President Franklin D. Roosevelt created the War Manpower Commission (WMC) on April 18, 1942, about four months after Pearl Harbor and the American entry into World War II. With the National War Labor Board and the War Production Board, the WMC was charged with facilitating full production by the nation’s war industries. More specifically, the WMC was to ensure there were enough workers for war and essential civilian industries in the war mobilization effort.
President Roosevelt’s decision that the United States would provide military forces in both the World War II European theater and the World War II Pacific theater while also serving as the “arsenal of democracy” for the Grand Alliance that fought the Axis created a manpower dilemma. In early 1942, planners estimated that defeating the Axis powers might require a combined military and civilian workforce of up to 60 million people, or about 45 percent of the U. S. population. Balancing military and production requirements would be difficult if the military grew larger than 8.2 million, some military planners said. Yet by 1945, approximately 16 million men had joined the military, and in 1942 millions of men began reporting for military duty, sometimes leaving key industries and also agriculture facing shortages of workers.
The massive mobilization of the labor force was hardly flawless. Throughout the war, a number of problems highlighted the difficulty of coordination in an increasingly complex and interdependent modern society. Agencies with overlapping mandates often refused to cooperate or to coordinate their efforts. Many of these problems fell at the feet of Roosevelt, who demonstrated an unwillingness to delegate broad authority to any single agency to manage the mobilization effort. Ultimately, however, the nation’s military and production needs were met.
FDR named former Indiana governor Paul V. McNutt to head the WMC and direct manpower policy. McNutt soon tried to consolidate the functions of about 20 agencies responsible for different aspects of the manpower effort. The president, however, did not place Selective Service, which administered the military draft, under the WMC until McNutt complained in December 1942. The WMC faced similar problems with other agencies and departments. In January 1943 it lost control over the agricultural labor supply to the Labor Department. The Civil Service Commission began recruiting workers independently to fill the expanding wartime bureaucracy. As the war continued, the WMC also lost authority over railroad workers and merchant marine sailors.
Putting Selective Service under the WMC did not alleviate McNutt’s problems. Throughout the war, the military attempted to keep the WMC and other civilian-run agencies from dictating either manpower or procurement policies. Although the Selective Service System technically reported to the WMC, the War Department continued to treat the agency as its own and expected it to represent military interests. The Selective Service System, and its director, General Lewis B. Hershey, responded and fought to ensure that the military always received the number and quality of men it asked for, sometimes over WMC objections. In late 1943, Congress, overruling FDR, made the Selective Service System an independent agency free of WMC control. Congress effectively had prevented the president from integrating the draft into the overall manpower program.
The primary means the WMC used to manage industrial manpower became the draft deferment, which excused from military service certain groups of civilian workers, including farmers, deemed essential to the war effort. In all, some 5 million such deferments were granted. But factories often competed for skilled workers, which led to high turnover and production inefficiencies. Compounding the situation was the government’s refusal to outlaw strikes and its rejection of national service and “work or fight” programs that would have allowed it to draft workers for jobs in industry or agriculture.
In May 1943, Roosevelt decided he needed a more powerful agency to better allocate resources, coordinate the mobilization effort, and ameliorate the political bickering among the agencies. He created the Oeeice of War Mobilization, (OWM), which toward the end of the war became the Oeeice oe War Mobilization and Reconversion (OWMR). The president named James F. Byrnes, a former Supreme Court justice and U. S. senator from South Carolina, as the new agency’s director.
Although subordinate to the OWM and then the OWMR, the WMC operated with little interference from Byrnes, whose philosophy was that the OWM must not administer anything or interfere with the normal operations of existing agencies. For the remainder of the war, the WMC recruited and trained labor for the war effort, analyzed manpower utilization practices to increase labor efficiency, and issued lists of deferrable and nondeferrable jobs that were sometimes not followed by local draft boards. The WMC was dissolved on September 19, 1945, after Japan’s formal surrender earlier in the month. McNutt soon was named high commissioner for the Philippines.
Further reading: George Q. Flynn, The Mess in Washington: Man-power Mobilization in World War II (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979); Herman M. Somers, Presidential Agency: The Office of War Mobilization and Reconversion (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1950).
—Edwin D. Miller
World History
