$l-a-Year Men Still Worth It

This was a real fight, out in the open, with no punches pulled. It was a hopeful sign. In the old defense agencies there had seldom been a really good fight. Down OPM's endless corridors, challenges and sneers had burrowed like voices in a cave, diminishing to futile silence: when all was quiet again, nothing had changed, nothing had been settled.

But Donald Nelson, the new Production boss, showed that he was not afraid of trading punches. Nelson believed, and said, that the talents of $1-a-year men, taking the Government's symbolic dollar but still drawing industry's thousands, were essential to his War Production Board and would serve the Government, not private interests. The Truman Committee had strongly suggested that $1-a-year men were two-bit patriots, protecting their own industries, freezing little business out of defense production.

At his own request, Nelson went before the committee to slug it out. He curved his surprised eyebrows and his padded chins over the witness table, puffed mightily on his pipe, gently tapped a paper of matches on the table to emphasize his points. Said he flatly: "The Committee is hampering us. ... You make men afraid to come down here. . . . Companies that are willing to sacrifice ... to have men come down here are afraid for them to come. . . .

"On this job we must get the maximum results from American industry. . . . We must have down here men who understand and can deal with industry's intricate structure and operation. . . .

"Most of these men . . . have been getting salaries much higher than those which can be paid Government employes. ... If we did not have any provision for $1-a-year men, we should be forced to ask these men to sever their old connections entirely to take temporary jobs at salaries which might not enable them to meet their fixed obligations. . . . We would usually get ... older men who were independently wealthy ... or those who have already retired. . . .

"As a group [the $1-a-year men] have worked hard and rendered valuable service. Those who have should be commended. Those who have not will be removed."

The Truman Committee--which got suspicious of $1-a-year men in the first place because it could not find out just what they were doing-changed its mind after this frank statement of the case. Like many a toe-to-toe fight, this one ended with a handshake.

Second Week. Meantime, Nelson pushed WPB closer to its final organization, using $1-a-year men and paid helpers alike. Slick, handsome Albert J. Browning, who left a $40,000-a-year job as president of United Wall Paper Factories, Inc. to become a Nelson lieutenant, moved over to the Army as deputy director of procurement. Stocky, swarthy Frank Folsom, on leave from Chicago's big Goldblatt store,* moved into the Navy's procurement division.

Ostensibly, both men were appointed by the services and will be paid by the services, but all Washington knew that they were Nelson men. Haters of red tape, all-out expansionists and good cussers, they carried short lengths of lead pipe in their hip pockets, for use if the Army & Navy clung too stubbornly to old practices.

And meantime Nelson continued to knock the frosting off the U.S. economy. He stopped production of Christmas-tree and advertising-light bulbs, of brass eyelets for shoes, ordered a 50% cut in tin cans for beer, coffee, tobacco, oil, dog food. As its first move into international problems, WPB allocated 4% of rayon production to Latin America.

Most important, in WPB's second week, was a step which went almost unnoticed outside its own offices. On Nelson's desk each morning bald Statistician Stacy May began to place a fat progress report: day-by-day, company-by-company deliveries of armaments and armament parts stacked against the quotas. In OPM, a lazy or incompetent chief could sit motionless at his desk for months without having anyone the wiser. Under Nelson's WPB, any failures should show up at once in the morning report on his desk.

*An ex-Montgomery Ward vice president, Folsom was editing Montgomery Ward's catalog when Donald Nelson was editing Sears, Roebuck's.

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