Christmas Present

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The U.S. Army handed civilians a welcome Christmas present last week. Under the needling of the Senate's Mead Committee, the Army declared $400,000,000 of its stocks surplus goods, promised that they would be made available for sale immediately.

Many of the items were of little civilian use: scabbards and bayonets, helmets, etc. But many of them were just what many a businessman wanted: 11,937 trucks, 2,000,000 Army blankets, 500,000 yards of lining for clothes, 3,632 tractors, millions of feet of iron pipe (which builders have been clamoring for), 82,000 flashlights and mountains of shirts, socks, etc.

Getting the Army to let go was only half the problem. The other half was selling the goods. To date, surplus-property agencies have been so snail-slow that they have fallen far behind even the tortoise-slow Army. Out of the $10.9 billion in property which has been declared surplus, only a small $962,000,000 has been sold (for $500,000,000).

Last week, Surplus Property Administrator W. Stuart Symington told a Senate surplus property subcommittee one big reason why. All surplus selling, said he, should be centered in RFC, instead of being scattered among several federal agencies, and should be spurred by a "dramatic" selling campaign. But this, as Symington well knew, was only part of the trouble. What also had to be done was to light a fire under RFC, which has muddled along shortsightedly trying to get the last penny for every surplus article.

Many a businessman feels that surplus items should be sold at any price they will bring, thus get rid of them fast right now, when they can be easily absorbed.

Last week, the British Government gave RFC a lesson in how it should be done. In Manhattan's Gimbel Brothers, it exhibited a tiny motorcycle from British Army surpluses. By week's end, Gimbels had taken orders for 550 of them.