Price Police

Price Boss Henderson marshaled his forces for the first enforcement attack on price ceilings. In several cities, squads of OPAgents made the rounds of retail stores, looking for posted ceiling prices. They found very few. But there was no crackdown. The agents were just dropping in to explain the complex law.

Faced with the most challenging Government job, except for the fighting itself, OPA had laid down one clear directive : it wants no aid from spying shoppers. It will welcome complaints, but for the present, at least, there should be neither a Government nor a civilian Gestapo. Canada has miraculously managed to police its stores by volunteer groups of women, each noting down prices and violations in "Queen Elizabeth books." But the U.S. will try another tack. In Chicago, OPAdministrator Michael Mulcahy hastily discouraged women who offered to snoop.

As long as most civilian goods remain available, the OPA plan may work. There are, as yet, no reports of black markets, except in tires, and these might disappear if there is national gas rationing. There is chiseling on gasoline on the East Coast right now: in many places it is easy to get a full tank any time. But what will happen by autumn, when more goods are rationed, when many disappear entirely?

Army Needed. By then Policeman Henderson will need a super-colossal army of price police. Originally estimated at 90,000, a number high enough to frighten all retailers, its size has already been cut by the Budget Bureau to 60,000. Of this, said OPA, only about 15,000 will be price cops, the rest clerks. This will set only one price cop to watch every 1,500 stores. Last week it seemed that Congress might whittle the force some more. Congressmen were angry and disappointed because Leon Henderson had failed to "consult" them on appointments. Regional and State administrators turned out to be strangely nonpolitical, in many cases not even good New Deal Democrats. There was one notable exception: in Kentucky, after a stubborn fight with non-politics-minded OPA, the job went to WPAdministrator George H. Goodman, whose WPA campaigned mightily for Senator Alben Barkley in 1938.

Congress, still trying to blame Leon Henderson for the X-card fiasco, got set to punish him for all the sour mail citizens have sent to Congress. Its method: cut his appropriation, possibly from $161 millions to $100 millions. Then Leon Henderson would have to ask for volunteer snoopers.

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