The Conclusions of a Dollar-a-Year Man
ON THE WORLD TODAY
SPEAKER: J. S. KNOWLSON
President, Stewart-Warner Corporation
I did not wish to go to Washington. I was busy and I liked my job. I was allergic to New Dealers, Bureaucrats, Planners, and Red Tape; therefore, when Donald Nelson corralled me in his office in August, 1941, I put up all the arguments I could think of as to why I should not go, finally retreating behind the statement that I was sure my directors would not let me leave.
There was to be many a shock in the succeeding sixteen months, but the first was the way these directors deserted me. “You have no option,’’ they said. “If he wants you, you have to go.’’ This was in August, 1941, and that is the way I became a dollara-year man in Washington — the modern version of the old-time remittance man.
Donald Nelson had seen me occasionally on my trips to Washington, where I was just trying to clear orders, get machinery, cut red tape, and so on. On those occasions I am afraid I had expressed myself in rather uncomplimentary terms on various subjects and about a good many branches of the government. Donald Nelson may have felt that it would be a good joke on me to put me on the other side of the fence. Again, his reason for wanting me to come to Washington may have been that early in 1940 our own company had become convinced that we were on the road to war, and that the only sensible course for a manufacturer was to get into war production. He knew that we had done this at considerable cost and after considerable effort; and he knew that I had been preaching the same course to my friends.
It is hard for any of us to think hack to September, 1941. A large number of people then, perhaps a majority, felt that whatever defense effort was necessary could be superposed upon our expanding peacetime business and should not be allowed to interfere with the apparent prosperity of those days.
Strange as this attitude seems now, it was the general feeling when I arrived in Washington in September, 1941, to join the staff of the Office of Production Management, headed by William S. Knudsen and Sidney Hillman. Mr. Knudsen I had known slightly, and of course he was recognized as a great production man who lived amid the rattle of screw machines and the clanging of punch presses, and who talked the language of mass production. I did not know then that Lieutenant General Knudsen is one of the really great men of our time, a man of wisdom and perception.
Sidney Hillman was only a name to me, and one of my first Washington shocks came after a meeting one day when a fellow dollar-a-year man said to me as we were walking down the hall, “This man Hillman acts a lot more like a statesman than a labor leader.”I was to find that the degree of suspicion with which I regarded Hillman was reciprocated, but as time went on our mutual regard increased.
Our “inexhaustible” resources
By September the OPM was making a successful effort to get the defense production well under way. Aluminum was admittedly short, and some people believed that copper might present a problem, although many believed the copper shortage was only statistical. We Americans had talked so long about our inexhaustible resources that we had reached the place where we believed in them as sincerely as the British believed in the impregnability of Singapore. We had lived so long in an economy of surpluses that any idea of a shortage was hard to assimilate.
For that reason, when it became necessary for the OPM to curtail the use of copper for what were apparently nonessential uses, such as grave markers, costume jewelry, zippers, and so on, the protests of industry were both sincere and loud. Everything we touched apparently had a place in the defense effort. I recall Leon Henderson’s coming in one day, flopping his bulk into a chair, and saying sardonically: “What are you fellows doing to the hair tonic business? Don’t you know it’s necessary for defense?” And when we asked him why, he said, “I don’t know myself, but a delegation has been in my office for two hours explaining it to me, and if I hadn’t run away I am afraid they’d have convinced me.”
Conversion difficulties
All during this period the columnists poked fun at our efforts, and constituents sought the help of their Congressmen to save them from the ruin which they felt we were planning. Then came Pearl Harbor, and with it an almost hysterical burst of evangelical fervor for conversion. Gone overnight were the days when we were ruining the economy of the country. Instead, OPM and WPB, which shortly followed it, were judged derelict in not having stopped peacetime production long before and converted industry to war products.
If you ask any manufacturer, he will tell you that during the last ten years his tribe has been selected as the goat whenever anything has gone wrong in national life. It therefore seemed quite in order to hear it said “that industry was sabotaging the war effort and that we dollar-a-year men were stooges planted in Washington to aid and abet this job.”
Few people realized, and few still seem to realize, that under the system which had developed, these civilian agencies could not of themselves convert a plant from baby carriages to gun carriages. Early in the game it had been decided that as the Services supposedly knew better than anyone else what they needed, and were to pay for and use the material, they should be allowed to buy where and when they wished.
The result of this setup was that the War Production Board could stop the manufacturer from making baby carriages, but the order which changed him to a producer of war goods had to come from the procurement officers of the armed services. The job of the War Production Board was really one of clearing away anything that interfered either with the facilities or with the materials needed by the Services, and then to trust that these materials and these facilities would be used.
There were those who felt that the job should be done overnight, that industry should be stopped dead in its tracks. Others of us, who knew something of the problems through personal experience, warned that in so doing we might well be liquidating rather than converting industry; that in too much haste we might well be destroying the very facilities we expected to convert.
Industrial shock
Throughout those wild days I sat at the desk from which, over my signature, flowed the hundreds of “thou shalt not” orders that brought the peacetime industry of our whole country to a shuddering halt. The shock was severe, and certain territories were so hard hit that they were certified as “distress areas” requiring special attention. I have seen tears rise in the eyes of hard-boiled manufacturers as they looked at the ruin of their businesses and spoke of the hardships that their people faced.
All we could say to the hundreds who came to Washington, and to the thousands who wrote of their troubles, was: “Go to the Services. You have something to sell and they are willing and ready buyers of almost everything.” It is good to relate that this period of acute distress was of relatively short duration. The credit for that is due both to the speed with which the Services placed their orders, and to the native determination of the rank and file of the manufacturers not to let anything lick them.
The speed of this change was brought home to me by the fact that personal friends from two of the so-called distress areas had come to tell me of the difficulties that their communities faced. Within two months these same friends reappeared with delegations from the same territories, to see what could be done to limit orders pouring into those territories. They now feared labor shortages. The inquiry of our callers suddenly changed from “What can I do to be saved?” to “How do I clean out this peacetime junk so that I can get started on my war orders?”
Industry begins to roll
The record is plain. Production in December, 1942, of munitions, planes, and the goods of war was five times what it was the month before Pearl Harbor, and much of that terrific production was rolling off lines which a few short months before had been producing material for peacetime.
Intimately as I saw these hurrying events, it is hard for me to believe that it has all happened in a few months. One has to pause to remember that automobile production of pleasure cars stopped in February of 1942; that the production of household radios, electric refrigerators, and many other items did not terminate until April; and that we were making ranges, metal furniture, pianos, organs, washing machines, and vacuum cleaners as late as May and June of last year.
By early fall the conversion job was pretty well finished. Some may think the job could have been done quicker, but history will show that it was done faster in this country than in any other.
The record speaks
This is not an attempt to whitewash the War Production Board. It doesn’t need it — for the record speaks. The Board was an emergency organization thrown together under great stress. It was a crosssection of American life. It operated on a democratic basis and it had all the weaknesses of our system. But I think it is well to recall that these men in Washington worked under tremendous pressure. Always ringing in their ears was that terrible cry of other nations; “Too little and too late”; and always uppermost in their minds was the fact that our forces were unarmed, that our allies were undersupplied. Always with them was the knowledge that our domestic economy was fat and we could live on that fat for a while at least.
So, as mistakes come to light, we should remember that they are mistakes which can be corrected before it is too late. They are mistakes that we can forgive because these men did not make the one unforgivable mistake of allowing anything within their power to stand in the way of the production of planes, tanks, guns, and ammunition. They said to the admirals and to the generals, “Tell us what you need and you can get it. Your need comes first.”
Throughout most of this period Donald Nelson has been in charge. Questioning, criticism, frustration — none of these things has ever caused him to relax his pressure towards his one goal, war production. Mr. Nelson is always being charged with not being tough enough, and for the last year and a half whenever things have got a bit sticky, someone has demanded that a tougher man take on the job.
Toughness or roughness
In the popular imagination there seems to be some confusion between toughness and roughness. I have never been able to reconcile that concept with the fact that there is doubtless an office in London where, if you asked who the toughest man in the world is, they would say Gandhi. Can it be possible that toughness of spirit is shown as much by the ability to take it as the ability to dish it out? If the ability to take it without losing your objective counts, then Donald Nelson is a mighty tough customer.
Everyone has some feeling about Leon Henderson. There is nothing negative in his make-up. He never dodged a fight in his life, and those of us who saw a lot of him will always speak highly of his courage and his intellectual honesty.
W. H. Harrison and Douglas C. MacKeachie held important positions at this time. They were both men who had fought themselves up to the vicepresidencies in a couple of companies not so soft, and they were both persuaded to leave the War Production Board for the Army. Both men were given high rank and important jobs.
W. L. Batt, Sr., who is still on the job, is a manufacturer of great experience. In addition he is a Hoosier, with all those qualities of independence and plainness and simplicity of approach of which that tribe is so proud. He is the oldest man of the staff and the one with the clearest picture of the international situation.
The size of the job
Down the line there was many another businessman who, like me, paused for a moment between “obscurity” and “oblivion” to take his small part in this gigantic job. As Lieutenant General Knudsen once said, “We all had the consolation of knowing that, no matter what job we had, it was much too big for us. ”
Whether we all had the same reactions to our experience, I do not know. Personally I learned that a lot of businessmen took to bureaucracy like a duck to water, and that so-called government red tape is not so much the result of governmental inefficiency as of the necessity of dealing with problems so large that the decimal point gets pushed way over to the right.
I lost ten pounds and a lot of personal prejudices. I find to my rather shocked surprise that I once made a memorandum like this: “I have been talking with Hopkins and I can’t escape the conviction that he has the clearest, coolest mind of anyone 1 have ever seen here. He factors complicated problems into simple terms, and he has given direction to my thought.” I don’t know anything about Mr. Hopkins’s social planning or his other ideas, but my one regret is that I did not see more of him in Washington. I can smell a well-run shop, and I shall always believe that in spite of his “terrible temper” the Honorable Harold Ickes is probably a good gang boss and a good administrator.
It is a serious thing to lose ten pounds and so many prejudices. So I am glad to be back on my old job. At the same time, I have an idea that I shall always be glad that I was part of that conglomerate mixture of bureaucrats, and Democrats, and Republicans, and New Dealers, and manufacturers, and professors, who argued and scrapped through those trying days, but who all worked for a common objective.