Tooling Up

(See Cover)

To arm the U. S. is a task as big as the U. S. itself. The job is enormous to the point of incomprehensibility. The U. S. press, trying to tell the nation about the defense program, finds itself measuring Mt. Everest with a schoolboy's ruler. There are scarcely words big enough to say what is happening to the country.

The physique of the U. S. is changing immeasurably. By the time the job is only half done, the country will already be a different country. The people are aware that change is afoot, but only half aware of the bigness, the imminence of that change. Waiting for spring to soften the February air, they scarcely realize that summer skies will be darkened .by something more ominous than clouds--by fleets of airplanes, on their way to help England, if the Isles still stand; on their way to U. S. airfields, whether Britain stands or falls.

"It would be no exaggeration to say that the future existence of democratic government for perhaps hundreds of years --the future existence of political freedom and individual liberty, the future existence of private capitalism and human decency--may all depend upon the degree of success attained by that group."

These were the sober words of a man who weighs his words, a man who sees the job of armament as clearly as any man and clearer than most: Donald Marr Nelson, Director of the Division of Purchases for the Office of Production Management.

By "that group" Nelson referred to the 0PM, where his job, as director of purchases, is to buy the materials for U. S. armament. No catalogue could measure his duties, but one example is enough: by June Donald Nelson will buy three quarters of a million dollars worth of food every day for the new U. S. Army.

But the task is greater than any mere multiplication of loaves of bread, or tanks or airplanes. Said Nelson:

"The requirements of military and naval equipment. . . are limited by only one thing: the total capacity of every mine, factory and mill to produce such equipment.

"We no longer are in a position to say 'We need so-and-so many ,50-calibre machine guns.' What we now say is: 'We need every .50-calibre machine gun that can be produced by the total coordination of every pound of material, every inch of factory space and every man-hour of work that can be mobilized for the job.'

"This is an all-out effort. There are no fixed limits save the limits imposed by physical and human capacity employed to their utmost.

"Defense must come first. ... If anything stands in the way it must make way."

No. 1 Buyer. Donald Nelson is 52, a big, mild man with shoulders like goal posts and an appetite for hard work, long hours and a pipe that smells like an unfrequented sulphur sink in Yellowstone Park. Son of a Hannibal, Mo. locomotive engineer (as a boy he saw Hannibal's first citizen, Mark Twain, explored Tom Sawyer's cave), Nelson worked his way through the University of Missouri waiting on tables, where he studied human nature by observing the reactions of students on whom he spilled hot gravy.

As a chemical engineer he got a job in 1912 as a laboratory-tester at Sears, Roebuck &. Co. Donald's first job was to analyze boys' pants and chewing gum, which he frequently found together. A man of rare patience, he rose slowly but thoroughly as a merchandising know-it-all, reaching the vice-presidency in 1930. He had long since become the foremost mass buyer in the U. S. From 1928 through 1938 he bought merchandise that sold for $4,500,000,000--some 135,000 items, from tin cups to tractors, from diapers to tombstones.

Today, as No. 1 U. S. Buyer, he still wastes too much time being nice to all comers. A weekend high-gos golfer, he holds a long-distance (not accuracy) driving record at Chicago's Bob O'Link Golf Club; he is said to have the longest, most exasperating hook outside a Wodehouse story. He smokes cigars, cigarets, and his huge fumigatory pipe, drinks Scotch highballs, dieted 20 Ib. off before going to Washington, has eaten them back on with interest. He hates exercise, said recently: "The only exercise I take now is walking in the funeral processions of friends who died from too much of it."

The Director of Purchases is a middle-roader. His views are his own. One day last fortnight, impatient of connivance, disgusted with the struggle for power in Washington, Donald Nelson announced his resignation as of May 1. Few days later he turned up at the White House. Last week the OPM consolidated control of purchases under him, increasing his direct power over all buying and giving him absolute power over all purchases of $500,000 or more. No more resignation talk was heard; if Nelson leaves on May 1, the reason will be that his job as buyer is substantially over.

Nelson's eminent value to U. S. defense has been that he began with a clear view of the size of the problem, partly out of his own experience, partly because he has a talent for clarity. He is also as honest as only a wise man can be: he spent his youth being kicked out of copy writers' offices in Sears, Roebuck, fighting for exact and truthful description of all merchandise. And because truth is beauty, even in lawnmowers, Sears catalogues have always read well.

Franklin Roosevelt began the defense program in the belief that the abnormal defense effort could be superimposed lightly on the normal economy. Nelson disagreed from the beginning: he saw the program as a basic resurgence and reconstruction of the entire U. ,S. economy. He could see this clearly because he knew what would happen to U. S. business when 5,000,000 more pairs of shoes a year were suddenly ordered--he could see the hundreds of factories, the machine-tool plants, the nails, thread, leather, the railroad carloads of materials. He multiplied shoes by the 18,000-odd separate items he must buy for defense, from guns to butter, and got one sure answer: a revitalization of U. S. industry and therefore of the U. S.

Paper Into Tools. The job of arming the U. S. fell into three stages: 1) paperwork, which was the letting of contracts, the headachy stage of deciding who was to do what and why and for how much; a period of telling people please-to-be-patient, of red tape and of asking softly for cooperation; 2) tooling up, a mechanic's phrase used by defense's master mechanic, William S. Knudsen--a period of the drawing board and the lathe, of designing and building tools to make things with, a time of blueprints and bricks-without-mortar, of labor-training schools, of raw materials and schedules; a time of hurry, nerves, urgency, short cuts and of sharp demands for cooperation-or-else; 3) production: when more factories roar, more men go to work, more will be produced than ever before in the world's history--the goal, the answer to all physical problems, the time of get-out-of-the-way and here-we-go.

The OPM was sired by Franklin Roosevelt out of confusion, which was the stable-name of the NDAC. The President had been greatly responsible for the confusion, although some of it was inherent in the size of the task and the nature of the problem. NDAC was a six-man, one-woman board charged with duties to buy, control, employ, arbitrate, stabilize, protect and manage national rearmament without ruining the country now or later. OPM has a simpler task: to produce arms. It has a simple creed: God help anyone who gets in the way of U. S. defense, or God help the U. S.

NDAC foundered in a wave of its own contradictory press releases. Despite the Commission, the program had gone astoundingly well. But the NDAC sank in a maelstrom of confusion, with enough flotsam left floating to remind Washington oldsters of the wreck of the NRA.

Theory behind NDAC was that all personal and philosophical differences would be shelved in the interests of national defense; that labor and industry would lie down with the New Deal. Trouble was the New Deal wouldn't lie down. A political campaign was on.

Trouble started when Army and Navy procurement men found civilians telling them, patriotically but confusedly, how to buy tanks and airplanes and armor plate. Here Donald Nelson was of enormous help. Of a ton of newspaper clippings gossiping about his deathly struggles with military buyers, not one is wholly true. They got along from the start, and what differences they had were settled before the press heard of them. Momentary flare-ups occur, say insiders, but Nelson and his men speak the same language as the military men, particularly since he has shown them how to buy quantities in slack seasons.

Bigger trouble and worse confusion--a confusion that still exists, but which both sides have sincerely tried to keep out of the press--has come in a long internecine war between the New-Dealers and the businessmen $1-a-yearlings. The New Dealers had some basic beliefs: that social gains must be preserved, that all present production was inadequate, that shortsighted industrialists had carried on a sit-down strike that, if continued, would bring the U. S. to a ruin like France's, or at least to a brink like Britain's. They pointed to Passamaquoddy's untimely death at the hands of economy, when now every kilowatt of possible power in the U. S. is needed, and more. Some in their ranks were simple power seekers, some were sincere.

The $1-a-yearlings, on their part, felt they had been called to Washington to save the country after the New Deal had fleeced them, sabotaged them, investigated, ridiculed, overtaxed and overregulated them into shackled helplessness. Being mostly production-minded, they could readily adopt the view that anything that stands in the way of defense production must make way, particularly so-called social gains. Some were sincere, some were power seekers.

The civil war has raged with indescribable bitterness, but always under cover. None could afford to break through the patriotic unity that William S. Knudsen and Sidney Hillman maintained in all sincerity. But in the strata below Knudsen and Hillman, the subterranean fires raged.

The middle-readers were predominantly Nelson, judicial, greying Under Secretary of War Robert P. Patterson, debonair, trigger-quick Under Secretary of Navy James V. Forrestal. Patterson and Forrestal clung to the road's middle as desperately as if the road shoulders were mined.

The fight roared up to its hottest as the OPM was set up. The U. S. was getting into the second stage: tooling up. The OPM itself was a four-man board on which two were advisory dummies--War Secretary Henry Stimson, Navy Secretary Frank Knox. Boss was a two-headed man named Knudsenhillman, whose like had never been seen on land or sea, but who looked exactly like a Roosevelt compromise. The struggle raged about a job that will one day perhaps be all-important: executive secretary of the OPM. The $1-a-yearlings wanted the job for Fredrick M. Eaton, Wall Street lawyer of the firm of Wright, Gordon, Zachry & Parlin. New Dealers wanted almost anyone else to get the post. The struggle went on from the day the President announced the OPM (Dec. 20) until last week. Upshot: the President compromised. He chose a Brookings-Institution-type of man, an expert in administrative procedure, who has dedicated his life to upping standards of public administration: Herbert Emmerich of Chicago, egg-bald, little (5 ft. 3 3/4! in.), 43, associate director of the Public Administration Clearing House--a quiet, capable, research-minded man, a management specialist who speaks French and German fluently. Rejected as a-soldier in World War I, Emmerich did counterespionage, has never talked about his experiences.

Phase II. The fight over the executive secretaryship showed clearly that the harness hasn't yet begun to fit the horses. But the great mess of the NDAC was being cleared up, as by a giant vacuum cleaner. The stink of it had apparently taken a long time to reach the President's nostrils, but now, under the indivisible fellow named Knudsenhillman -- capital & labor, $1-a-year and New Deal--the confusion had at least been departmentalized, into Priorities, Purchases, Production. Filed for future reference were $1-a-yearling Ralph Budd (transportation), and three New Dealers, Harriet Elliott (consumers), Chester C. Davis (agriculture), and Leon Henderson (prices). Henderson, a pigeon who hates holes, and who somehow had gotten on excellent terms with the $1-men, refused to be filed, sulked off to Florida for a sun tan and some long thoughts.

The crazy, zigzagging slump of the post-election period, when the haggard President held his tongue about Defense, sat mum in the White House, worn from his defense (and speechmaking) trips, was gone. Somehow the Army and the Navy had managed to let $11,000,000,000 worth of contracts. The major phase of paperwork was nearing its end, tooling up was well along. Over the drawing boards and blueprints men sweated, in labor schools they learned which way was up (see p. 60).

In January the aircraft industry produced 1,020 fighter and training and 26 passenger ships. This was a 100% increase since June 1940. By June 1942, production would quadruple to about 4,500 planes a month. Knudsen, quiet, unhurried, spending more & more time along assembly lines and less in the office--where he is still uneasy because he feels he can't wear his derby indoors--now confidently said the U. S. would live up to its delivery-promise of 33,000 planes by June 1942.

The men with brazen stomachs moved in. Under Knudsen is fast, tough John David Biggers, 52, chief of one of the three P's--Production. Under Biggers is Industrialist William L. Batt. A Washington gag was: Production is coming like a Batt out of Biggers. As purchasing passed its presently estimated peak--buying in January was at the rate of $570,000,000 a month; the peak would be $900,000,000 --Nelson would fade from the spotlight;

Biggers & Batt would be upstage-centre.

The program had begun to come true with a reality that was both terrible and exciting; it was terrible as a nightmare, and yet exciting as a dream of how great a country the U. S. might become. Once-enormous future schemes were discarded as puny. Prime example was in power. At Boulder Dam the 1930 power plans--to install up to 900,000 kw. by 1980--were moved ahead 40 years: by the end of 1942 Boulder Dam generators will make 947,500 kw. with every kilowatt needed. Grand Coulee's March opening had been planned for an installation of three 108,000-kw. generators, largest in the world. This output has been doubled, with every kilowatt needed. At Bonneville, Shasta, Parker Dams, the same story.

First medium tanks will come out of Chrysler's Detroit plant by May; by a year from this week at least 14 tanks a day are to be rolling from assemblies. One unpublicized incident of last fortnight most clearly illumined the future: on Sept. 5, 1940 ground was broken for a new Pratt & Whitney (aircraft engines, East Hartford, Conn.) plant unit, with only a Government man's handshake as guarantee. The factory was finished in four months. On Jan. 31, a Friday night, 1,000 men began moving over 2,000 pieces of machinery, from massive hoists to screwdrivers into the new unit. On Monday, Feb. 3, the full daily quota (about 40 engines) was produced. Next day the old daily quota was exceeded. Wednesday a new daily quota was set.

Thus far, all was well as could be. But under Edward Stettinius was a third P: Priorities, department of desperate shortages and of nearly utter confusion. The whole program might wreck on a vital shortage: Stettinius labored valiantly to rebuild a ruin bequeathed him by the stupidities of years. He was trying everything but prayer, and perhaps that.

Yet here again, and still, primary responsibility lay with the President. A Plan might have prevented shortages--and there simply was no Plan, never had been. Perhaps there could not be, perhaps the only possible plan was to make the most of everything the U. S. could make. But the NDAC, the Army & Navy, and now 0PM all face one impossible chore: buy, build and expand at an unknown rate, to get how big, to meet what threat?

In 1917 planes, guns and uniforms were planned for a U. S. Army to fight with in France against Germany; depth bombs were manufactured to drop on submarines in certain waters. The objective was clear. In 1940-41 the U. S., struggling in a war of diplomacy, of sea power, and of nerves, was arming to fight Heaven-knows-whom at Heaven-knows-where for Heaven-knows-what. Maybe the battle would be in North Africa or Bermuda or the mouth of the St. Lawrence or in Rochester, N. Y. --or perhaps nowhere and never.

The most basic priority problem of all --guns -v. butter--was on its way to settlement, and the answer was guns. Franklin Roosevelt's idea of defense superimposed on the normal economy was a notion as passe as high-button shoes.

Only question now was how to insure some butter. The shortages were there, and the expansion was not yet at a rate great enough to take care of both civilian needs and defense needs. The U. S. could look ahead to less of many a luxury, but to a great deal more of the most terrible luxury of all--armaments.

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