in history.
The U.S. entered World War II woefully unprepared. It possessed staggering economic power, but almost none of it was directed toward defense. As it sought to ramp up the war effort, supply disruptions for much-needed commodities like rubber would slow it back down. To have a fighting chance, the government would need to recruit hundreds of thousands of factories to wartime production while simultaneously smashing countless bottlenecks in the supply chains that fed them.