Action, Action, Action!

Each day's news came like a dose of gall & wormwood, each morning's headlines made the morning coffee bitter. The U.S. looked at the management of the war, and found it bad.

Some people found it bad enough to be frightening. In New York City a committee called Citizens For Victory (most prominent officers: Poet Stephen Vincent Benet, Fiscal Expert Harry Scherman, Editor Walter Millis) wrote an advertisement this week under the glaring banner: WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH THIS COUNTRY? The ad went over the same barren, dreary ground as the daily headlines: Our own young boys are dying bravely for us; so are Russians, British, Chinese; but in Washington the spectacle of pork-barrel politics is as unblushing as ever. The ad denounced the farm bloc as "those to whom V means Votes in November." Other culprits: the labor lobby, the anti-labor bloc, the silver bloc, all kinds of blocs. Said the Citizens For Victory, taking shame for the nation: "December 7--Bataan--our sailors gasping for air and drowning in oil--our boys diving their lines out on Jap battleships--all have made no difference. Surely this is not the voice of the real America at war."

The advertisement blamed the whole terrible situation on the people, who were condemned for apathy-as-usual. "Wake The People!" screamed the Citizens For Victory.

But the people were awake. They just did not know how to do anything about the mess. The ad seemed out of date the minute it was published. Throughout the U.S. there was no longer "habitual indifference to Governmental management." Governmental management--and mismanagement--was burning the people up. But what could they do? They had thrown a vaudeville dancer out of Civilian Defense; they had got themselves a one-man management of war production; they had kicked up a furor that killed Pensions-For-Congress.

But there were more heads to the hydra than any Hercules could lop: > Strikes, though still infinitesimal, were up 85% from the month before.

> Carelessness, stupidity and waste had bungled the management of the U.S. stock of critical metals. For instance, although the U.S. has ten times as much copper as Germany, U.S. war production lags miserably for lack of it.

> While others starve, the U.S. has so much wheat that it is being left to rot on the ground.

>The U.S. has staggering quantities of meat, more than ever before. But even in the U.S. many places suffer this week from a meat shortage.

> Chiefs of the Government, key Administration figures, from the President on down, have been and are spending incalculably valuable time and effort on New York State politics.

> The great Rubber Scandal, far from being solved, moved into an even dizzier confusion, a Wonderland where jabberwocky jive talk about buna, butyl and guayule was the only language spoken.

> The national clamor [Gallup poll: 49%] for a united high command of the Army & Navy, had been answered by the Presidential appointment of a "generalissimo" whose job Mr. Roosevelt now defined as that of a mere "legman".

Wage Control? In Alaska, to the daily shame of the U.S., sat the Japs. Across the Don in Russia the Nazis fought their way; Rommel was getting up steam again in Egypt; and the formerly isolationist Scripps-Howard newspapers clamored for an all-out air attack on Germany which would thus avert the bloody necessity of the U.S. coming squarely to grips with the enemy. The British were beginning to believe their leaders had deceived them in their promises (or hints) of a second front this year; the desperate Russians had begun to tell their people that everything depended on their own soldiers, tanks and planes, not on outside help.

In the midst of such a dreadful week as this, when the WLB wage-raising decision in the Little Steel case had started in motion many & many a new labor demand for higher wages, when the threat of inflation got more & more real by the moment, an unprecedented delegation paid a call on the President. "Historic" the President called it, for figuratively arm-in-arm came the famed heads of A.F. of L. and C.I.O. together with President Eric Johnston of the Chamber of Commerce and President William P. Witherow of the National Association of Manufacturers. They said they wanted to do everything possible to help win the war. The President was delighted. Same day, the two head men of labor went back to the White House--this time, significantly, unaccompanied by businessmen. It looked as if that united front had been more front than unity.

Time to Rest. Congressional leaders had already warned the President not to try to get any firmer grip on wages and farm prices. They warned him that he could not, told him to use executive and persuasive powers he already has. At week's end he had apparently decided to compromise, somehow, with the public demand for action. Anyway, Congress coolly went home on a five to six weeks' vacation, for a little political fence mending.

But in the Senate too had come vigorous demands for action. Up rose Georgia's Walter F. George: "A great many people say that if SG-&-SO is done we deal with this problem in a realistic way we shall be retired from public life. I think that is of almost no consequence. I do not think it is important if any of us comes back to the Senate." George urged Congress not to wait for the President, but to take things in hand itself.

In such a demand, from such men, there was yet hope. A leading Wheeler-Isolationist, Colorado's Senator Ed Johnson, strangely got together with a leading Roosevelt-New Dealer, Oklahoma's Josh Lee, to propose a Senate bill to create a new military supply board to direct immediate construction of cargo planes--thus indicating their impatience with a war effort which fails to do the right things fast enough.

What the U.S. wanted was action: all kinds and nothing else but: military, political, economic. As the week began, they could see in their newspapers a picture of the kind of action they most wanted: a periscope-eye-view of a Japanese destroyer sinking, taken through the periscope of the U.S. submarine that had torpedoed it. More of that, said the U.S., and less politics.

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