War Industries Board

War Industries Board. The War Industries Board (WIB) was formed in July 1917 by the Council of National Defense, a wartime agency set up by President Woodrow Wilson, to assure the availability of vital raw materials and resources for war production.The WIB fell short of its goals, however, and in March 1918 Wilson appointed the Wall Street financier Bernard Baruch to reorganize and head it. Although it was a new departure in executive authority, the WIB lacked compulsory power, even with the addition of a price‐fixing committee in March 1918. Making matters worse was industry's hostile reaction to Baruch's appointment. Such heads of the major auto and steel corporations as John Dodge, Henry Ford, and Elbert H. Gary did not disguise their disdain for Baruch. While the hostility stemmed in part from business's fear that it could not control the tough and fiercely independent Baruch, anti‐Semitism played a role as well. With powers more illusory than real, Baruch relied on persuasion to gain the voluntary cooperation of business and labor. Even so, profit‐oriented manufacturers often resisted his patriotic appeals to invoke modest wartime price controls. Only after he threatened to marshal the entire force of the federal government against the titans of industry did they capitulate. Still, guided by Baruch, the WIB did keep inflation in check while providing the War Department with needed resources. The WIB was dismantled in 1918, a few weeks after the war ended.

During the Great Depression of the 1930s, the WIB served as a model for the Franklin Delano Roosevelt administration's efforts to rework the economic forces of supply and demand. In 1939, it was resurrected in modified form when President Roosevelt established the short‐lived War Resources Board. When the United States entered World War II, Roosevelt again turned to the WIB precedent and drew upon many of Baruch's ideas about managing a war economy.
See also Economic Regulation; New Deal Era, The; World War I.

Bibliography

Bernard Baruch , My Own Story, 1957.
Jordan A. Schwarz , The Speculator: Bernard M. Baruch in Washington, 1917–1965, 1981.
William O'Neill , A Democracy at War: America's Fight at Home and Abroad in World War II, 1993.

Anthony Troncone