Home Front

Under way last week were the first plans for an idea that President Roosevelt has cherished for many a month: to make use of the willingness, even eagerness of many U. S. citizens to serve their country in time of crisis, in order to organize a Home Front if that crisis turns into war.

No one wanted to contemplate the day when whistling explosives might make piles of smoking trash out of U. S. buildings, craters in U. S. streets. But few dared say that such things were impossible in the world of 1941. An organization of U. S. fire-watchers, trained to extinguish incendiary capsules, would be part of the program, but far down on the list. The first thing would be to organize civilians for the defense program's duller essentials: to meet the problems of new cantonments, vast new industries. Adequate housing must be established in little towns that were becoming seething centres of activity; health problems, which always follow the migrations of workers, must be dealt with; recreational facilities must be set up as counter-attractions to red-light districts.

The President asked his advisers to give him the name of a man to start planning the Home Front. Lean, stringy Harry Hopkins submitted the name of lean, stringy Wayne Coy, 37, a long-faced, spectacled young man who was once chief of WPA in Indiana, and who was brought to Washington in 1939 by Indianian Paul V. McNutt.

The day the President left Washington to fish off Florida, he called Coy to the White House, with ex-Ambassador William C. Bullitt, Budget Bureau Director Harold D. Smith, and ever-present Adviser Hopkins, outlined Coy's new job: to create a Division of Home Defense, coordinating services of volunteer groups all over the U. S.

The President explained that he wanted a framework drafted. He intended to set up the new division by executive order, would finance it with his blanket defense funds, hoped it would not cost much. The President then sent to the Senate a nomination of Coy as director of "a board of investigation and research" authorized by the 1940 Transportation Act. But Washington wiseacres expect the rising young New Dealer to spend his time on much more pressing things than researching "the relative economy and fitness of carriers by railroad, motor carriers, and water carriers for transportation service. . . ."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.