The American Mood

The feeling was in the air, like the first, tingling foretaste of fall.

Lloyds of London offered 5-to-8 that V-day would come by Oct. 31. Americans even began to think of Paris again as something real. Some day soon Americans would be going there again.

This mood of optimism, borne up on the good news flooding from the worldwide battlefronts, was the real U.S. news again last week.Washington, concerned with war-production weak spots, fought hard against the feeling--but it was a losing battle. Despite orders, regulations, speeches, newsreels, propaganda of all kinds, thousands of Americans were reconverting their lives from war to peace before peace had been declared. As realists, born of generations of realists, Americans were telling themselves that now--or very soon--was the time to start thinking about their own personal peacetime plans.

P: In Indianapolis, 22-year-old Juanita Wilson, a self-confident blonde, with some money in the bank (she could have saved more) and plenty of clothes in her closet, quit her $32-a-week war job at the R.C.A. plant. A beauty operator before the war, she now took a $20-a-week job in Paul's Beauty Shop on East Michigan Street. Said Juanita: "I just figured I wanted to have something solid to stand on after the war, something that won't blow up overnight."

P: At Douglas Aircraft's Chicago plant, the "wise guys" among the 20,000 employes were scurrying for new jobs. Some had already left: a layout artist switched to an aviation magazine; a riveter went to Inland Steel. To stop the flight, Douglas let word get out that it has a mountain of postwar orders locked up in the safe. But the exodus went on.

P: California's Department of Labor estimated that 20,000 shipyard and plane-factory employes had already left their jobs. Many were Okies and Arkies, heading back home with cash money in their jeans.

Shortage of Weapons. In Washington, Lieut. General Brehon Somervell, boss of the Army Service Forces, called a hurried press conference. With chart and pointer, he pointed out the Army's urgent needs: trucks, small bombs, radar, heavy artillery ammunition. In all, he listed shortages in 320 vital categories. General Somervell was angry. He shouted: "If we are going to keep down the cost in American life, then the cost in labor and effort for everyone back here must continue to rise until it strikes its high point at midnight on the day before the enemy's final collapse."

Three days later, War Mobilizer Jimmy Byrnes published a long, dramatic statement, arguing: "We have the enemy on the ropes; he is dazed and his knees are buckling." Then he ordered a pip-squeak move: to place ceilings on employment in all nonessential industries, hoping thereby to send 200,000 workers to war plants. The Washington Post assigned half its staff to write huff-puff stories along General Somervell's line. But the Post and the General were struggling against a tide.

Shortage of Time. Washington itself was divided. Many in the Administration wanted to begin an orderly reconversion to peace now, as against the Somervell school, who think that any talk of reconversion now is next door to treason. To the Reconversionists, General Somervell's blast seemed like a blow below the belt.

Battlefields or no battlefields, the time to start the first trickle of reconversion was already past. Ever since the 1942 victory at Midway, Washington desks had bulged with reconversion plans. Now, with V-day much nearer, the plans were still in the desks.

What few seemed to grasp was that the planning and changeover to a peace economy would be infinitely tougher, and politically more explosive, than the 1940 American conversion to war. Said Pundit Walter Lippmann: "We shall have to face fully the realities . . . which are now as little understood as were the danger and imminence of war in the winter of 1940. How little that was understood may be judged from the fact that two months before the fall of France, the House cut the number of replacement airplanes of the Army to 57, and the President did not publicly object."

Last week Congress made a fitful start to jam through some reconversion legislation, but a bitter battle was in the offing (see Congress). The Administration stood on the sidelines, pushing no overall program of its own, and the people went ahead with their own plans.

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