The Atlantic Report on the World Today: Washington

ON THE WORLD TODAY

HOW goes the Battle of Washington? There seems to be a concerted effort on the part of Administration officials, from the President down, to deny that there is one. The President’s attack on the press on the very heels of the Wallace-Jones bout was his most sizzling to date.

The feud between the President and the press is, of course, of long standing. To say that the White House correspondents are irked by Mr. Roosevelt’s barbs is putting their reaction mildly. At any time, one of them might be asked to put on a dunce cap and stand in the corner.

The integrity of the men in front of the President suffers at his hands. The impression he gives to the public is that they are paid to distort the news by the men who own their newspapers. It is not very pleasant to listen to this continuing arraignment. On June 29, in the words of the scrupulous correspondent of the Baltimore Sun, the President “just stopped short of holding them collectively responsible for the wave of feuds, resignations, recrimination, and widespread turmoil that has attended domestic phases of the war program in recent weeks.”

There is one healthy aspect in this unfortunate feud. Mr. Roosevelt’s denunciations of the press are all faithfully recorded by the scribes and printed by their “bosses” along with the muddle in Washington and the achievements of the factory workers and men in uniform of America.

Gossip and the WACS

Admittedly the wartime conduct of the newspapers is, like the curate’s egg, bad in spots. The latest example is the report carried in the McCormick-Patterson press that contraceptives and prophylactic equipment were to be furnished to members of the WACS. Newspapermen in Washington joined officials in condemning the men who gave currency to this poisonous story. Fortunately the story rebounded upon the tellers, thanks to American common sense. There was no hysterical mail from the girls’ parents. There was no falling off in recruiting. And the report afforded an opportunity of paying tribute to the splendid job that these 65,000 American women are doing.

It is the consensus that no other group is so well disciplined, so hard-working, or so dedicated to their country as the WACS. Surely the report was vicious. But there are black sheep in every business, and the report about the WACS merely showed that black sheep exist among the newspapers. It was no indictment of present-day newspaper practice in America.

Wallace vs. Jones

The Wallace-Jones row illustrates how dissension starts in the Administration. Responsibility is given without power. The Board of Economic Warfare, of which Vice President Wallace is chairman, buys materials abroad either for our war industries or to keep them out of enemy hands.

The testimony is that, since the war began, our arsenal has not been slowed down a minute for want of strategic materials supplied from abroad. This is quite an achievement when one bears in mind the smallness of our stockpiles when we were precipitated into war. It is an achievement because a mere handful of any one of a half a dozen materials might stall a whole series of industrial operations. The credit goes to BEW. In its economic warfare it has constantly worsted the enemy as well as kept our war machine free of many bottlenecks. The House Appropriations Committee paid tribute to BEW’s work by including a bouquet in its approval of BEW’s budget.

The job was formerly done by the RFC under Jesse Jones. That organization was so canny in its purchasing that the United States entered the war woefully short of such needed imports as rubber. Accordingly Mr. Jones found himself deprived of his import functions in an executive order of April 13, 1942. However, Mr. Jones remained as banker for BEW’s operations. Mr. Wallace charges that, because Mr. Jones has never been willing to accept the transfer of his import functions, he has been obstructionist.

The quick solution

The problem should be settled by giving BEW financial power with its responsibilities. Buying in wartime requires quick, on-the-spot decisions. To let a trade hang upon the approval of a banker in Washington is akin to holding up decisions on the battlefield pending instructions from the chief of staff back home. Perhaps there will be a change now. Mr. Wallace, at any rate, has sunk his teeth into a devastating indictment. It seems inconceivable that a row of this dimension can be smoothed over even by the emollient Mr. Byrnes.

There is precedent for the vesting of financial powers in the BEW. Britain’s BEW gets lump-sum appropriations. It accounts for expenditures after and not prior to transactions. An Englishman said: “An interdepartmental committee looks over and approves of what is spent by our BEW. Approval is a matter of form. Of course, the Treasury man sitting on that committee could justifiably question our BEW’s transactions as not conforming to practice, and he could obstruct the work on technical grounds. The fact is he doesn’t. If there were any such obstructionism, the case would, of course, not be aired in public, but would be ventilated in the War Cabinet, and, since this is war, the BEW would have no difficulty.”

Food and friction

Responsibility without power has also bedeviled the Food Administration. Chester C. Davis has quit because of it. He has been a ninth wheel in the food machinery, sharing responsibilities wdth the Department of Agriculture, the Lend-Lease Administration, the War Production Board, the War Manpower Commission, the Army, the Navy, the Office of Price Administration, and the Board of Economic Stabilization.

In any proper setup Mr. Davis should have been Secretary of Agriculture. That would have been the springboard to the assumption of proper authority. But the President has a congenital dislike for firing appointees who have outlived their usefulness. He simply sets up another man in a duplicate role. Perhaps the President hoped that Secretary Wickard would take the hint and resign, but Mr. Wickard didn’t. The result has been that Mr. Davis, since he was appointed Food Administrator on March 25, has been kept in an ivory tower.

There is a great demand that the Food Administrator shall be in fact a czar over food. The demand will probably fail. Mr. Roosevelt feels that if authority over food prices is transferred to the Food Administrator, the Price Administrator would be put on one leg. All prices are interrelated.

Meet Mr. Jones

Marvin Jones, who replaces Mr. Davis, will have a place in the Office of War Mobilization, the overall agency which is intended to unify the war administration. OWM couldn’t begin to function till there had been a meeting of minds among the administrators under Mr. Byrnes.

Of course, the appointment of a new Food Administrator doesn’t mean that we now have anything like a food policy. We are, in fact, lamentably short of one. Perhaps the most notorious example of a lack of policy lies in the meat situation. There is still no ceiling on livestock prices, with the result that there is a heavy production of n.eat animals. However, there is a ceiling price on processed meats, and this has discouraged slaughtering, limited sales of meat, and encouraged the black market.

Look at the lack of policy in the corn and hog situation. With corn fixed at $1-05 the farmer, as Governor Dewey put it, “can get $1.45 for the same corn right on the farm just by throwing it over the fence to his pigs.” Accordingly corn is not coming to market. And the New York dairy cow, in which Mr. Dewey was interested, is threatened with extinction, not to mention plants manufacturing starch and dextrose sugar.

Clearly there must be some relation between food and feed and among prices all the way down from the farm before we can be said to have a real food policy.

After the war, demand for food will still be much in excess of supply. In the highest economic interest we ought to divert to grain some of the attention which we now devote to producing meat. About ten times more food energy can be got from an hour of labor spent on wheat than from an hour of labor spent on dairy cows. Doubtless the entire problem will engage Mr. Byrnes’s prime interest, now that the conflict of personalities has been removed.

Smoldering coals

How the coal strike adds up is anybody’s guess. It seems to be recognized that John L. Lewis has won his point. He would have nothing to do with the War Labor Board. He wanted to see the operators discomfited. There is no question that both purposes have been achieved. No contract has been signed in conformity with the WLB’s award, and the mines are being taken away from the owners.

This is the status quo till October 31. In the meantime the President hoped to persuade Congress to legislate a work-or-fight order at the expense of strikers. The suggestion fell flat. It seemed to make military service a punishment rather than a duty, and it applied to one segment of the population instead of to the nation as a whole.

Yet the idea was thought to be more feasible politically than a national service law. It is plain that Congress would be far more hospitable to the AustinWadsworth bill, which would enact national service. But there is no chance of action till Congress returns to work.

Congress is going home to the people having armed the President against his will with the Connally-Smith Act. The WLB now has statutory authority, and the President can take action against inciters of strikes. To be sure, John L. Lewis has never incited a strike by any positive act. But under the new law he would presumably be indictable even if he took counsel with local strike leaders and rendered aid and comfort to the strikers out of his union’s treasury.

The act of course is far from perfect, and Mr. Roosevelt was quite right in saying that the measure contained flaws. But the feeling in Congress in overriding his veto was: Better this bill than no bill at all. The President always has resisted restrictive labor legislation. He could have had a better measure if he had made his wishes known during the debate.

THE MOOD OF THE CAPITAL

The mood of the capital is that the assertion of its prerogatives by Congress has been sufficiently demonstrated. Sober minds are increasingly concerned with developing a better liaison with the White House. Mr. Byrnes promises to establish such a liaison through the OWM. The reform is overdue. But it is realized even in Congress that those who are casting stones at the Executive for muddle and mismanagement are themselves living in a glass house.

Congressional machinery requires as much overhauling as the President’s. This was demonstrated by the last-minute chaos over appropriations before Congress adjourned. There should be, for example, a joint committee on supply bills, as there is on taxation, to enable Congress to legislate intelligently, not blindly and belligerently. But the overriding mood is a vast mutual irritation which may not be unconnected with a heat wave that, according to returning travelers, beats anything in Africa.