The Atlantic Report on the World Today: Washington

ON THE WORLD TODAY

PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT for the second time has come back from an inspection trip with a rebuke for the mild war spirit of the Capital as compared with that of the country. In point of fact, there is plenty of war spirit in Washington. But much of it is diverted from Hitler and the Japanese. On his return Mr. Roosevelt found several battles in violent progress.

The spectacle of these battles, and the causes giving rise to them, account for what has been called the galloping frustration of life in Washington. There is nothing either mild or peaceful about it.

Congress has joined the military in trying to do away with Mr. Nelson’s waning powers over the WPB. A good deal of resentment has been caused among the legislators by Mr. Nelson’s disregard of civilian needs. As if to make up for our lack of preparedness for the war in 1941, when we had a banner year for civilian goods, we have gone to the other extreme and starved the civilian goods industries.

Mr. Nelson, trying to head off Congressional action in behalf of the consumer and the small businessman who cannot get war orders, has reorganized the OCS, has put in A. D. Whiteside, a first-class man, and has made him vice-chairman of the WPB. But Congress may not be appeased. There seems to be a good chance that the Maloney bill will become law, with its provision for setting up the OCS apart from WPB.

Bombs on the shelf

Either way, the civilian situation is bound to be eased. The United States is becoming a vast arsenal with materiel piling up in our warehouses for want of shipping space. Not even businessmen had appreciated the amazing potentialities of the American economy.

Even in that bottleneck, shipping, our building this year will be 19 million tons, compared with 8 million last year. Though General Somervell, head of the Army’s Services of Supply, says we have not too much military equipment, nevertheless we do have enough barbed wire to wrap around the globe. Tanks are ‘way ahead of trained personnel, component parts of airplanes are far in excess of the frames and engines, bombs on the shelf would satisfy the needs of a long, long war. Probably some facilities for manufacture will be returned to civilian employment.

Hoarding men

The President has supplied the formula on the use of manpower — the right man should be in the right place at the right time.

If the Costello Committee of the House scrutinizes draft dodging, it would be well if personalities were excluded. But, with this caveat, the Committee is likely to do a useful service. Government in this case has not practiced what it preaches. Far from being frugal with manpower, it is prodigal. Too many government employes are of draft age. The total is 840,570. How many are fathers whose draft boards have not yet got around to them, how many have been examined and classified 4-F, how many are working in navy yards or arsenals on technical jobs as essential as jobs in private war plants — these are questions still to be answered. There is circumstantial evidence that public service has been used as a shield for draft dodging. The problem requires attention from department heads, and the Costello Committee is of aid in bringing it to their notice.

The Truman Committee

The public has reason to be grateful to the Truman Committee. Its full name is Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program. Created in March, 1941, it is the child of Senator Harry S. Truman, of Missouri, who, as is the custom, was named chairman. At the beginning it had so little prestige that the party leaders had difficulty in getting members to serve. That is why the Committee is full of freshmen Senators. But the importance of the Truman Committee has grown so mightily that the filling of any vacancy nowadays creates the keenest competition.

The list of its achievements is numerous and impressive. It is not too much to say that its reports are state documents.

It has saved millions of dollars by the revelation of profiteering. It has enabled the country to use its resources better by investigation and denunciation of monopolistic practice. It may even have saved lives by its exposures of falsification of company records.

It has kept the Executive agencies, particularly the service departments, on their toes. Its information is the most reliable coming out of Washington. Yet the Committee has spent only $150,000, or one threehundredth of the year’s appropriation asked by OWI.

The Committee has been called a gadfly, but one might go much further and call it a loyal opposition all to itself. Certainly we have no loyal opposition in the Republican Party. All that the GOP seems interested in doing is flaying the Administration. It is not fulfilling, despite its promises of six months ago, the duty of a loyal opposition in wartime: namely, to propose rather than to oppose.

Taxation headache

No problem is more crucial than the existence of the surplus money which already has bred inflation. Actually inflation is undermining our economic system. Since the Administration is still afraid to invoke the remedies, the GOP should have embodied them in its opposition policy. What is needed is obvious even to an economic tyro — a withholding tax on wages and salaries, a general sales tax, and compulsory savings. All that the Capital has witnessed in this Congress is a weird battle on the Ruml Plan.

No constructive opposition can be discerned through the heat and haze of these time-wasting battles. That is one of many reasons why the Truman Committee comes closest to acting as a check on abuses in the war administration, on extravagance, and on mistakes.

Truman and the news

Senator Truman and his colleagues believe in giving the American people enough information to enable them to form an intelligent and reasonable view about the war. This, of course, is not the formula of the armed services upon which Mr. Davis and the OWI must depend.

The services control OWI. But the Truman Committee. being outside the Executive branch, can bring pressure upon the armed services which is beyond the powers of Mr. Davis’s OWI. They can also play the part of inquiring reporter. Indeed, they have so much prestige nowadays and there is so much questioning of the hush-hush policy of the Administration that the chairman’s mail is the third heaviest in the Capital.

How accurate is his information was brought out in the Truman Committee’s report on the Battle of the Atlantic. Till the Truman Committee issued its report the public did not know the status of that battle. Secretary Knox would say that the March losses were better than February’s, or worse, and let it go at that.

The Secretary commented indignantly on the Truman Committee’s report on the Battle of the Atlantic. But for the first time the public was told that last year we lost a million tons more than both Britain and America built. “Common gossip,”the Secretary snorted. He accused the Committee of mixing up deadweight and gross tons. It turned out that the Secretary himself was confused. When the Truman Committee stuck to its data, the Secretary had to admit that the Committee was right.

Senator Truman and his colleagues, in fact, are seldom wrong. They are so zealous for the truth that, in spite of the pressure on the Committee, by both Republicans and Democrats, there has never been a minority report. Senator Connally, a fellow Texan and friend of Secretary Jones, even signed the report indicting Jones’s rubber record.

The Russian-Polish snarl

The great powers in the anti-Axis front have a number of suspicions requiring assuagement. If the Senate were to give the clear signal to the President by passing the Pall Resolution, he might set up a United Nations executive Committee, and get to work in earnest to remove the suspicions existing in the Kremlin. The act of the Senate would in itself give Moscow more confidence in American policy. It is clear from the Russo-Polish quarrel that Russians intend to pursue an independent diplomacy. This knowledge is troubling the Capital. Of course there is a good deal of impatience with Polish maladroitness, but it is the enigma presented by Soviet policy that is causing most concern.

How the Poles think we can help them diplomatically until we are established in the continent of Europe is known only to the Poles.

Most of what we ask of the Kremlin is refused. The last occasion for a refusal was when we repuested permission to send a medical unit to Russia. The aid is badly needed, but the Russians are so xenophobic that they would rather dispense with the aid than admit our doctors on a roving commission. Mr. Roosevelt, who is a great believer in the healing virtue of personal contact, is known to be eager to talk things over with Stalin. But Stalin refused the invitation to Casablanca and has not encouraged subsequent overtures for a tête-à-tête. Deeds, not words, will impress him.

That is the overriding reason that so much importance is attached in the Capital to the establishment of a second front. The peace will not be very happy unless we pull our weight on land in bringing about Hitler’s downfall.

There’s another troublesome aspect about the RussoPolish quarrel. This is the activity of the Polish minority in this country. It numbers three million. Half a million live in Chicago. They have taken such an anti-Soviet line in their papers and committees that now the Kremlin and the Capital are both annoyed.

The Polish Embassy here should long ago have disavowed the agitators. Stalin, of course, does not realize the extent of the free speech that flourishes under the American system. The Administration is angry because the Poles seem to be playing with the former isolationists. Here is the type of problem that will bedevil this country in the era of post-war reconstruction. We are still a melting pot. Can we base our foreign policy on the national interest, or will it be fashioned by pressure groups from our minorities? The record of domestic policy is not a cheerful parallel.

THE MOOD OF THE CAPITAL

The mood of the Capital, as this is being written, is excited by John L. Lewis. The feeling is strong that the authority of the government must be sustained without face-saving for the miners’ leader. The extent of Mr. Lewis’s ambitions is anybody’s guess. At any rate, it is felt that the time is long overdue when he should be curbed.

That can be done by leaving the settlement of the coal dispute to the War Labor Board. This is the duly authorized agency for that purpose. Mr. Lewis wrecked its predecessor eighteen months ago when the President allowed him to by-pass the Mediation Board. Now Mr. Lewis wants the blood of the War Labor Board. But if the War Labor Board’s authority is not sustained beyond any doubt, every other labor and farm leader could ape Lewis in defying the government. Hitherto the President has frowned on all such legislation, but now the feeling is general that Congress must put an end to the abuses which have grown up in union practice.