Home Guard

Near & dear to the heart of Herbert Hoover when he was Secretary of Commerce was that Department's Bureau of Foreign & Domestic Commerce. When he became President he continued to build it up and expand its functions into a world-wide organization primarily interested in helping the U. S. businessman sell his goods abroad. If Johannesburg wanted washing machines or Brisbane underwear or Budapest typewriters or Edmonton corkscrews, what came to be known as "Hoover's Foreign Legion" would hear of it first and flash the news to the Department which then broadcast trade orders to U. S. industry. Herbert Hoover thought foreign trade was able to make or break domestic prosperity and to this end the Bureau of Foreign & Domestic Commerce was his favorite lever in trying to pry a sodden nation out of the Depression. Before he left office the bureau was spending nearly $4,000,000 per year on 53 foreign offices with 168 employes, 34 domestic offices with 235 employes and a headquarters staff of 823.

For President Roosevelt the bureau had no particular charm. He hacked its appropriation in half. Foreign offices were reduced to 23 with a staff of only 77, the other 91 workers being summarily recalled (TIME, July 3). Ten domestic offices were discontinued and 145 employes let out. The headquarters staff in Washington was cut to 450. And last week the bureau got a new chief and a new mission.

Dr. Willard Thorp, 34, is the twenty-third college professor President Roosevelt has called to Washington as part of his ''Brain Trust.'' The new bureau chief was born in Oswego, N. Y., educated in Duluth. Amherst graduated him in 1920. He took his master's degree at Michigan, his doctor's at Columbia. He worked for the National Bureau of Economic Research, which published his Business Annals. Other writings include The Integration of Industrial Operation and Economic Changes. In 1926 he returned to Amherst, has been teaching economics there ever since. Tall chubbily handsome, an able tennis player, Dr. Thorp married Hildegarde Churchill, daughter of an Amherst professor and onetime Congressman.

Under Chief Thorp the bureau will become more of a Home Guard than a Foreign Legion. President Roosevelt's new instructions called not for quick export orders but for "emphasis on basic research applying particularly to problems such as the estimating of production and consumption, the growth of productive capacity, the expansion of industry in terms of equipment, markets and employment, machinery depreciation and obsolescence, the future of American foreign trade and a wide range of similar topics." Rather than rustling up export orders, Dr. Thorp's efforts were designed to give ''a better sense of direction to business with eventually a much greater degree of national economic security and stability."

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