New Boss, More Goods

WPB's Office of Civilian Requirements, headless and neglected since shy, gnome-like Arthur Dare Whiteside went back to run Dun & Bradstreet three months ago, last week got a new boss and a vigorous new policy. Off went the lid which WPB clamped down six weeks ago on any sizable increase in manufacturing civilian goods.

Under the new policy, plants with 100 or fewer employes (50 in labor-tight West Coast areas) may now resume manufacturing civilian goods in unlimited quantities, whenever they wind up their war contracts. As the civilian supply bottleneck is less the result of material shortages than of lack of facilities and manpower, this change will produce a small bonanza of farm equipment, household goods (e.g., irons, baby carriages) and textiles (children's and infants' clothes). More important, the new policy underlined a significant fact: WPB has at last taken a firm stand against Army & Navy demand for "everything-of -everything."

Dr. into Mr. OCR's new boss, William Yandell Elliott, is big (6 ft. 2 in.), barrel-chested, fond of using his booming voice. Born in Tennessee, he went to Vanderbilt University, left it to serve abroad in World War I as a field artillery lieutenant. Later, as a Rhodes scholar, he distinguished himself by 1) earning a D. Phil.,* 2) exploding a giant firecracker behind the dignified dean of Balliol College. He taught at the University of California, later moved to Harvard as associate professor of government. Trying his hand at a textbook for his classes, he found that none of his students could understand it. (In 1940, the Harvard Crimson termed his lectures "so poorly organized few freshmen know what he is driving at.") In his third book, The Need for Constitutional Reform, he boldly proposed to make over the U.S. by scrapping the states, setting up ten regional "commonwealths" along with a gigantic government holding company to help run utilities and raw material industries.

As a popular women's club lecturer in the mid-'30s he whacked Mussolini, the Liberty League, Republicans. As an all-out interventionist when World War II began, he told Harvard students that war was not much worse than "crossing the traffic in Harvard Square." In 1940 Dr. Elliott went to Washington as consultant for the National Defense Advisory Commission; the next year he became OPM's raw materials expert, loudly urged stockpiling of tin, rubber, etc. He rightly predicted that the U.S. might soon be cut off by Japan from its chief supply sources. Surviving the transmutation of 0PM into WPB, he became its chief of Stockpiling and Transportation. So good was his stockpiling job that WPB is now worrying about its surplus metals. Lately, he has begun playing down his academic past. Says the secretary who answers his telephone: "Mr. Elliott's office."

Free for All. In his new job, Mr. Elliott got off to a good start. He buttered up labor by arranging to consult with it--along with industry. He pleased factory owners by denouncing any scheme to protect competitive positions, i.e., prevent one plant from resuming civilian manufacture because a competitor was still doing war work. Small factories, which got a jackal's share of war contracts, are apparently to have the lion's share of the job of supplying U.S. civilians until war's end.

*English version of Ph.D.

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