1943 Franklin D. Roosevelt - War Production Board

In 1942, Franklin D. Roosevelt established the War Production Board (WPB) via Executive Order.  The purpose of the board was to regulate and allocate materials and fuel during World War II.  For example, the board encouraged people to save their bacon fat and other waste fats to make explosives.  They were encouraged to bring their waste fats to Official Fat Collecting Stations.  But the WPB also assumed the responsibility of supervising the production of $183 billion worth of weapons and supplies or about 40% of the total world output of munitions.   One-half of the output was warplanes and warships.   In his 1943 address to congress to share the war production successes of America.  Roosevelt stated,  "I think the arsenal of democracy is making good.".   He provided an impressive list of items that were produced.

• 48,000 planes more than all of Germany, Italy and Japan put together
• 56,000 combat vehicles
• 670,000 machine guns
• 21,000 anti-tank guns
• 10.25 billion rounds of small-arms ammunition
• 181 million rounds of artillery ammunition

Of course, things did not always go as planned.   There were embarrassing shortages at home, notably rubber and petroleum.  Other coordination efforts failed hampering the production of weapons of war and Roosevelt's men running the War Production  Board were clashing over war-production controls. Roosevelt's political enemies and the pundits of the day found this as an opportunity to attack the the president and the War Production Board, calling it a 'madhouse'.  Roosevelt, with a little tongue-in-cheek, accepted the criticism.

"It is often amusing, and it is sometimes politically profitable, to picture the City of Washington as a madhouse, with the Congress and the Administration disrupted with confusion and indecision and general incompetence.

However—what matters most in war is results. And the one pertinent fact is that after only a few years of preparation and only one year of warfare, we are able to engage, spiritually as well as physically, in the total waging of a total war.

Washington may be a madhouse- but only in the sense that it is the Capital City of a Nation which is fighting mad. And I think that Berlin and Rome and Tokyo, which had such contempt for the obsolete methods of democracy, would now gladly use all they could get of that same brand of madness."

http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=16386
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Production_Board
http://pubs.usgs.gov/book/2015/rabbitt-vol4/pdf/vol4_chapter3.pdf
http://waste360.com/site-files/waste360.com/files/gallery_images/waste-fats.png?1413316026
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/03/US-WarProductionBoard-Seal.svg/2000px-US-WarProductionBoard-Seal.svg.png
http://histclo.com/imagef/date/2012/09/p40-buf01s.jpg
http://assets.nydailynews.com/polopoly_fs/1.1076629!/img/httpImage/image.jpg_gen/derivatives/gallery_1200/franklin-delano-roosevelt.jpg

In 1942 Walt Disney made this short film for the U.S. War Production Board

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ic5XjnG3foY