A Little Courage

Like a bone fought over until picked clean, Senator Walter F. George's Reconversion Bill was finally passed by Congress last week and dropped on the President's desk. After more than a month of battling, there was little meat left on the bill; certainly it had few of the muscles needed to handle the Atlantean job of shifting the U.S. back to peace.

The bill provides for an Office of War Mobilization and Reconversion, in effect a watered-down version of the job now held by Home Front Czar Jimmy Byrnes--who has said he will resign when the demobilization machinery is set up. The new $15,000-a-year Reconversion boss, appointed by the President, will have the last word on the termination of war contracts and the disposal of surplus property. He will also oversee a brand-new agency, the Retraining and Reemployment Administration. Though this sounds like something big, the job of the new bureau is actually vague, and RRA may turn out to be simply the old Veterans Bureau in a new suit.

The bill leaves the No. 1 job--that of seeing workers through a possible reconversion depression--to the states. The states can tap the Federal Government only if they run out of cash to pay the jobless the benefits, which range from $2 to $22 a week. Then the money is to be lent, not given. Even these benefits are so hedged that the 3,600,000 federal employes, including thousands in U.S.-owned arsenals and shipyards, are left out in the cold. So are migrant war workers. The House trampled on a Senate proposal for the Federal Government to pay up to $200 a family to bring stranded workers back to their home towns.

Pennsylvania's level headed Representative Herman P. Eberharter best summed up the dying Congress' feeble handling of the problem. Said he: "These gentlemen fail to realize the magnitude of the shock that is going to occur in this country. . . . They are failing to look forward to the future with any vision. . . . They are failing to attack the problem now because it requires a little bit of courage."

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