Little Jeweler, What Now?

"When a material gets as scarce as copper," SPAB Director Donald Nelson told the Truman Committee last week, "priorities are no longer any good. It has to be straight allocation . . . both from the top and from the bottom."

This was reassuring talk. Allocation, Washington's new magic word, was about to replace priorities in earnest (TIME. Oct. 6). Theoretically, this meant that civilian industries starving for lack of scarce materials could expect a fairer shake, that Army and Navy must also submit to allocation, instead of hogging the head of the queue. Said Nelson Deputy Albert J. Browning last week, "Some proportion of critical materials [must be] set aside for general civilian use."

But this week a large section of the civilian economy discovered that "allocation from the bottom" was no safer than priorities. In a drastic order, the use of copper was virtually forbidden (after Jan. 1) in more than 100 common household products--from toys to fire extinguishers, from caskets to jewelry.

The case of jewelry was a miniature study of the whole U.S. scarcity dilemma. The product is about as far from defense as a product can be. But it assumed symbolic proportions because the jewelers had important friends at court: Republican Leader Joe Martin and House Majority Leader John McCormack. There are only a few hundred jewelry-makers in Martin's and McCormack's New England. But there are 100,000 small manufacturers in the U.S., and their aggregate political importance is even greater than Joe Martin's.

The jewelers arrived in Washington last week the day after Donald Nelson had given the New York Sales Executives Club some jolting facts about copper. For this month latest OPM estimates show 5,730 tons too little copper for defense and Lend-Lease alone. For 1942 they show a maximum supply of 1,650,000 tons (including a sanguine 600,000 tons of imports); defense and Lend-Lease needs of 1,050,000 tons; "essential civilian" needs of 250.000 tons. This left 350,000 tons for "other civilian" demand--which OPM estimated at 1,100,000 tons.

Thanks to his sponsors, grave-faced Frederick A. Ballou Jr., head of the New England Manufacturing Jewelers & Silversmiths Association, was soon closeted with Washington's most important defensemen (see cut).* To them he described the idleness that faces 35,500 jewelry factory workers in Massachusetts and Rhode Island (60,000 in the U.S.) unless the industry gets a measly 5,688 tons of copper, 1.409 tons of zinc, in 1942. Without it he saw at least two ghost towns: North Attleboro and Attleboro, Mass., dead center of the industry in this war as in the last. In 1918 Barney Baruch had not let Attleboro go under.

Little Business' Floyd Odium, breathing sympathy and courage, said he would go to bat for the jewelers. His sympathy was strengthened when canny Joe Martin pointed out that the U.S. is still importing jewelry from British manufacturers, whom war has not yet liquidated. Nevertheless this week the jewelers got the kiss of death from Donald Nelson.

If Floyd Odium should prove unable to help Joe Martin save Attleboro, and if Joe should carry the question to Congress' floor, SPAB might be in even more trouble than the jewelers are. The magic word "allocation" will not prove magic enough if its only practical effect is to put people out of business.

For SPAB has yet to define allocation in the sense of ranking allocatees. Army and Navy, who use copper in a way most businessmen would consider lavish, still hogged the head of the queue last week. No plans for supplying a minimum civilian economy had been formulated. With incomplete statistics on inventories the true dimensions and use of the existing copper supply were still unknown. Around the corner loomed another possible claimant for first place in the queue: plant expansion. Above all, SPAB had no technique (such as World War I's industry committees) for the execution of its allocations. And of U.S. scarcities, copper is merely one.

* Left to right: Don Nelson, Floyd Odium, Jeweler Ballou, SPAB Chairman Henry Wallace, Senator Green (D., R.I.), Governor McGrath of Rhode Island.

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