Fireworks at the Waldorf

The 48th annual convention of the National Association of Manufacturers assembled, 4,000 strong, at Manhattan's plush Waldorf-Astoria Hotel last week. For once, there were plenty of fireworks in the three-day session.

In the Main Ring. The biggest news at N.A.M.'s meeting came from Charles E. Wilson, WPB's Big Business Vice Chairman (TIME, Dec. 13). After he had recited some statistics on 1944 war production goals, big Charley looked right down his friends' throats and roared. Said the ex-president of huge General Electric Co.:

"We who are assembled in this room have a substantial influence on the morale of America, as well as its material strength. That spiritual or psychological responsibility is easy to evade--for who is there to check up on us? For that very reason, because we answer to no one but ourselves, our responsibility is the greater.

"I know of no other period in American history, except perhaps the Civil War, when there has been so much need for unity in our country, and so few signs of it. From where I sit in Washington it is an appalling thing to see the separate groups and cliques and special interests separating out of the main body of the American war effort in order to work for their own special purposes and private ambitions.

"Too many people are trying to position themselves for the postwar period, long before the country is out of danger, and long before our fighting men have any chance to position themselves.

"Sometimes these groups can be made to see reason--sometimes they can be browbeaten into cooperation--but by & large they represent a serious menace to the unity of the nation, to the war effort and to the lives and futures of American fighting men.

"Now we are coming into an election year, when passions and prejudices are likely to be accentuated. ... If we lend ourselves to breaking up . . . into partisan groups and cliques, we are playing into the hands of the enemy. More than that, we are jeopardizing our entire national future. Many of us in the '30s feared that a left-wing reaction would draw labor so far away from the main body of American sentiment that the gap could not be closed without a disastrous struggle. ... I am deeply alarmed today over the possibility that a right-wing reaction may draw some sections of capital so far away from our traditions as to imperil the entire structure of American life as we know it.

"This above all is a time when the industrial leaders of America owe it to their country and to themselves to practice the arts of compromise."

In the Next Ring. For the most part, Charley Wilson's passionate outburst dropped into an almost bottomless pit of editorial unconcern. But his words, coming from an impeccably Big Businessman, did not fall on deaf ears in the Waldorf's pink and gold Grand Ballroom--which contained at the time the very ears for which they were presumably intended.

N.A.M.'s second biggest news was much better publicized, much less puzzling, much less painful to those same ears. It came from the keynoter at N.A.M.'s usual $10 blue-plate windup banquet (grapefruit, mock turtle soup, roast turkey and cranberries, sherbet and petits fours--no butter), the man who makes policy for the world's biggest manufacturer: General Motors' Alfred Pritchard Sloan Jr.

Said G.M.'s lank Board Chairman: "The prewar standards of national income passed with the prewar period itself." He suggested that industry must plan to produce for a postwar national income of around $100 billion a year, v. $65-70 billion heretofore.* And, he concluded, G.M. believes so firmly in this new, star-spangled statistic that it is ready to back it with a cool $500 million of new investment in reconversion and expansion. Since business confidence is so much a matter of follow-the-leader, G.M.'s $500 million bet on the postwar world, represented first-rate psychological warfare for full employment.

Master of Ceremonies. The chief contribution of its outgoing president to N.A.M.'s big show was a redefinition and embellishment of industry's favorite cliche: free enterprise. From now on, said Frederick C. Crawford of Cleveland's Thompson Products, N.A.M. would not stand for "free enterprise," but for "free, private, competitive enterprise . . . the absence of all uncontrolled monopoly and special privilege wherever they may have been found in the past." Prior to this unmistakably official statement, free enterprise could as well as not have been interpreted--and was, by some N.A.Magnates--as freedom to restrain one's competitors in the interests of an "orderly" market.

Even more unmistakably different from N.A.M.'s usual frostily Big Business fac,ade was the attitude of its newly elected president, Robert M. Gaylord, who heads Rockford, Ill.'s small Ingersoll Milling Machine Co. Early-bird reporters flocking to N.A.M.'s press room caught his easy reply to a worried Old Guard trying to coach him on how to avoid "embarrassing questions." "They can't ask me any embarrassing questions," said Bob Gaylord blandly. Nor could they.

Blue-eyed, athletic, Minneapolis-born Bob Gaylord looks much younger than his 55 years, has the small businessman's visceral belief in competition. With 900 employes, twice his peacetime average, his simple, ungrammatical attitude toward Big Business is that "the further management gets from the job the easier it is to lick them." His company has had a profit-sharing deal with its employes since 1919, has never had a work stoppage, and has never been organized by C.I.O. or A.F. of L. (its open-shop independent union: the Industrial Employes Association). And although he admitted to being a Republican, the nearest thing to an anti-New Deal statement reporters could worm out of him was that he thought the NRA had been an anti-free enterprise experiment.

Side Shows. Still another main-ring event was a speech by J. Cheever Cowdin, chairman of Universal Pictures. Implacably conservative Mr. Cowdin, who heads N.A.M.'s implacably conservative Government Finance Committee, looked a postwar $300 billion national debt right in the face. He proposed to deal with it by subjecting the nation to a budget that would have made any loyal N.A.Mite jump out of his skin two years ago: $30 billion a year for the next hundred years.

But besides the main-ring attractions, N.A.M. had a lot more side shows than usual. Chief among them:

>A black-masked ex-member of the French Chamber of Deputies, now a member of the underground.

>The "oldest" U.S. war worker--95-year-old Henry M. Roe, who once carried messages for Abraham Lincoln, now carries them for St. Louis' Laister-Kauffmann Aircraft Corp.; the "youngest subcontractors"--Giles and Jerry Morrill (13 and 16) of Fort Wayne, Ind., who are doing precision work for the Army.

>Six handsome lady welders, et al., plus one handsome lady vice president of a big U.S. corporation (International Business Machines' Ruth M. Leach).

Finale. A new tone ran all through N.A.M.'s Second War Congress. Last year, industry's top rung spent most of its time nostalgically looking backward, left it to Maverick Henry Kaiser to make a where-do-we-go-from-here speech (TIME, Dec. 14, 1942). This year there was much realistic looking-ahead.

This year, N.A.M.'s "Program for a Better America" ended with a bang: a "peacetime pledge ... to do everything within its power to produce and distribute better goods in greater volume at lower prices to more people. . . ."

*Many economists have set the figure even higher, at around $140 billion.

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