The Furnace Front

"I'm not God. I can't make anthracite that's not there. And I can't produce miners." Fuel Boss Harold L. Ickes made these modest admissions last week as he plunged into a new Washington feud, and as thousands of Americans got colder & colder, with no coal in sight.

When the October coal strike caved in, the coal consumers hoped for the best. Long before last week they were shaking numb fists at John Lewis, Harold Ickes or their coal dealers. In the East there was little anthracite for householders. The 1944 prediction was that the U.S. will be 30 million tons short of its hard & soft coal needs for the year. Quipped Ickes: "This country can fuel all the people some of the time and fuel some of the people all the time. But during war we can't fuel all the people all the time."

The War Manpower Commission blamed the shortage on the strikes. But stubborn Harold Ickes had believed all along that if he. had been given a free hand to deal with John Lewis the coal strike could have been averted by granting the miners $1.25 more a day. Therefore he snorted last week that WMC is to blame for lagging coal output. He charged: 1) a halfhearted recruiting campaign for more miners failed because WMC at the same time was recruiting for a high-paying war industry; 2) 200 miners transferred to the northwest coal fields quit when they arrived, and got jobs in shipyards.

Ickes embargoed shipments of hard coal west of Erie, Pa., asked the Army to cut coal usage by 50%, and began a search for 50,000 miners.

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