Last fall—before Covid-19 even had a name—I read historian Maury Klein's 900-page masterpiece A Call to Arms.
Little did I know I was reading the playbook Trump ought to have.
December 7, 1941, hurtled America into war with the Axis.
FDR—a leader who listened—saw in 1939 that to win, the US would have to "bury the Axis in weapons."
(On December 7, the US ranked 28th in the world in the size of its military, which relied on obsolete equipment, weapons and ammunition left from previous conflicts.)
To bury the Axis, FDR undertook what Klein calls "the greatest industrial expansion in modern history.”
But mass mobilization wasn't easy. Union leaders, bureaucrats and businessmen—especially businessmen—pushed back, as did many citizens.
FDR simply pushed harder.
He guaranteed wary businessmen not only that the government would buy every item manufactured no matter the length of the war, but would assume all the costs of converting the factories back to peacetime production for 10 years thereafter.
The president also enlisted hundreds of "czars" to ride herd on every conceivable raw material, process and product—czars who were experts, not toadies, daughters and sons-in-law.
Within only months, FDR built America's colossal "arsenal of democracy," using brains and brawn—not blustery bullshit.
And America rapidly buried the Axis.
