New Face In the Line

The Good Neighbor policy was sandwiched into OPM's priorities lists last week. To build a steel industry in Brazil, for which Export-Import Bank anted $20,000,000 (TIME, Oct. 7), OPM announced it would give priorities to orders Brazil must place in the U.S. for materials and machinery.

This was a victory for young Nelson Rockefeller and his committee on Latin-American trade and cultural relations. For months Rockefeller has told President Roosevelt that the U.S. would have to keep up its exports to Latin America--defense program or no--or take a back seat to the Axis. Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles agreed. But OPM's Ed Stettinius and OPACS' Leon Henderson stood pat against any exports that would take materials away from defense or essential civilian needs. Now the Presidential nod has gone to Rockefeller (partly because a Nazi freighter recently slipped through the blockade, delivered an airplane and parts which Brazil's Vasp line needed and the U.S. had failed to supply).

Priorities for Brazil's steel plant will be followed by a general program of priorities and quotas for all of Latin America's more important needs. In the priorities line, Latin America (whose essential needs are a drop in the bucket of total U.S. production) will stand in front of U.S. civilian orders, just behind defense requirements.

Last week OPM's priorities division also:

> Made chromium the 15th material under full industry-wide control.

> Gave a high rating--A-2--to materials orders by manufacturers and repairers of canning machinery (at OPACS' request, to avoid any loss of the 1941 food crop).

> Extended its industry-wide control over copper to include copper base alloys, brass and bronze.

> Gave blanket priorities to shipyards for materials needed to build and outfit ways (A1a on ways which will turn out completed ships this year, A-1-b on ways which will not produce ships until 1942-43).

> Added six items to its priorities critical list (some 300 materials on which Army and Navy get first call): rubber and rubber goods, fire-prevention and fire-fightins; equipment, Halowax (for insulation), neat's-foot oil, hospital and field laboratory equipment, portable oxygen units.

> Revised its controls over machine tools (which was the first industry to get industry-wide priorities) by giving new "urgency standings" to defense plants which the Army and Navy want tooled up first. Under the old system, all manufacturers with A-1-a-1 rating got equal treatment on machine-tool deliveries. Now they will be distinguished in effect as Aiai, A-1-a-2, etc., will form a line within a line. Manufacturers of other machine tools, cutting tools, gauges and micrometers get first call even over defense plants.

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