In 1939, after leaving the "New York Post", Stone worked for "The Nation", first as associate editor and then as its Washington, D.C., editor. Two years later, in the book "Business as Usual: The First Year of Defense" (1941), Stone reported the inefficient planning and execution, and the business-as-usual attitude, of the industrial and business monopolies — and its toleration by the U.S. military — that resulted in the tardy production of matériel for the Arsenal of Democracy with which President F. D. Roosevelt said the U.S. would help Europeans and Asians combat the totalitarianism of Nazi Germany, fascist Italy and Imperial Japan, in the Second World War (1939–45).