In Post-War Business Planners in the United States, 1939–48, Charlie Whitham argues that the organized business community played an important role in bringing about the transition from the central planning of the New Deal to the indirect Keynesian demand management of post-WWII America. This is by no means a new argument, and Whitham even acknowledges that his presentation of one particular business group, the Committee for Economic Development (CED), as encapsulating the triumph of this moderate ideology “does not fundamentally challenge these well-established interpretations” (p. 9). Nevertheless, Whitham’s book offers a novel perspective on the CED’s rise by positioning it not as the most liberal of the major business groups, as previous historians have done, but as the voice of moderation among progressive business groups supportive of government planning. Through detailed research in the archival records of two important yet previously understudied groups, the National Planning Association (NPA) and the Twentieth Century Fund (TCF), Whitham presents a new perspective on the rise of the CED and its moderate consensus in both domestic and international economic policymaking.

Whitham focuses his investigation on these three organizations, the titular “post-war business planners,” which he defines as business-led organizations concerned with the role of the federal government in the economy following WWII. With the White House preoccupied with the immediate concerns of the preparedness and, subsequently, the wartime economies, these private groups took the initiative in setting out a vision for the postwar period. The NPA and TCF, having already supported federal economic intervention during the Great Depression, embraced the likelihood that the wartime command economy made the return to a free-market economy highly unlikely. As these liberal views grew popular, a concerned Commerce Department encouraged its Business Advisory Committee to assemble a rival planning group that would defend the role of private enterprise. The resulting CED ultimately hashed out a consensus in which employment would remain private but enjoy the support of federal budget policies and the gradual elimination of wartime controls. The emergence of a conservative political climate over the span of the war weakened the appeal of the TCF and NPA and forced the elimination of their primary ally in the federal government, the Natural Resources Planning Board, but the CED continued to grow in stature as it provided a more politically palatable set of policy recommendations for postwar America.

Whitham’s most original argument demonstrates how the CED rose to prominence in Washington through its studies of the international economy, a facet of that organization’s research previously neglected by historians. When the financial community opposed the Bretton Woods Agreement, the White House approached the CED as a “new and fittingly ‘neutral’ group of businessmen” that could broker a compromise (p. 138). Although Whitham provides few details of the CED’s specific recommendations, he suggests that they proved extremely influential in winning support for Bretton Woods on Capitol Hill. The NPA had meanwhile issued an “unqualified endorsement of the government’s position on Bretton Woods,” but the White House avoided soliciting that group’s support out of concerns that its overt liberal background would prove a liability given the conservative political climate (p. 145). Likewise, though the NPA would later prove an early advocate of aid to postwar Europe and “held near-identical views [on the Marshall Plan] with that of the CED,” it was the latter group and its executive membership whom the government solicited to plan its foreign-aid strategy and to fill the top positions on the Economic Cooperation Administration (p. 180).

In contrast to Whitham’s documentation of the CED’s ascendancy in international affairs, the extent of the influence of its moderate consensus over domestic affairs is less clear. Whitham focuses largely on macroeconomic domestic policies, most importantly the growing consensus of the post-war business planners around Keynesian demand management that supported the Employment Act of 1946. Yet the list of publications by the CED, TCF, and NPA contained in Appendix 2 demonstrates that they also spent much time and energy deliberating policies on labor, agriculture, and other individual sectors. Whitham’s limited discussion of how the business planners understood such sector-specific concerns and how much political influence they held over these hot-button issues makes it difficult to ascertain whether their moderate convergence extended to these fields as well. According to the pie charts in Appendix 1, labor and agriculture comprised more than one-quarter of the membership of the NPA but only held token representation at the CED over the span of this decade. This contrast suggests that, on at least some issues, the CED may have held less in common with the other liberal planners than it did with its conservative business brethren. Whitham excludes such business groups as the National Association of Manufacturers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce from his investigation of post-war business planners on the grounds that they did not accept any role of the state in postwar political economy. Nevertheless, as Whitham himself acknowledges when discussing the Employment Act, these groups did play an active political role in America’s transition back to a peacetime economy, the same development that had motivated Whitham’s business planners even before 1941.

Overall, Whitham has provided a new perspective on the American retreat from planning over the late 1930s and 1940s. Although the rise of the CED is well-known, historians of the twentieth-century American economy will still find much to be appreciated in Whitham’s original analysis of the TCF and NPA and his demonstration of the CED’s importance to the construction of the postwar international economic order.