Give Plants to Warriors

The shock-absorbent members of San Francisco's famed Commonwealth Club* heard last week one of the most radical ideas in all their oral history. The speaker was Secretary of the Interior Harold LeClare Ickes. His subject: "America's Postwar Frontier."

Secretary Ickes asked himself: What should the U.S. do with the $15,500,000,000 worth of Government-owned war plants? He answered: turn them over to the veterans of World War II to own and operate. Smoothly, Secretary Ickes explained that "we can confidently look forward to postwar chaos" if the plants are "throttled by monopoly," not kept in operation. Then:

"I know of no better way to accomplish [continued operation] than to vest ownership and control of these Government plants in the men and women who have served in the armed forces. . . . Giving to each of them a share in the ownership and control of a giant segment of American industry would amount to giving them a stake in the future of the democratic economy of America which they are fighting to preserve. It would be the most beneficial form of a bonus payment. . . .

"Perhaps the first directors would have to be appointed by the Government. Beyond that there would be no special relations between the Government and the enterprise."

Pipedream? Reporters asked: Had the Secretary talked the plan over with the President or with Jesse Jones whose Defense Plant Corporation technically owns the plants? No, he replied, the plan was still "fluid."

For all its revolutionary overtones of a strange jumble of free-enterprise socialism, the proposal was calmly received in San Francisco and elsewhere in the U.S. Manhattan's Journal of Commerce merely pooh-poohed it as absurd.

* The club's 4,850 members range from labor leaders to corporation executives. For a generation they have been soapboxed by speakers of every political shade, from Communist Earl Browder to Britain's conservative Lord Halifax. The club has heard every U.S. president since William McKinley, missing only Warren G. Harding (he died the day before he was to address it). Before it in 1932, Presidential Nominee Franklin Roosevelt made the famed speech which first blueprinted the New Deal.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.