Fear of the Future

Pint-sized, grey-haired Arthur D. Whiteside, the 61-year-old President of credit raters Dun & Bradstreet, last week came out as a spokesman for all U.S. businessmen who fear the future. Fresh from a year as WPB's Chief of Civilian Requirements, he spoke to the potent American Retail Federation (representing 500,000 retailers) at its annual meeting in Manhattan's Waldorf Astoria. His thesis: the U.S. Government should control civilian goods production "on the basis of 1939" for two to three years after the war.

This was the same awful fear that panicked the U.S. into theeconomy-of-scarcity regimentations of the late unlamented NRA. For Mr. Whiteside's consuming fear--a fear shared by many--is that all-out production of peacetime goods during the transition from war to peace will glut the postwar market. "If we let manufacturers loose now to produce as much as they want to," he said, "I don't know what we would do at the end of the war." (Behind this fear was another one which constantly agitates WPBigwigs: that an early-bird reconvert would get an unfair jump on his competitors unless his production were restricted to his share of the prewar market.)

The Rebuttal. The retailers, whose bread is buttered on the side of selling more goods, naturally thought this kind of talk dangerous nonsense. Their official rebuttal came from the American Retail Federation Chairman Fred Lazarus Jr.* Said he: "The essence of reconversion is continuous employment." No manufacturer has a "vested right" in tomorrow's market because of past performance.

According to Lazarus, the lid of Federal control should come off at once whenever and wherever civilian goods can be turned out, or Government surpluses released, without interfering with war production. As for glutting the market, he reminded fearmongers that postwar production must be vastly greater than ever before. His clinching argument: "We cannot get a $135-billion national income out of 1939 quotas set on an $80 billion economy."

The Verdict? Though the debate is nowhere near settled, there are growing signs that the final verdict will lean in the Lazarus direction. The Baruch Report (TIME, Feb. 28) supported that viewpoint. This week the Senate's hardworking Truman Committee did likewise.

In the third annual report, the Committee flatly stated: "The bulk of the initial [war] equipment and supplies will have been manufactured within 60 to 90 days. . . . We may expect cancellations or cutbacks . . . within a few months to exceed new contracts." Then, the Committe roundly damned what Lazarus had called "a system of quotas or cartelization."

Concluded the Truman Report: "The Committee believes that we should have confidence in the free democracy for which the war is being fought." In other words, stimulation of future competition will be better for the U.S. economy than protection of past competitive positions.

*He is also vice president of Columbus, Ohio's largest store, F. & R. Lazarus & Co., and president of John Shillito Co., one of Cincinnati's biggest department stores.

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