The Atlantic Report on the World Today: Washington

ON THE WORLD TODAY

THE dirt is beginning to fly off the fabulous contracts between government and industry which munitioned the war. Some of the muckraking is political. This is an election year and most of the Representatives and one third of the Senators are trying to establish records for themselves in the eyes of their constituents.

Expect some exaggeration. To be sure, there is an ancient and fish-like smell about the relations between the Garsson combine and Representative Andrew J. May. But the Mead Committee may have gone too far in trying to pin on the “merchants of death” and Army inspectors the responsibility for deaths on the battlefield from defective shells.

The ammunition in question armed the 4.2-inch mortar, which was one of the most effective weapons of the war. The fighting men swore by it. The enemy cursed it. The gun is an adaptation of the old 4-inch mortar which in World War I shot off gas shells. In this war the mortar was redesigned for high-explosive shells. It is so light in weight and so handy in size that three men can carry it into the front lines. In this weapon the infantry had a piece of artillery packing the wallop of a 155-millimeter gun. Moreover it can be fired so rapidly that the Germans called it the “lightning” gun.

Some of the 4.2-inch shells proved to be defective. That is the case in every war, with every type of ammunition. But the War Department says that the percentage of defectives was no higher for 4.2’s than for any other kind of ammunition, and our record for defectives is not bettered by any other munitionmaking nation.

During the Battle of the Bulge, for instance, smart use of the mortar saved a weak point in our line. One unit, badly cut up, had to spread its strength thin in order to cover its front. The Nazis probed the front to determine how strongly it was held. But the American commander fooled them by moving the mortars back and forth.

Many testimonies like that are coming in to refute the mudslinging before the Mead Committee. As for the alleged neglect to remedy defects, the fact is that care was always taken to minimize danger. There was a report system which enabled Headquarters to notify all fronts whenever defectives were discovered in a particular lot.

What is brought out in the Mead Committee hearings is the general looseness which is destroying our standards of behavior. Whoopee between officials and businessmen is always offensive. To carry it on in public is doubly so.

Reorganization begins at last!

One way of putting a stop to these goings on, in so far as the Capital is concerned, is through the investigative process. But a better way is the reorganization of the machinery of government for the policing of lobby activity. This has now been accomplished as a result of the work of the La FolletteMonroney Committee in the matter of the reorganization of Congress.

No more important legislation was put through this past session. Under this Act a check on lobbyists will be made possible by a requirement for registration and a record of what the lobbyists spend and how. In the end this legislation went through with surprising ease.

By far the most important of the new reforms to improve the machinery of Congress relates to the streamlining of the committee system. Down the years, the committees have increased on the basis of particular fields of activity. In the Senate there are thirty-three standing committees, or as many standing committees as there are principal provinces of public policy.

WASHINGTON(continued)

There are committees on Interstate Commerce, Commerce, Interoceanic Canals, and Manufactures. Five committees deal with public land problems and six with the rules and administration of the Senate. This crazy-quilt pattern inhibits a consideration of legislation in the national interest. It provokes a rivalry on behalf of, say, particular forms of transport. It means that responsibility for legislative action is scattered among thirty-three small Senates which go their own way at their own pace and cannot act in concert.

Now, as the result of the consolidation under the La Follette-Monroney Act, there will be fifteen committees in the Senate and nineteen (instead of fortyeight) committees in the House. The pity is that the plan to set up majority and minority policy committees in both houses, in order to provide direction and liaison for the standing committees, was defeated.

The executive branch

The State Department must bear as heavy a burden in peacetime as the War and Navy Departments have to shoulder in wartime. Congress has passed a bill authorizing appointment of a second Under Secretary of State, as a result of the recommendation that the Assistant Secretary of State for Economic Affairs be advanced in status.

William L. Clayton well merits his promotion. He has been one of the nation’s most useful public servants since he decided to quit the cotton business and devote himself to government work. Even the leftists, who violently opposed his appointment to the State Department, now give him their respect. He is superior as a negotiator, and has a knowledge born of years of experience in business, and a natural aptitude for work.

Because of the importance of the United Nations to world peace, the State Department should have an Under Secretary for United Nations Affairs to back up our representative on the Security Council, Warren R. Austin. There is not yet even an Assistant Secretary, though the United Nations is more than a year old.

An effort is being made to lift the scale of salaries for the high operating officials of government. The plan is to hike Cabinet salaries in order to push Under Secretaries, members of Boards and Commissions, and other high officials out of the dead $10,000 center. The steady flow of good men from government service is another factor causing action.

Prices and wages

Paul Porter is not one of the ideologists who want to perpetuate price control. Before the question of extending the OPA ever arose, he showed a disposition to speed up requests for price adjustment and to accelerate decontrol. But he was hamstrung by the protracted debate in Congress. He could not pledge himself, in the teeth of debate, to decontrol one commodity and not another. He will now be spurred by the Decontrol Board set up under the new Act. President Truman’s selection of members of the Board is regarded as excellent. They will be a jury in which business can have confidence.

The chief problem in the Capital is whether there will be a rash of wage demands to match the price increases that took place when the OPA was not functioning. If this is the case, the fight against inflation may be lost. Some glimmering of labor statesmanship has been shown which has produced the hope that organized labor will stay its hand until reconversion has been completed.

Both William Green and Walter Reuther are stressing the advantage to labor of full production. Reuther has suggested that the heads of the automobile industry and the top officers of the union discuss ways and means of getting the industry into maximum output.

These are straws in the wind, but the administration is clinging to them, for nothing would be more disastrous than a union campaign to adjust the price advance of recent months. The only problem is how far this statesmanship will prevail among the rank and file who furnish the tail that wags the dog. Certainly the Administration on its part has got the bit in its teeth in the struggle with the dread forces of inflation.

THE MOOD OF THE CAPITAL

The mood of the Capital is concerned with the prospective test at the polls in November. President Truman has put up the backs of the Congress because they think that everything he has done lately has been tinctured with election politics.

The rejection of the first OPA bill was a case in point. He used the whip of public opinion on the backs of the legislators, then signed the new bill “reluctantly,” with more than a hint that the legislators were responsible for the boosted prices. All this may be effective with the voters, although the pros and cons of the matter are by now thoroughly confused.

Why did Mr. Truman give Burton Wheeler a pat on the eve of his rejection by his Montana constituents? The answer is that Harry Truman never lets down a pal. Wheeler was very kind to Truman when the latter was a Senator, and even made some effective speeches on Truman’s behalf when he last came up for Senatorial re-election. Favors oi this sort the President never forgets. Come hell or high water, he will reciprocate. Yet if Wheeler had won, there would not have been a more dangerous threat to the President’s international policies.