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

WAR INDUSTRIES BOARD

WAR INDUSTRIES BOARD. The War Industries Board was a wartime agency of 1917–1918 designed to coordinate the war role of American industry. Its parent body, the Council of National Defense, enjoyed only advisory powers and could not compel anyone to accept its advice. There were five procurement agencies in the War Department, and they frequently competed for the same materials and manufacturing facilities, leading to shortages of transportation, labor, and material that seriously slowed the war program in the winter of 1917–1918.

The War Industries Board, formed in July 1917, was as powerless as the other agencies had been. When Congress discussed the extremely limited production of military equipment early in 1918, many leaders aimed to establish a munitions ministry on the English model. In order to forestall this thinly veiled censure, President Woodrow Wilson, on 4 March 1918, appointed Bernard M. Baruch as chairman of the War Industries Board and greatly augmented its powers. This enabled the War Industries Board to use all the agencies of the Council of National Defense, to mobilize industry, and to force adoption of its orders. This board controlled all available resources and manufacturing facilities, fixed prices, raised the volume of munitions produced, and brought order out of industrial chaos. It was terminated by executive order on 1 January 1919.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Baruch, Bernard M. American Industry in the War: A Report of the War Industries Board. New York: Prentice-Hall, 1941.

Leuchtenburg, William E. The Perils of Prosperity, 1914–32. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.

H. A.DeWeerd/c. w.

See alsoCouncil of National Defense ; Munitions ; War Department ; World War I, Economic Mobilization for .

War Industries Board a committee created before World War I whose task was to help mobilize the American economy for possible war. It began in 1916 as the Council on National Defense, a cabinet committee created by Congress. The committee functioned chaotically at first as a loose grouping of over 100 subcommittees, headed by various industrial executives who refused to work with each other, let alone the military. Wilson re-created it as the War Industries Board in the winter of 1917–18, but the Board did not become effective until prominent financier Bernard Baruch was appointed by the president to head the committee on March 4, 1918. Baruch delegated work efficiently and cajoled some measure of unified action between disparate groups of industry and the army. By Armistice Day, one quarter of industrial manufacturing had been converted to military use. The policies of the War Industries Board provided a template for the New Deal and the mobilization for World War II.

WAR INDUSTRIES BOARD (WIB)

Participation in World War I (1914–1918) required not only the mobilization of people, but of materials in the United States. The country entered the conflict on April 6, 1917, when Congress declared war on Germany, and the United States joined the Allied nations (France, Great Britain, Russia, Serbia, and twenty other nations, including Japan) to fight the Central Powers (Austria-Hungary, Germany, the Ottoman Empire, and Bulgaria). The U.S. war effort demanded that industry join with the federal government to ensure an adequate flow of supplies to the front and to keep things moving smoothly on the home front. President Woodrow Wilson (1913–1921) declared that "it is not an army that we must shape and train for war, it is a nation." Of all the committees and agencies that were established to advise and oversee the production and movement of materials, raw and finished, the most important was the War Industries Board (WIB), which, for the duration of the war, ran the nation's economy.

Formed in July 1917, the WIB was originally led by F.A. Scott (1873–1949); he resigned under the enormous pressure of the job. Succeeded by Daniel Willard (1861–1942), he too resigned, complaining of the War Industries Board's lack of power. In 1918 Wilson secured broader authority for the board when Congress passed the Overman Act. The president tapped American businessman Bernard Baruch (1870–1965), who was then serving on the Allied Purchasing Commission, to head the WIB.

Under Baruch's leadership the WIB faced with the challenge of converting the nation's industry to wartime production. The wartime agency allocated supplies (war-related items received first priority on production lines), fixed prices (to ensure that manufacturers had a means to pay wages high enough that workers would not strike), ordered the standardization of goods (so resources would not be wasted), and made purchases, sending enough goods—about one quarter of all American production—to the European front. While the Selective Service Act (1917) and local draft boards had successfully mobilized the troops, the WIB mobilized the economy, ensuring the Allied nations' defeat of the Central Powers in November 1918. On December 31, President Wilson directed that the board be dissolved. It was officially disbanded in mid-1919. The war effort was a catalyst for U.S. economic growth: By the end of the decade, the gross national product (GNP) was 237 percent higher than it was in 1914, when fighting first broke out.

See also: Bernard Baruch, Overman Act, Selective Service

it is not an army that we must shape and train for war, it is a nation.

president woodrow wilson, on u.s. mobilization for world war i