Even before the United States formally entered World War II, in December 1941, Americans had started to plan for the postwar era. Some business leaders, along with a few academics and government officials, took a special interest in plans for postwar domestic and international economic policies. These “business planners,” as the title of Charlie Whitham's book calls them, did much of their work under the auspices of research-oriented nongovernmental organizations. Whitham's book offers a detailed account of three of these groups: the Committee for Economic Development (CED), the National Planning Association (NPA), and the Twentieth Century Fund (TCF). In a compelling chronological narrative, Whitham describes the formation of these organizations, their wartime planning work, and their interactions and rivalries. Over the course of World War II, Whitham argues, the more “liberal” (i.e., progressive) business planners at the TCF and the NPA became less influential, in comparison to their counterparts at the more moderate CED. Thus, the book tells a story of “the rise of corporate moderates to post-war dominance,” which had important effects on mid-twentieth-century U.S. economic policies (p. x).

This book is based on thorough, new research. It draws upon the unpublished archival records of all three organizations, along with dozens of their pamphlets and periodicals. This material allows Whitham to provide the reader with a wealth of information about the groups and their publications, which are described in detail, in dense paragraphs.

The book's main argument, about the rising influence of “corporate moderates” during the 1940s, seems at first glance to be not very original. Indeed, parts of Whitham's story merely confirm and extend the one related several decades ago by Robert M. Collins, in The Business Response to Keynes, 1929–1964 (1981). The two books offer complementary accounts of the success of the CED in promoting a moderate version of what Collins and others have called “commercial Keynesianism.” Whereas Collins contrasted the CED with two business groups that were larger and more conservative (the Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers), Whitham describes the relationships between the CED and two small but dynamic organizations to its political left, the TCF and the NPA. The history of those groups, Whitham argues, allows us to understand that the CED was part of a wider, politically heterogeneous planning community. Nevertheless, Whitham echoes Collins's argument that it was the business moderates who had emerged by 1945 as the most influential shapers of postwar economic policies.

The most original aspect of Whitham's account, which should inspire more work on the subject, is its attention to the international economy. The final two chapters of the book provide a valuable discussion of the planners' success in shaping international trade policy, the Bretton Woods system, and the Marshall Plan. These subjects were of considerable concern to American business leaders and their research organizations. Here, Whitham shows, the planning groups helped to create a broad consensus, among business leaders and in Washington, in favor of a more internationalist approach to trade policy and global affairs.

While the book's narrow focus on three organizations allows Whitham to provide thorough discussions of the groups and their members, it also makes it difficult for the author to make convincing arguments about the influence of corporate liberals and moderates. Whitham claims that more conservative groups and government agencies did very little planning for the postwar era, but the book's research methodology does not allow for an authoritative statement about this question, one way or the other. (Just because conservatives sought to avoid a planned economy did not necessarily mean they did not plan, in their own way, for a more favorable postwar economic regime.) The book certainly does describe, at length, the content of many pamphlets issued by the NPA, the TCF, and the CED. In the end, however, it remains difficult for the reader to understand how exactly the three groups may have affected specific domestic economic policies. Part of the problem here is that the planners themselves were often vague. But the book's focus on the three groups and their output, often without substantial discussion of wider contexts, also makes it hard for Whitham to assess their influence over the actions of Congress and executive agencies.

This is a substantial work of original scholarship, which should be consulted by students of mid-twentieth-century U.S. history with a special interest in economic policy and the activities of business leaders in the policymaking arena. Future work on the NPA, the TCF, and the CED should be informed by Whitham's book. So too should new studies of the ways in which Americans, during and immediately after World War II, debated how their powerful nation should seek to reform the international economy.