National Affairs: A Creed for Enterprise

When Congress grudgingly extended the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act for another year (TIME, Aug. 3), it also set up a Commission on Foreign Economic Policy to report next year on how much protection and how much free trading the U.S. ought to indulge in. Last week, mindful that the commission's recommendations could shape U.S. and world trading poli cies for years to come, President Eisen hower appointed a highly qualified man for the job of chairman. The choice: Clarence B. Randall, 62, chairman of the board of Chicago's Inland Steel Co.

Steelman Randall is a successful businessman with an appetite for public service. In 1951 he wrote a thoughtful and plain-spoken book, A Creed for Free Enterprise, which has become a staple of the U.S. businessman's library. In it, he de fended the philosophy as well as the operating efficiency of U.S. capitalism. But he also lamented that most businessmen are so preoccupied with production schedules that they leave the intellectual market to their collectivist enemies. Said Randall: "With brick and mortar and stainless steel we are the greatest builders the world has ever seen, but our daring and confidence seem to leave us when we walk out of the plant into the realm of ideas."

Spokesman for Industry. Randall's ideas conform to no trite pattern. After service in World War I (he was a staff officer in Harry Truman's division), he abandoned a legal career for Inland Steel, and in 24 years worked his way to the top. In Chicago and beyond, he pulled more than his weight in serving on charity drives, civic bodies and educational boards (he is now an overseer of Harvard University). In 1938, he delivered a Harvard series of lectures on labor strife and civil liberties, in company with veteran Civil Libertarian Roger Baldwin. When Harry Truman seized the U.S. steel industry in 1952, Randall, although his company is only the eighth largest steel producer, was chosen as the industry's spokesman. "This evil deed," he said in a blistering radio-TV speech, "without precedent in American history, discharges a political debt to the C.I.O."

Midwest Republican Randall went to Paris in 1948 as the steel consultant to the Truman Administration's ECA. He came back with a permanent interest in Europe's industry, a newly acquired ability to speak French, and a conviction that the U.S. would have to deal with the world's problems for a long time to come. "Chicago," he said, "is not so far from the Ruhr as people think."

He did not accept his ECA associations uncritically. He has denounced Europe's capitalists as "cartel-ridden," attacked Point Four as "a Mad Hatter's race" ("Our billions will be wasted for lack of an existing entrepreneurial class in the backward countries"). He looks askance at Europe's Schuman Plan for pooling steel resources, considers it an incentive to "socialism."

Anxiety for Action. Harvardman Randall reads a lot and has a good sense of humor (he once suggested that more businessmen might read books if a law were passed prohibiting gin rummy), but he likes to study a serious problem carefully before he sounds off on it. With barely five months in which to make his foreign-trade recommendations, he is painfully anxious to get his trade commission in action.