A Job for Mr. Perkins

Soft-spoken Vice President Henry Wallace met last week for the first time with the new Economic Defense Board (TIME, Aug. 11) which he heads,* introduced his colleagues to the vast, spraddling economic powers they will wield. Not present was the man who will be the executive at the controls, whose job it will be to use that power as a swift, decisive weapon of warfare.

The Vice President had been casting about for an able, hard-boiled New Deal administrator. Last week he paid a visit to the bedside of 41-year-old Surplus Marketing Administrator Milo Perkins, now recuperating in his Maryland home from a serious abdominal operation. Friends of the Vice President said he had found his man.

Stocky, slit-eyed, tweedy Milo Perkins is a rare New Deal exhibit: a hard-driving businessman who left a thriving business to take a modest job in a Government bureau. He did it because he is an evangelist at heart. Unlike many a cynical Government worker, Milo Perkins really believes in the New Deal credo that "nobody should go hungry."

Wisconsin-born, he was a successful maker of gunny sacks in Texas, a keen jute speculator, when the urge to go to Washington seized him in 1934. It happened one night in a Chicago hotel. Milo Perkins sat down, wrote a letter to Henry Wallace, whom he had never met: "From childhood I have wanted to live in the world so that I could . . . leave it happier because I had worked in it. . . . I am going to throw my whole energies into working for the principles of the New Deal. . . . It occurs to me that you might have just the job for a man of my interests. . . ."

Henry Wallace did. Then Secretary of Agriculture, he found a place for Milo Perkins as his assistant. Perkins did well. One day in 1939 Wallace called him up to talk about the Surplus Marketing Administration. Said Wallace: "Milo, I want you to come over and take charge of this thing and straighten it out." Milo has been there ever since. It was his idea to distribute surplus food by issuing food stamps to families on relief. Since the Lend-Lease Act went through, he has been buying food supplies for Britain.

As a straight-thinking administrator and a trusted friend of the Vice President, Milo Perkins is the obvious man to take hold of the Economic Defense Board and make it work. He will have the help of Princeton Economist Winfield William Riefler. As a part-time adviser, Riefler will be charged with the special job of planning for a post-war economy, but Milo Perkins will be dealing with far more immediate matters: further embargoes on shipments to Japan and Vichy, trade with the Free French in Central Africa, control over frozen Axis credits in the U.S., economic relations with Latin America--all of which can be made tools of economic warfare.

-Its members: The Secretaries of State, Treasury, War, Navy, Agriculture, Commerce and the Attorney General--or their deputies.

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