The Atlantic Report on the World Today: Washington

ON THE WOULD TODAY

THERE is a credit as well as a debit side to the management of the home front. The men in the lines have been backed by a miracle of achievement.

The two brightest spots are aircraft and shipbuilding. In June we turned out 7000 airplanes against 5000 in January. When one recalls the way the President’s post-Pearl Harbor plan of 50,000 planes a year was derided in this country as well as by the enemy, one must agree that we have performed mightily.

The President calls the shipbuilding figure “unbelievable.” It is a proper word. Even Bernard Shaw uses superlatives for what we have accomplished in shipbuilding. Not long ago the complaint was rife that there were not enough transport bottoms. Now the call is for cargo ships.

Partly this change is due to the licking we have administered to the U-boats. Partly it derives from the spurt in shipbuilding. When one realizes that in June alone we turned out 46 per cent more ships than we built in all 1941, the accomplishment appears in its true perspective.

Washington undertow

Where are those New Dealers who used to dominate all Washington? In the White House, naturally. The President leans as heavily as ever upon New Dealers, from Harry L. Hopkins to Wayne Coy; but beyond this heart of the war administration the responsibility of New Dealers is difficult to place. A month ago, New Dealers predominated in OPA, OWI, and BEW.

But the reaper has since been at work. With one swish BEW under Vice President Wallace and Milo Perkins was cut down. OPA, on Congressional orders, must now have a decisive quota of businessmen. OWI has had a house cleaning as a result of the cut in its appropriation. The regular departments, of course, employ numerous New Dealers. But these posts are not influential, though the heads of departments who are a carry-over from peacetime remain devoted to New Dealism.

The job that the New Dealer is doing in wartime varies with the man. The habit of saying that a New Dealer is ipso facto a bad administrator as well as a dangerous fellow is absurd. Secretary Ickes, one of the new elite, is the best administrator in Washington. As Petroleum Coördinator he has won encomiums right and left.

This country would have been better off today if another priest of the New Deal had been kept at OPA: the dynamic and Falstaffian Leon Henderson. But the New Dealers he left behind for service under the vacillating Prentiss Brown have been inept. They have aroused the suspicion in Congress that they want to make over industry as an item in permanent social reform rather than as a way to expedite victory.

This much can be said for the New Dealers in the Administration: they were the most prescient group in Washington in readying this country for war. Before the war some valiant New Dealers fought the battle for stockpiles of scarce materials from abroad.

On the War Production Board and in its predecessor agencies, moreover, the only discernible foresight was provided by the Planning Division under New Dealer Robert Nathan. He in turn had been prodded by that able young labor leader among the automobile workers, Walter Reuther. Mr. Nathan, who is now in the army, can look back on his WPB record with pride. He it was who wanted to convert the automobile plants when businessmen counseled delay. On the other hand, there are many examples of retrogressive “New Dealism as usual” in wartime administration. The most notorious is the Treasury. Here class taxation and the gospel of better distribution of buying power have prevailed when national taxation and the drying up of buying power are imperative. This is the agency where responsibility for control of inflation primarily belongs,

A tocsin for the 1944 campaign was sounded in the summary severance of the Wallace-Jones knot. The President, saying he had no time to go into the dispute, simply discharged both men from their ties with our business relations abroad. The Board of Economic Warfare, over which Mr. Wallace presided, has been wound up, and Mr. Jones has been relieved of the responsibility for financing our foreign purchases.

Mr. Jones, man of many jobs, is left at the heart of the war administration. The crowning act of political strategy was to bring in Jesse Jones’s friend, Leo T. Crowley, as head of the new Office of Economic Warfare, which is to take the place of the Board of Economic Warfare. Mr. Crowley is a leading Catholic layman. He commands considerable financial resources. He is a figure of political weight in the Northwest. All in all, the President got in a good slug for 1944 in settling the Wallace-Jones feud.

Mr. Wallace was, of course, thrust upon the President in 1940. The South wanted Speaker Bankhead and still wants him. Administration scouts, reporting on the Democratic revolt in the South, say that it is mainly anti-Wallace. And aside from Mr. Wallace’s addiction to utopianism, the Vice President “has no political oomph,” though he is the standard of New Dealers at home and abroad. But, say what you will about Mr. Wallace as a dreamer with an inept sense of mudslinging, he has many public and private virtues.

Economic commandos

The Wallace-Jones dispute goes right to the heart of both the war effort and the Battle of Washington. What succeeded it is a local revolution in war administration. BEW’s job was to buy abroad those materials which are required both by our war industry and by the enemy’s. All over the world there are 300 buying agents, so-called “economic commandos.”

They go after new sources of quinine in Latin American wilds for the succor of our pest-ridden soldiers in the Pacific. They search for quartz crystals to make possible radio installations in our tanks, submarines, and aircraft.

The “economic commandos” are well named. The phrase expresses the lightning tactics required of BEW agents as well as the nature of their explorations. It follows that, since war is a fierce seller’s market, money must be available right away for snapping up any materials that are offered. Mr. Wallace complained that his commandos had to await the permission of Jesse Jones before consummating the transactions. He further charged that this delay was in violation of the Presidential directive of April 13, 1942, which was intended to make BEW autonomous as to both policy and finance.

Now the setup is changed to give the new OEW autonomy in finance as Mr. Wallace wanted. That change is an organizational advance.

Toward a unified foreign policy

But of even more importance is the directive making OEW and all other war agencies abroad defer to the State Department in regard to policy. Formerly they followed their own policy. The result was a projection abroad of the administrative confusion in Washington. Every agency pursued its own foreign policy. Now the diplomats are on top, and Secretary Hull’s stern features can relax.

The State Department has been under fire for years. Some of the criticism is unfair. The Department was disturbed when the United States recognized the agent of the French Committee of National Liberation at Algiers in Martinique and withheld recognition of the principal. But the President is his own Secretary of State as well as Secretary of the Navy. If there is a lack of clear-cut policy on many issues, put it down to the President, not the State Department.

Thus a premium has been put on the enunciation of foreign policy governing a growing complication of issues as we hit the road to Berlin. The job is at once delicate and titanic. We are situated between a world that is dying and a world struggling to be born. We are on the verge of having to apply to particular cases some of our glittering generalities that we intend to uproot and to destroy fascism and all its works.

In these circumstances the President should have help beyond the administrative aid afforded by the State Department. What is required is a planning group operating at the President’s elbow and having nothing to do with day-to-day administration. It might conceivably be linked with the Congressional committees on foreign affairs. For on the Hill, as in the press and country, the work of our diplomats abroad has been criticized.

There is growing disquiet over the secrecy of operations, over the rise of pipe-line journalism through which the Administration directs opinion about for eign personalities (as, for instance, about de Gaulle), and over the developing reliance on executive agreements when the subject matter of arrangements with other countries merits treaties.

There was the effort to bar newspapermen from covering the food parley at Hot Springs, Virginia, and then from the agreement on post-war rehabilitation which grew out of related parleys. This is a people’s war. But judging from the way things are conducted, one might think the peace is going to be a purely private matter.

Political warfare

All news from Washington these days has a bearing on coördination or the lack of it. There was OWI’s gaffe in repeating on the short wave to Europe a commentator’s crack about the “moronic little king” of Italy. The President was incensed. The upshot of the incident is that OWI is now being subjected more closely to the supervision of the State Department.

Just before that episode, OWI itself had taken a jab at the Navy Department for talking out of turn. The Capital was in its cheeriest mood one morning when, at a press conference held by four high Navy officials, the Assistant Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Horne, handed out a bombshell. It was to the effect that the Navy was planning on building up its strength to seven times its present size, on the assumption that the war with Japan would last till 1949. OWI jumped on the Navy with both feet.

The Navy, evidently, was trying to scare both the Japanese and our own people. It is the Navy’s theory that overoptimism is the enemy of high production. (Why the workers would slacken their efforts to produce goods which give them high wages is anybody’s guess. But that is the theory.) Accordingly the Navy believes in making our flesh creep.

The bombshell was aimed also at the Japanese, on the theory that if they knew we were going to be seven times as strong in 1949, perhaps they would get fainthearted. In both cases the shots boomeranged, causing protests from China and criticism at home, even from the President.

THE MOOD OF THE CAPITAL

The mood of the Capital is buoyant these days. The fighting front and the home front are enabling this country to absorb the lack of teamwork and closeknit organization in Washington. The President objects to any distinction between the two fronts. But the distinction is real enough. Organized labor prevented the President from instituting a national service act. It is the general opinion that the war is too far advanced now to institute national service, though we might have been further on the road to victory, less hospitable in Washington to pressure politics, and not so endangered by inflation if that step had been taken after Pearl Harbor.