Exit Smiling

At Baltimore's Pennsylvania Station one evening last week, Price Boss Leon Henderson stepped into the arms of a welcoming committee from Local Ration Board 234.3, all set to rib him, themselves and their mutual works at a "Smileage Rationing" party.

First stop was Radio Station WCAO, for a broadcast with his hosts. A woman member asked point-blank about rumors that he was going to resign. Leon Henderson grinned. "Well, that's the way things go," he said. In walked a newsman, with word that the resignation had just been announced in Washington. "There you have it," said Henderson, grinning again.

Somebody asked him why. Using the same euphemisms as his letter of resignation to Franklin Roosevelt, the Price Boss mentioned his lame back, his "rather bad impairment of eyesight." He pointed to a sign which cried TURN OUT LIGHT! in letters nearly two inches high. "Why, I can't read that at all," he said.

The broadcast went on; so did the party. Members had planned to make Rationer Henderson ride a streetcar to the party, stand waiting at two transfer points; they no longer had the heart and called a taxi instead. To most of Local Board 234.3 their skits now sounded a little flat. But if the ex-Price Boss was not having a fine time he never once let on.

Good Works & Bad. Thus Leon Henderson, watchdog of the nation's prices, big bad wolf to Congress and bull in a china shop to all & sundry, dropped out of one of the biggest of all wartime offices. For all his polite interchange of letters with his President, Henderson did not fall. He was pushed: by the farm bloc, by Midwestern Congressmen who loathe gasoline rationing, by Democrats who thought that his restrictions had been the biggest factor in November's election returns. And perhaps the Administration felt it was time to sacrifice him when a new blunder over gas rationing almost left the East gasless.

Henderson had made many mistakes. He had tried to do two jobs, price control and rationing, with one brain. In rationing, he had insisted on working out his own system instead of taking the easy way out by working through industry committees, which probably would have been more efficient. He had picked some lemons on his staff: some of the forms they dreamed up were nearly as complicated as critics made out. And, though any price and rationing boss must frequently swat the public and politicians, no public official should seem to enjoy it so much.

But Henderson, a practical economist who would rather be right than popular, had left many a good work behind him. He had calculated nearly to the hour when the U.S. war effort would run into steel and transportation shortages, had done his best to make skeptics see the handwriting on the wall. He had mapped U.S. strategy against inflation, had created the job of Price Boss, had helped get the price laws through Congress. And despite all the mistakes, all the red tape and all the difficulties, he had by & large kept prices down.

At a press conference last fortnight Henderson once again cited the figures he takes such pride in: they showed that the basic price level has risen only two points since he got his price-control act last January. Said Leon Henderson: "I'd rather be remembered for that than for the people who love me."

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