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April 16, 2006 Mark Wilson (University of North Carolina at Charlotte) The Making of a Liberal War Machine: During the Second World War, when Americans participated in a mobilization of unprecedented magnitude, they accommodated themselves to new levels of military authority and military-industrial cooperation. This process was not simply an automatic consequence of war, but required the construction of new definitions of legitimacy in the American political economy. This paper re-examines the work of the Truman Committee, the U.S. Senate body that became the most important legislative overseer of the industrial mobilization for World War II. As one of the most powerful contributors to wartime public discussions of the military economy, the Truman Committee not only served as a critic and watchdog, but also offered a new vision of how the military-industrial leviathan might be reconciled with a liberal political order. Mark R. Wilson is Assistant Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He is the author of The Business of Civil War: Military Mobilization and the State, 1861-1865 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006). He is currently at work on the history of U.S. military-industrial relations between 1918 and 1945. He received his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in 2002. In 2004-2005, he was a Post-Doctoral Fellow in National Security at the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies, Harvard University. |