Heroes in an emergency, U.S. automobile leaders gained the wealth and credibility lost in the Depression, and the forerunner of the military-industrial complex was born. In what historian John Morton Blume called “the hardening pattern of bigness,” government grew bigger and bigger businesses got the bucks. Among them the biggest of all was the automobile industry. Washington handed out two-thirds of its $175 billion in contracts to the nation’s top 100 corporations, 8 percent to General Motors alone.
