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

Arthur Herman, New York: Random House, 2012. $28.00. cloth, i-xiv, 413 pp. Since the culmination of the conservative revolution in 1980, interests on the right have commissioned countless studies to challenge the liberal-consensus interpretation of events that dominated the previous half-century. Commissioned and funded by the conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI), Freedom's Forge attempts to rewrite history by deemphasizing the collaboration of government, business and labor that supplied the Allies and the fighting men and women on the front lines who actually won the war and substitute instead an alternate reality where the private sector alone triumphed over obstructionist "New Dealers" in the Roosevelt administration and a labor movement supposedly dominated by communists to singly-handedly win the war. Kaiser's shipbuilding empire during World War II was fueled entirely by government contracts (highlighting the private sector's inability to anticipate and meet the national need for merchant shipping in the absence of any clear profit motive) and quickly collapsed in the post-war years.