The Atlantic Report on the World Today: Washington

ON THE WORLD TODAY

THE third phase of the American mobilization demanded as the price of victory is now approaching. That is the regimentation of our manpower. We began with the draft of our Army, then we harnessed the economy, and now we are about to tackle the problem of national service. Freedom to pick and change one’s job has always been taken for granted in this Republic. The opposite flouts the very freedom we are fighting to ensure. But, ironical as the situation is, the only way we can win liberty in a war which demands the maximum contribution of our human and mechanical resources is to waive large chunks of it temporarily. Anything less than a wide measure of compulsion over our labor power is inefficient and wasteful and chaotic.

That has been brought home to Congress by the deluge of reports about labor shortages on the farm and in the factory, arising out of the hit-ormiss incidence of the draft.

The harvest in many sections had to be brought in by children. Chicago is threatened with a milk shortage because the Wisconsin dairy industry is losing labor. Here in Washington we hear a warning from our supplying farmers of Virginia of a 25 per cent cut in Washington’s milk supply this winter unless steps are taken to freeze their manpower. West of Chicago, crops of vegetables and fruit have been left to rot. Labor is scarce even on the ranges. Of course, only part of the loss of farm labor is attributable to the draft; the lure of high wages in the factory is responsible for some of the trek to the towns. Selective Service statements that, from now on, drafting will proceed at a “superhuman rate" have persuaded some of the workers to enlist at once. Actually jobs in vital war plants are being vacated. Even from the mines come reports of men drifting into the Army, though in this case they are being returned. I requires no argument to show that such a haphazard draft policy on the part of local draft boards is highly injurious to any united war effort.

First we must understand that we are fighting for the United Nations. In order to get the quickest and the best results our skills and resources must be pooled; in other words, we must have coalition planning.

The nightmare

Our major war contribution so far consists of a bulging granary and an inexhaustible arsenal. But the handling of the draft is already making the Capital wonder whether we know what we are doing in the large. Our war policy is losing direction. Take, for example, the farm. It is not uncommon nowadays to read such headlines as “Food Shortage Coming Up” — for this nation, let alone the United Nations. And they are not exaggerated. Senator Norris of Nebraska, a man not given to rash statements, bears them out. “You cannot overemphasize the crisis,”he says, speaking of this farm problem, “and it will be a terrible tragedy if something isn’t done.”

Mr. Nelson, looking at the factory front, is equally lugubrious. He reports production figures behind schedule. Even the President, in a little-noticed statement, has lowered the sights on aircraft by saying that the goal is a production rate of 60,000 a year, not an output of that figure this year.

We cannot have our cake and eat it, too. If we insist upon raising a mass army, we cannot at the same time victual and sustain the United Nations. Not by a long shot. Look at the calculations of our experts on manpower and military needs. Paul V. McNutt, head of the Manpower Commission, and Major General Lewis B. Hershey, Selective Service director, say that eighteen men in war industries are required to equip and supply one man in the armed forces. Put the new army at the new figure of 10,000,000 to 13,000,000. Well, at that rate we should need between 180,000,000 and 234,000,000 civilian workers! Yet our war worker population is only 9,000,000 and our total population only 134,000,000! These mathematical contradictions point up the problem — and the need to solve it immediately. The Army supply plan to service this mass army is a nightmare to Mr. Nelson as well as the United Nations.

What a mass army means

The first duty is to recanvass the advisability of a mass army. But that is like talking to a stone wall. Argument about a mass army gets nowhere with the military authorities. They say, “You think we can win this war cheaply and without discomfort, but by this time you ought to know we can win it only by putting our armies on the battlefields of Europe, and armies are made up of men — millions of them.” With the generals a mass army of 10,000,000 plus is an article of faith which has not been dislodged in the slightest by the preachments of Fuller and de Gaulle for small, highly mobile, professional armies.

I do not think that our military authorities cling to the mass army idea because of the power that will accrue to the military. Undoubtedly there are some who do. But in general they are addicted to the mass army because military men are made that way. History is littered with apologias of generals explaining defeats only on the ground of a shortage either of men or supplies. They always

insist on being prepared to the last button, and the last button is seldom found. Lord Salisbury, the greatest civilian authority on the military mind, said: “Nothing is pure to the minister, nothing is healthy to the doctor, and nothing is secure to the general.” I would lay a bet that Stalin said something of the sort to Mr. Willkie. The general who can take risks when an opening occurs has seldom been brought up on field service regulations.

In the same breath the adherents of a mass army talk of a long war. The two attitudes go together. You can inquire into the relation between a little and relatively ill-equipped army opposed to a small Nazi army guarding the invasion front, on the one hand, or a mass army launched against the whole horde of Nazis fresh from the conquest of Russia, on the other. But the chance to make an arithmetical calculation out of this relation will be ignored. The answer is generally left to General Logistics. And he, I find, can be a tyrant as well as a slave. In other words, the reply comes back: You forget shipping.

Ships — but how used?

To be sure, there is a shortage of shipping, but the shortage is not absolute. I have yet to find that our shipping has been allocated on any basis of relativity of need according to an overall strategical scheme which puts first things first. Nor is there any evidence that cargo space is used wisely even to our dispersed fronts. Is aid to Russia, for instance, the prior claim — as it should be, in any view of coalition planning? Is space used wisely when cargoes include supplies (for example, beer) to the AEF in Britain which are obtainable in Britain, instead of munitions? The questions are raised because they are constantly raised in the Capital without being answered.

Feather-bedding labor

Even if the mass army is sanctified, a calm mind should recognize the claims of the farm over the Army for many of the farm laborers now in uniform. Nobody would question that aircraft workers should be frozen. Not so patent, but equally important, is the waste of labor arising from the maintenance of peacetime standards of employment. In the railroads, for instance, there is a labor force of 1,500,000. When I hazarded to a railroad executive that 150,000 might be spared by the waiver of feather-bedding rules, he agreed that the saving might be sizable. Men are still at work mining silver and gold to add to our stocks of white elephants. The duplication of labor in our Federal establishment is scandalous.

Perhaps the prize example of labor hoarding in this Republic’s grimmest emergency lies in the coal mines. While we are suffering from a fuel shortage, the miners are working seven hours a day and only five days a week, or 35 hours a week, leaving the production rate at only 70 per cent of capacity. The only remedy we have yet been able to frame is the dispatch of 200 members of our fighting services to stage “pep” rallies!

All these examples are variants of the featherbedding which is impeding the national mobilization. Victory will not come cheaply: it will come only when we mobilize our resources on a wartime basis. How much velvet remains in our economy may be gauged from the fact that, relative to population, the British war production is certainly double and probably triple our own.

Wanted: more action

In Congress the leadership in the movement to promote a national service act has been undertaken by Senators Austin and Lister Hill. In the House the issue, in so far as it concerns the farm, is in the hands of the Agriculture Committee. Both committees threaten, because of the acuteness of the problem, that they will not await Administration leadership if that leadership is not soon forthcoming.

Mr. Roosevelt is a changed man since he came back from his inspection tour. Like Antaeus, he absorbed new strength and encouragement from his contact with the earth of the hinterland.

The trip in part owed its origin to his desire to find out whether the people could take it. He was uncertain, for instance, whether the people in the oilproducing states would even stand for nation-wide “mileage” (the President’s tender euphemism for “gas”) rationing. There are no more doubts in his mind that the people are ahead of their government in their readiness for real mobilization for victory. The opinion of travelers long before Mr. Roosevelt is that they have been ready since Pearl Harbor. At any rate, the Gallup poll showed that the President’s position on inflation was so enormously popular that strict constructionists like Senator Taft had to drop the constitutional issue arising out of the anti-inflation bill. The people want to get on with the war and don’t care how.

Nothing is clearer than that the President will now quicken the Manpower Commission. The Commission, headed by Paul V. McNutt, was set up as far back as April 18. It was called upon to formulate a national policy on manpower and to ask for necessary legislation. But little has been done so far except to move toward the relief of specific labor shortages. That is the sum total of six months of labor. By contrast the Baruch Committee took little more than a month from the date of appointment to put a comprehensive and altogether excellent report on rubber on the President’s desk. Perhaps the report of the Manpower Commission will appear shortly. At any rate, the pressure of the President has now been added to the pressure of Congress.

THE MOOD OF THE CAPITAL

This mood of the Capital reflects the realization that the people, far from being smug, are actionists. That does not mean that they would take kindly to dragooning in the Nazi manner. Nor does anybody in Washington envision a manpower enactment without safeguards, or an administration of a manpower mandate on the Nazi model. The British example is the case study in the Capital — just as the Canadian example was the case study in the matter of price stabilization. In Britain compulsion is generally kept in the locker. This would be the result here. Nevertheless the prevailing view is that without such a law our war effort would steadily deteriorate as a result of the lack of system on manpower. That prospect — nay, that condition — is what has aroused the people to bear down on the Capital with the demand for vigorous and fearless leadership. And it explains the new activity in Washington to give it to them. “We have been lacking in Vitamin G (meaning guts),” is how one Senator put it to me.