Davis Week

Few weeks in the war had brought the U.S. so much troubled news on the home front. Newspapers could scarcely keep up with the wild swirl of domestic events: edition by edition, the big, black headlines shifted.

The stresses of girding for war finally took their toll. As the summer heat cooked the land, strained tempers reached boiling point. Race riots broke out in Beaumont, Tex.; shortly the bloodiest in years was raging in Detroit.

But the biggest news was in Washington and, by a queer coincidence, it centered around three men all named Davis.

>The biggest crisis was a new coal strike, with 530,000 miners out of the pits. There shaggy, humane William Hammatt Davis, chairman of Franklin Roosevelt's War Labor Board, bore the pressure.

>An even greater crisis brewed in food. There Chester C. Davis, the new Food Czar, his good intentions thwarted by old mistakes and continuing delays, worked and warned, threatened and pleaded, debated whether to resign in self-defense or continue out of patriotism.

>In Congress, the old feud between the President and his legislative branch had flared into the kind of revolt that had sapped the nation's strength in two previous great wars. There Information Director Elmer Davis was a chief victim.

These men were the storm centers last week. Their trials and tribulations, their successes and failures, were also the nation's.

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