Pinch

The final tatters of respectability were ripped last week from the old highfalutin promise that U.S. aluminum production capacity was plenty big enough for all needs. The Office of Production Management, whose high-rankers were parties to the mistaken promise, announced through OPM's Ed Stettinius aluminum's prospects for June. They were not pretty: defense was going to take nearly 100% of the month's production of 53,000,000 lb.

Prospects were likely to be uglier still for later months, as defense demands overleap aluminum production, were not likely to improve much until 1942-43, when Alcoa, Reynolds Metals Co. and Bohn Aluminum & Brass Corp. get additional new plants into operation.

Having admitted aluminum's poverty, OPM proceeded to pass the hat for it. In interventionist Richmond, Va. and in isolationist Madison, Wis. (and their counties), it put school children. Boy Scouts, American Legionnaires to work collecting aluminum scrap. This week the experiment ended and OPM waited for the returns to come in.

If the returns are good, the hat may be passed on a nationwide scale this summer. How much aluminum scrap there is in U.S. pantries and basements, no one knows. But 0PM calculates that if each U.S. family gives up one pound, it can scrape together 30,000,000 lb.--better than a fortnight's production.

Before its test collection, OPM put on a surcharged publicity campaign, announcing that both cities were going to be asked to make a "sample sacrifice'' for national defense. To a citizenry worked up to the point of donating its blood or staying up all night, the sacrifice of a few pots & pans was easy. In both cities, old aluminum poured in.

By week's end more than 100 truckloads were piled up in front of Wisconsin's capitol, and the local committee was beginning to hope that when the collection ended this week it would have 120,000 lb. of scrap--better than 6 lb. from each of Dane County's families. In Richmond, scrap aluminum (including four outgrown artificial legs from one donor) piled up just as fast. When the collections are over the metal will be rolled flat, baled, sold at 10 1/2-c- a lb. Proceeds will go to the regional defense councils. The scrap, not usable for aircraft manufacture (which now takes 50% of U.S. production), will be used for other aluminum jobs, release its equivalent for airplane building.

In other ways, war's pinch tightened enough last week to raise more than aluminum bruises on the U.S. economic body. To the list of metals already under mandatory Government control (aluminum, magnesium, nickel, nickel-steel, ferrotungsten) Ed Stettinius added copper, may soon have to add zinc and other metals now under partial control. He also warned manufacturers looking for substitutes to steer clear of other essentials to defense. At the same time Franklin Roosevelt appointed Interior Secretary Harold Ickes, who talked of gasless Sundays, Government tsar of the oil industry.

The Federal Power Commission had even direr words to say. Already short on power production, the U.S. has run into bad luck in droughts in almost all the waterpower areas. The shortage, said an official of FPC, might easily become the most serious in history. Harold Ickes was ready to pinch citizens with other remedies. What the country needed, said he, was nationwide daylight saving time. The U.S. also seemed headed for darkened electric signs, a suspension of such power-guzzling affairs as floodlighted skyscrapers, night baseball games.

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