Freedom's Forge Quotes

“The priceless copy of Magna Carta on display in the British pavilion was supposed to go home when the fair closed on October 1. After high-level discussion, however, officials thought it would be safer to let it stay in the United States.*”
― Arthur Herman, Freedom's Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II

“This country seems able to do more by accident than any other country can do on purpose.—Employee at Bechtel-McCone B-29 modification plant, Birmingham, Alabama, 1943”
― Arthur Herman, Freedom's Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II

“American technology was now driving military strategy, rather than the other way around.”
― Arthur Herman, Freedom's Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II

“Bill Knudsen summed up simply and succinctly. “Progress is only made when fear is overcome by curiosity,” he said. “If you are curious enough, you will not have any fear.”
― Arthur Herman, Freedom's Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II

“I learned when you shout at someone,” he once said, “you make him afraid. And when he’s afraid, he won’t tell you his troubles”—or tell a manager the truth about what on the assembly line wasn’t working, or what had gone wrong. An”
― Arthur Herman, Freedom's Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II

“In 1938 alone, their orders would total some $350 million—with $84 million in aircraft engines.2 It was five times what the Army Air Corps was ordering. Britain’s war, and France’s, resurrected America’s aviation industry from the dead. One of the very first orders came in the spring of 1938, when a British team from the RAF flew out to Burbank, California, to tour the factory of Lockheed Aviation, now merged with the struggling Vega company. The British saw nothing they liked, and declared they would move on. The president of Lockheed-Vega, Robert Gross, was desperate. “Give me forty-eight”
― Arthur Herman, Freedom's Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II

“This country seems to be able to do more by accident than any other country can do on purpose.”
― Arthur Herman, Freedom's Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II

“Stock prices surged, and by 1947 shares had gained value by 92 percent. As one economist has put it, “As the war ended, real prosperity returned almost overnight.”
― Arthur Herman, Freedom's Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II

“Total economic production in the United States had doubled;* wages rose by 70 percent.”
― Arthur Herman, Freedom's Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II

“This posed a dilemma, which Bill Knudsen summed up simply and succinctly. “Progress is only made when fear is overcome by curiosity,” he said.”
― Arthur Herman, Freedom's Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II

“ornery enough that they will not stay where the rule was laid down. In that I believe you will find the greatest hope for America’s future. —William S. Knudsen”
― Arthur Herman, Freedom's Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II

“armed forces. Compared to the Soviet Union or Great Britain, more women remained at home rather than going to work—more than 60 percent. And the United States converted the least of all its economic output to the war effort, just over 47 percent in 1944 compared to almost 60 percent for Britain and more for Germany and the Soviet Union, only to outproduce everyone else put together, including Japan.5”
― Arthur Herman, Freedom's Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II

“When Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill first met at Tehran in 1943, and Stalin raised his glass in a toast “to American production, without which this war would have been lost,” it was a stunning tribute from the leader of world Communism to the forces of American capitalism.”
― Arthur Herman, Freedom's Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II

“If business profits rose during the war, labor’s wages rose much more—an average of 70 percent.”
― Arthur Herman, Freedom's Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II

“Before 1942 was out, the United States was producing more war materiel than all three Axis powers—Germany, Italy, and Japan—combined.”
― Arthur Herman, Freedom's Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II

“But months, and not a few lives, were lost because the Army insisted on pushing ahead on its own design without once asking if the professional experts might do it better. It would take some time before American companies learned to challenge the War Department on how to design and build the weapons it wanted”
― Arthur Herman, Freedom's Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II

“Churchill half expected to see German paratroopers landing on the outskirts of London. On July 12 there was a serious discussion in the War Cabinet about whether the government should encourage the populace to attack German invaders with scythes and stones.”
― Arthur Herman, Freedom's Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II

“From the fourth-biggest military force in the world in 1918, the United States Army shrank to number eighteen, just ahead of tiny Holland.”
― Arthur Herman, Freedom's Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II

“American workers in war-related industries in 1942–43 died or were injured in numbers twenty times greater than the American servicemen killed or wounded during those same years.”
― Arthur Herman, Freedom's Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II

“His heart is so filled with the love of the machine that it has somewhat crowded out his love of the men who must run it.”
― Arthur Herman, Freedom's Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II