The Miserable Truth

The miserable truth was coming out. U.S. production of war materials was still nowhere near enough.

Everybody blamed somebody else. Assistant Attorney General Thurman Arnold blamed "monopoly." The pinko Nation and New Republic blamed capitalism in general. Columnist Westbrook Pegler blamed C.I.O. strikes, A.F. of L. racketeering. Columnist Walter Lippmann put the finger on U.S. industry, for its "disgraceful" commercial boom, chewing up vast quantities of precious strategic metals and rubber. Anti-New Dealers blamed New Dealers, and vice versa. Congressmen blamed the OPM, and vice versa. Little businessmen blamed the Army & Navy.

U.S. citizens--thinking of Marines on Wake Island fighting off the Japs with only four planes, of their soldiers in the Philippines defending bridges with rifles and hand grenades against machine guns--cried a pox on Thurman Arnold et al., a pox on blame-laying, a pox on alibis and confusion and red tape. Bottleneck had be come the most hated word in the language, "too little & too late" a phrase too deep for tears.

The Men Who. What the U.S. wanted was for the President to appoint one man to head the defense organization--and to be given power to hire & fire, to make and enforce decisions. Someone must make decisions--even wrong decisions. And no move had the President more consistently avoided than appointing such a head man.

Some of the defense chiefs the U.S. had come to respect. Respect had grown for Vice President Henry Wallace. He had no sparkle or drama in him, but he was steady, sure, solid, and growing all the time. Respect had grown for Price Boss Leon Henderson, "The Great Jawbone," who had shown himself the only man in the defense setup who was never afraid to stick out his neck; who fought always for production, and was a man without malice to ward industry, labor or his colleagues. And new men, better men, were streaming in, taking key jobs; the Army & Navy Munitions Board was now topped by a knowing civilian--Wall Street's Ferd Eberstadt (see p. 62).

Respect for many of the others had dimmed. The U.S. had hoped great things from Donald Nelson, executive director of SPAB, priorities director of OPM. But Nelson had pulled his punches, refused to fight his way to a showdown. He was shrewd and able; no top leader, but a good No. 2 man.

William S. Knudsen, the pink-cheeked, snow-haired Great Dane, was now generally regarded as unfit to be a policy maker, however able as an assembly-line troubleshooter. He had pigeonholed the Reuther plan a year ago (the program of C.I.O.'s bumptious, able Walter Reuther to convert automobile plants into defense industries), was now forced this week to bring it out again and fix it up to make it work. He was the father of the commercial boom, in the sense that he had opposed attempts to stop it.

Eleven months ago Jesse Jones was one of the apples of the U.S. eye. Last week he was a much criticized man in Washington. Of many criticisms, two instances: on Aug. 14, 1940, at a regular meeting of the first defense organization (the dead NDAC), two projects were agreed on as essential to the program then planned: 1) a $30,000,000 synthetic-rubber project, 2) large-scale stockpiling of 100-octane gasoline-without which warplanes are useless. Nine months later, on May 15, 1941, Jesse Jones unfroze just $5,000,000 in small contracts to major rubber companies, to produce a total of only 10,000 tons a year of synthetic rubber. The bottlenecking of 100-octane gas was. ended only a fortnight ago when Interior Secretary Harold Ickes finally got approval of a $150,000,000 expansion program for 100-octane gas facilities--after nearly 17 months of delay.

The men the President had brought to Washington--and the friends they brought with them--had a record of failure which was now summed up most frighteningly by the Tolan committee of the House of Representatives. Reported the committee: production to date, measured against the facilities available and the visible need for war goods, has been a failure. The two main reasons: 1) manufacturers have been reluctant to convert their production from civilian to military purposes; 2) the Federal defense agencies have not required such conversion.

The Thing Which. The President, like an expert and far from despairing Laocoon, writhing cheerfully in the crushing toils of Washington's red tape, announced that he had added to the X program--which had looked very big before Pearl Harbor--and to the Y program, drafted thereafter, the Z program. This Z, or War Program (not to be called the Victory Program) will absorb half the national income--half of $100,000,000,000 a year--by the middle of 1943.

To achieve this staggering rate of spending, the U.S. must also treble its pace within a few months. In December, $1,800,000,000 was spent on defense. By next June the nation must spend a billion dollars a week. To do that, the U.S. must really convert its peacetime plant to war uses. And in Washington last week, busy as a maddened bee, operated Britain's great production-needler, gnomish Lord Beaverbrook, who preached conversion day & night (see p. 10).

First act toward that conversion came from Leon Henderson. He stopped all production of civilian automobiles, as of Jan. 31. In order to win his point with SPAB, he agreed to let the industry assemble 204,000 cars in January (see p. 62).

The Facts Remaining. The President kept cheerful, and Jawbone Henderson smote mightily, but the Washington defense tangle remained essentially the same:

> After 20 months of defense effort, there is still no overall plan of industrial mobilization. And when the automobile men met with OPMites in Washington this week, to discuss full wartime conversion of the nation's No. i industry, they dis covered that no one knew how and to what they should convert their plants.

> Lack of coordination between Army ordnance and OPM, resulting from brass-hat inefficiency in the Army, and Director Knudsen 's unwillingness to regard OPM as anything but an advisory body.

> Overlapping : e.g., on SPAB, Knudsen is under Nelson, although Knudsen has a vote and Nelson has not; while in OPM Nelson is under Knudsen, although Nelson's priorities should rule Knudsen's production program.

> Red tape: best recent news in defense was the quick start on conversion into tank production by farm-equipment manufacturers. This was the result of a mistake: the OPM official in charge forgot to take his conversion program to Knudsen's production division and get it okayed; mistakenly took it direct to the industry, which began converting for tank production immediately.

> Divided authority: SPAB cannot let contracts--that is an Army & Navy function. SPAB cannot finance projects --that is a Jesse Jones monopoly. SPAB cannot enforce its Latin American rulings--such policies are set by the Board of Economic Warfare and interfered with by the State Department. SPAB cannot touch production--that belongs to Knudsen in OPM. SPAB cannot handle conversion--that is the function of Floyd Odium's subcontracting division, and Odium cannot do anything either, because the Army & Navy let all contracts. Yet SPAB is supposedly the top defense board.

To SPAB this week the President appointed Jesse Jones, momentarily baffling the great roster of Jones critics, and adding another job to Jesse's multitude.

Newspapers all over the U.S. predicted a shakeup. What they meant was that the U.S. demanded a shakeup.

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