Establishment of the War Production Board

The establishment of the War Production Board replaced the divided leadership of the Office of Production Management with a single-headed agency for wartime production. It followed the Truman Committee’s investigation of defense mobilization failures and became a major instance in which its findings helped prompt an administrative change before the attack on Pearl Harbor made full-scale mobilization urgent.

The OPM’s divided leadership

The Truman Committee traced many delays and difficulties in defense production to the Office of Production Management, an agency created by Franklin D. Roosevelt with two heads: William S. Knudsen, formerly of General Motors, and labor leader Sidney Hillman. The President had deliberately divided authority rather than create a production czar. The committee reached the opposite conclusion: the production effort needed a strong leader with clear authority, not a divided command.

The committee’s criticism rested on more than organizational theory. Its report judged the OPM’s leadership inept, describing a record of numerous errors of commission and still greater errors of omission. It faulted the agency for failing to act when problems could not be avoided simply by refusing to recognize them. Harry S. Truman was particularly angered by Hillman’s withholding of a construction contract from a low bidder because he feared trouble from elements of the American Federation of Labor that he regarded as irresponsible. Truman argued that the United States should not fear trouble from any source and called for Hillman to be replaced if he would not protect the national interest.

Conflicts of interest and the committee’s findings

The report also urged the government to dispense as soon as possible with the more than 250 dollar-a-year men in the OPM. The committee considered corporate executives in high government posts too likely to make decisions in their own companies’ interests. Their presence, it argued, amounted in practice to lobbying and invited favoritism. It recommended that they receive government salaries comparable to other positions of responsibility and sever outside employment and payments from companies holding defense contracts. In the committee’s view, divided loyalties compounded the problem of divided leadership.

The change in agency leadership

Unwilling to embarrass the administration or damage the defense effort, Truman made sure that Franklin D. Roosevelt received an advance copy of the committee’s findings. Before the report was released, Roosevelt disbanded the OPM and announced the establishment of the War Production Board under one head, Donald M. Nelson of Sears, Roebuck. The change addressed the committee’s central organizational criticism by replacing the OPM’s two-headed structure with the clear authority its members had urged.

The committee was not the only force pressing for a change: Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson had also urged Roosevelt to act. Even so, the new board’s creation was a signal victory for the Truman Committee. Truman later told Nelson that the committee had fought to get him the job and would fight to support him in carrying it out.

From administrative reform to wartime mobilization

The transition came on the eve of the country’s entry into all-out war. By the time Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, Nelson’s task was to mobilize the nation for the conflict. The Board’s establishment thus joined an internal reform of defense administration to the vastly expanded demands of wartime production: the committee had pressed for unified authority before those demands became immediate.