What did the war mean in terms of two things: first, big government, and then big business?
WILLIAM O’NEILL: The effect of the war on the federal government is an interesting topic, because it might go contrary to what you would suppose. There had been a significant extension of government activities during the 1930s. Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal created new agencies and there were more federal employees than before and the budget grew and the like. In fact, Roosevelt was actually a pretty conservative man. People who hated him. Right-wingers who hated him at the time always thought that was outrageous when somebody tried to say that, but he really was. He never liked to go further than he had to, to get a solution. And so what he did during the war, rather than expanding existing government agencies. Some had to be expanded; I mean, the War Department and the Navy Department had to get bigger. But to the degree possible, he met the special requirements of the war by creating temporary agencies, which were designed to go out of business at the end of the war and did. So the
