Launching a thousand ships: Entrepreneurs, war workers, and the *state in American shipbuilding, 1940--1945

All along the American home front during World War II, the federal government, business, and labor experimented with political, economic, and social arrangements intended to orient a revitalized industrial capitalism towards total war. Why did mobilization work so well? Why was the American war effort both decentralized and carefully calibrated by the state---which provided funds and guidance to the private contractors and free workforces that actually performed the work---especially when other belligerent states directly manufactured war materiel and when American political economy before the war was characterized by a shift of power from moribund private enterprise to an increasingly activist government? What was the nature of the relationship between the state and its contractors? How did mobilization affect prevailing characteristics of American political economy, society, and culture?;This dissertation addresses these questions by examining wartime shipbuilding, an industrial sector that contributed enormously to Allied victory. Focused on the U.S. Maritime Commission (USMC) and San Francisco Bay shipyards run by the Kaiser and Bechtel construction firms, this study shows how administrative, technical, and social innovations allowed merchant shipbuilders to produce ships at a breathtaking pace. The USMC's decision to devolve production authority to inspectors and managers, for instance, freed shipyards to adapt to local conditions. By replacing riveting with welding, Bechtel and Kaiser could build ships with thousands of new but skilled and committed workers who eagerly embraced work-improvement campaigns, output races, and other activities which linked industrial labor to sports and combat.;The interplay of these factors accounts for Kaiser and Bechtel's ability to outperform other shipbuilders and industries like aircraft manufacturing. This, in turn, focuses attention on the considerable power of the American state to foster industrial development in alliance with contractors like Kaiser and Bechtel, even outside the classic military-industrial sectors. Merchant shipbuilding thus demonstrates that contrary to prevailing conceptions of ubiquitous conflict (or at best uneasy coexistence) between the American state and private enterprise, U.S. industrial history is better typified as having been shaped by longstanding, deeply rooted, and vital forms of collaboration between the state and private enterprise.