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Launching a Thousand Ships: Entrepreneurs, War Workers, and the State in American Shipbuilding, 1940–1945
CHRISTOPHER JAMES TASSAVA is a community faculty member in the Department of History and Women’s Studies at Metropolitan State University, St. Paul, Minnesota. Contact information: 4044 Nineteenth Avenue South, Minneapolis, MN 55407, USA. E-mail: christopher@tassava.com.
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All along the American home front during World War II, the federal government, business, and labor experimented with new political, economic, and social arrangements intended to orient a revitalized industrial capitalism toward total war. As the enormous—perhaps decisive—contribution by American industry to the Allies’ victory over Germany, Japan, and Italy shows, these attempts were phenomenally successful. My dissertation uses the case study of wartime merchant shipbuilding to examine a set of questions around America’s mobilization experience. Why did mobilization work so well? Why did the United States choose, among other possible and real models, to build a war effort that was both markedly decentralized and carefully calibrated to link the federal government with private contractors and workforces? How did the relationships between the federal government and its contractors change over the course of the war? And, above all, how did mobilization affect prevailing characteristics of American political economy?
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