Jitters

Thousands of U. S. businessmen lunched in hundreds of groups last week and talked about the jitters.

The President had tried to lay his hand soothingly on Business (TIME, Aug. 20), but, like a shell-shocked animal, it kept on trembling all the more. Unable to hog-call Business himself, the President dispatched his Secretary of Commerce to the microphone to swear that the "Roosevelt Administration . . . believes in just profits for management and capital" (see p. 17). But businessmen still had the jitters.

Front-page stories from Washington reported that NRA was about to be reorganized. They still had the jitters. Retail sales were good last week and even heavy industries showed a slight improvement. And still they had the jitters.

The man upon whom the nervousness of U. S. Business pressed most heavily last week was the President's loyal, earnest Secretary of the Treasury. A gentleman farmer by occupation, no pundit in monetary affairs, Mr. Morgenthau will have to borrow $1,700,000,000 in a skittish market within two months. It was clearly his turn to be reassuring. Flatly he stated that there will be no change in U. S. gold policy, no devaluation of the dollar. And he twitted: "The financiers seem to have taken seriously reports from South Africa, China and Timbuctoo as to what I am going to do over each weekend. Why those places should know exactly what I am going to do is beyond me. I just wonder where some of those rumors come from."

No rumor but a fact was the shipment of 400 tons of silver from London to the U. S. and a return shipment of $7,800,000 in gold from New York to Europe. Since the Treasury now legally owns all domestic silver and is not obliged to buy silver abroad, this governmental swapping of gold for silver stirred fresh confusion over the Administration's money policies.

But if governmental assurance could not exorcise the jitters, the voice of a tycoon might. This month General Motors' Alfred P. Sloan Jr. led off the list of the Atlantic Monthly's contributors. Wrote he:

"Industry is incurably optimistic; its beacon is hope, and change is its lifeblood. ... All through the ages ... the cry has been raised that the end of human advance is at hand. Asiatic kings had that sombre fallacy carved on monuments rescued from oblivion by the far-ranging archaeologists of our dynamic era. . . .

"A new day is with us. ... A little patience now, a brief respite from fear and uncertainty, during which the vast financial reserves which caution has gathered can be placed behind the new ideas and methods developed by research, and we shall be on our way toward a higher standard of living. ... I affirm the duty of industrial leaders to hasten this development, so pregnant with good for all mankind. . . . The good life lies ahead somewhere along the road of abundance, and we shall find it by continuing in that direction with stout hearts and open minds."

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