Mark R. Wilson's Destructive Creation examines the nature of wartime mobilization in the United States and the creation of the destructive “arsenal of democracy” that ultimately won the war. Wilson argues that previous works on the subject emphasize the role of private business leaders, such as Henry Kaiser, who are seen as either generous patriots or greedy wartime profiteers. In contrast, Wilson aims to tell the story of how the public sector – notably the numerous wartime agencies involved in mobilization – played a significant role in the mobilization process. Through an emphasis on public investment, central management, and governmental regulation, Wilson tells the detailed story of the development of the wartime state and strongly emphasizes the role of government. As Wilson argues, “successful conversion of the US economy into an agent of ‘destructive creation’ owed as much to socialism as it did to capitalism” (4). At the same time as mobilization needed private industry and allowed that industry to profit, it also saw a greatly expanded role for the state.

Despite Wilson's emphasis on the role of the public sector, a significant thread running throughout the book is how business leaders resisted the enlarged wartime government role. Indeed, the book begins with the Great War and the 1920s and 1930s, looking at how business leaders remembered that war for its perceived overregulation of business. The New Deal programmes of the 1930s only added to their sense that business was overregulated, and there was concern among some businessmen that another war would bring yet more state regulation. As chapter 2 reveals, the eve of war saw the development of a state–private partnership that was multifaceted and complex, but highly successful.

Chapter 3 is arguably the heart of the book's argument, as it examines the efforts of wartime businessmen to shape the story of mobilization in a way that emphasized the success of the free-enterprise system and private manufacturing above the planned systems of not only the Axis powers but also New Deal America. The business community's narrative of its wartime production miracle told a story of heroic corporations and businessmen, while labour and government were nowhere to be found. The success of this particular narrative was deemed to be essential by business leaders in order to secure the future of a free-enterprise system after the war, and certainly one more free than in the New Deal years of the 1930s.

The book moves on to provide a detailed assessment of the government's exacting production demands and its regulation of prices and profits. The uneven nature of the former and the perception among businessmen that the latter were excessive helped to reinforce the business community's view that the government was a less-than-ideal customer and that less governmental interference in business was the ideal, despite the incentives and guarantees that came with the cost-plus-fixed-fee wartime procurement system. This argument is particularly important as, while historians have previously argued that the war saw excessive profiteering, Wilson makes it clear that manufacturers at the time clearly did not believe that this was the case.

The business community's perception of excessive governmental power was only reinforced by frequent government seizures of industry during the war. While previous historical accounts have focussed largely on the way that strikes affected the rights of workers, the emphasis here is on how businesses such Montgomery Ward were seized for failing to go along with the demands of the National War Labor Board. The book concludes with a chapter on the reconversion process at war's end, which led to a more limited peacetime role for government, an increasingly privatized defence industry, and the origins of what President Eisenhower later called the military–industrial complex.

In attempting to underline the originality of the book's thesis, Wilson arguably overstates the extent to which previous historians have ignored the public–private partnership that led to successful wartime mobilization, and also how dominant the conservative narrative about mobilization has been. While historians may have painted a mixed picture, there is no question that the government's role in the wartime mobilization process has been addressed. Nevertheless, the story of the government's role has never been told so forcefully or in so much rich detail, and the material on the business community's reaction to wartime mobilization is a revelation. The book is a valuable addition to the growing literature on America's wartime mobilization.