Priorities Week

Besides starting an overall survey of defense requirements (see above), the Supply Priorities & Allocations Board hacked away busily last week at the priorities jungle which ex-Chief Ed Stettinius left behind.

> Issued was Priorities Regulation No. 2, which puts Lend-Lease and civilian priorities on a mandatory instead of voluntary basis, thus gives them the same legal status as Army & Navy ratings. In conjunction with recent Regulation No. 1, which forces plants to accept defense orders, this gave SPAB the tools it needed for strict, complete allocation of all of the nation's raw materials and production facilities. It also served notice on Army & Navy that henceforth they could not ride roughshod over Lend-Lease and essential civilian orders.

> In the long bout of Leon Henderson v. Bill Knudsen over control of automobile production, SPAB stepped in, stopped the fight, raised Leon's arm. Henceforth Henderson has full authority over quotas for automobiles and all other consumers' durable goods. This week he used his new powers to set the December quota at 204,848 passenger cars, 48.4% under December 1940.

> By tabling Tennessee Eastman Corp.'s application to expand its plastics plant, SPAB made clear that it opposed any non-defense industrial expansion which would require too much steel or other scarce materials. Eastman's new facilities would have produced enough plastics to replace 6,000,000 lb. of stainless steel, 8,000,000 lb. of aluminum, 18,000,000 lb. of chrome nickel plated steel, 34,000,000 lb. of zinc. But they would have required both steel and stainless steel to build.

> SPAB denied National Defense Pipelines Inc. (sponsored by Harold Ickes) priorities on steel plates for a 1,580-mile pipeline from the Texas oil fields to New Jersey. Reason: the plates (at least 430,000 tons) could better be used for ships and freight cars. But no formal vote was taken and the pipeline project was by no means knocked out once for all. SPAB's potent Henderson said afterward that he still favored the project--as do the Army, Navy and President Roosevelt. So Ickes' pipeline may yet cause the first open fight inside SPAB.

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