Business: Boom, Shortages, Taxes, War

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Conversion? But as Detroit typified U.S. industry's triumph, so it typified its problems and shortcomings in converting to Total War. For throughout 1941, Detroit's main business was still passenger cars. Of these it made and sold 3,750,000, more than in any year except 1937.

The first man to propose publicly that this emphasis be reversed was not a businessman, but a labor leader. Walter Reuther, youthful vice president of U.A.W., is the kind of labor leader Westbrook Pegler has yet to dope out. He was seriously concerned about two things: 1) Hitler, 2) the fact than when the U.S. ran short of materials, it would cost his autoworkers jobs. As early as December 1940 he proposed to beat Hitler and secure the jobs by converting auto plants to the mass production of planes.

The Reuther plan was replete with technical impossibilities, which OPM was quick to point out. It also contained a practical idea—the idea of conversion—about which OPM did nothing. Wrote Walter Lippmann eleven months later: "That piece of Philistinism cost us not merely an unconscionable delay in using the resources of the motor industry but it cost us the enthusiastic participation of labor in national defense."

Six days after Pearl Harbor, Reuther was back on the radio, with a new version of his plan. He bluntly aired his fight with Knudsen, who had given him the brush-off by claiming that he had no authority to take him through an auto plant to count the convertible machines. His new proposal was that when G.M., Ford and Chrysler got big orders for identical 30-ton tanks, the three should pool their facilities and subcontract to each other. This is a method of simplifying production which many industries (under the name of the Lyttleton plan) have been forced to in Britain. But the year closed before anyone knew whether Pearl Harbor was the U.S.'s Dunkirk or not.

A few businessmen grasped the dimensions of total war sooner than most labor leaders in 1941. But the quickest to do so were not business' social servants, the $1-a-year ambassadors to the New Deal. They were the Old Guard, whose hatred of Roosevelt kept them out of Washington altogether.

The Lone Wolf. The first to mobilize was Tom Girdler. His career of devil-may-care unpopularity had come to a climax in a 1940 Roosevelt campaign speech, when the President used his name as a synonym for enemy-of-the-people. Shortly thereafter Girdler put out feelers to Washington and decided to quit fighting C.I.O. That was now kid stuff; the big leaguers were fighting Hitler.