U.S. At War: Trouble Ahead

• Share

Over Washington, gloomy under late winter skies, spread the deeper, greyer, more paralyzing gloom made by men. Grumpily, unhappily, but perforce, men faced the fact that the Administration's war agencies are still full of sand and emery dust, their borrowed time is fast running out, ahead lies another screaming crisis when all the wheels will grind to a stop and only a major repair job can get them started again.

The War Production Board, product of half a dozen earlier crises, went through another upheaval last week. Its Boss Donald Nelson, torn between his natural urge to compromise and his belated resolution to "get tough," had reorganized WPB again—and left it teetering on a higher precipice than ever before. No plain citizen could hope now to follow the tortured quarreling inside WPB; even Elder Statesman Bernard M. Baruch, out of his experience as World War I's one-man production board, could only shake his old grey head and gloom: "Tinkering, tinkering, always tinkering. Patching. They have no overall plan. . . ."

Czars were now a dime a dozen: the U.S. had Economic Czar James F. Byrnes, Production Czar Donald Nelson, Manpower Czar Paul McNutt, Food Czar Claude Wickard, Rubber Czar William Jeffers. But they were more like Grand Dukes than Czars: under their high-sounding titles, divided authority and lack of direction left them still snarled in invisible red tape.

Rubber Czar Jeffers, trying to do his job, had got all fouled up with the Army & Navy. Economic Czar Byrnes had stepped in to cut away the tangle—but no one was sure last week who would enforce the compromise he had laid down. Manpower Czar McNutt began stretching his muscles with a new work-or-fight order—and Congress promptly raised a howl. Czar Wickard was apparently frozen with fright at the horrible food prospects ahead.

After last summer's wasting days of turmoil, Franklin Roosevelt had stepped in with some spectacular reorganizations—appointment of Byrnes and Jeffers, of McNutt and Wickard, a shakeup of WPB. Now, even inside the Administration, observers agreed that this, too, had been a stopgap. The sound effects had been terrific, the visual impression of Olympian lightnings spectacular—but nothing had really been changed. The era of good cheer had run its course; some nasty trouble brewed. The only consolation for plain citizens was that, despite the procrastination and the palace revolutions, the Army somehow grew and the munitions somehow got made. The U.S. was strong enough to survive even another vast, absolutely final reorganization.