War Socialism with American Characteristics: The War Industries Board and the Politics of State-Corporation Relations in Late Progressivism

Eric Freeburg, University of Michigan

This paper analyzes the development of the American War Industries Board (WIB) during WWI as a process of political articulation. It argues that the WIB constituted an attempt by business and state actors to extend and consolidate the corporate liberal regime that emerged during the Progressive Era (1890s-1920s). Under this regime, political actors increasingly sought to reconcile the emergence of large consolidated corporations designed to achieve market dominance with the popular legitimacy of competitive markets by constructing state institutions capable of legitimizing business coordination. Institutionalized through regulatory bodies such as the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Reserve, this corporate liberal regime thus established a fledgling system of state-mediated sectoral self-governance that addressed the destabilizing effects of competition while avoiding the legal and political challenges associated with the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. Situated within this institutional trajectory, the WIB can be understood as a wartime experiment to cement corporate liberal hegemony through the coordination of state and corporate power in order to legitimize business-led industrial governance during a national emergency. The Board did so by developing a repertoire of technopolitical and performative practices capable of mobilizing new forms of expertise, statistical knowledge, and administrative techniques to demonstrate the viability of state-mediation and the compatibility of private corporations with the public interest. Through these practices, the WIB attempted to consolidate the “moral and intellectual leadership” of corporate liberalism in the eyes of both business and Progressive reformers. By analyzing the WIB’s successes and failures in terms of hegemonic articulation, the paper highlights the role of economic constraints and institutional limits in shaping the construction of hegemonic projects.

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 Presented in Session 55. Warfare, Welfare States, and State-Corporation Relations