The Man at the Wheel

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Among all the complicated engines contrived by man, few have titillated the imagination like that noble automotive artifact, the Stanley Steamer. Nobody, according to early legend, knew how fast it would go, but thousands of dustered and begoggled motorists believed that a man with nerve enough to hold its throttle open after his hat flew off could keep it accelerating indefinitely. It was rumored --though here the mind reeled and the senses boggled--that it might reach 100 miles an hour.

Last week, after a decade of the greatest industrial achievement man had ever known, many a citizen had gotten the same feeling about the productive capacity of the U.S. The idea that one nation could successfully jack up the whole Western world, put it on wheels and tow it along, perhaps for decades, was almost too fantastic to grasp. Here was the U.S. with the Korean war to fight, with India to feed, with Europe to supply, arm and encourage, with enormous armed forces to be raised and equipped at home. It was a gigantic project--a productive effort completely without precedent in human affairs.

But most Americans don't know their own strength. To the men who man and manage the nation's production lines, the project, enormous as it was, did not seem in the least fantastic. To Defense Mobilizer Charles E. Wilson, the man who had been seated at the wheel of U.S. production, it was, quite simply, a job which could be done because it had to be done (see EDUCATION). As the nation's Mr. Production, he has not the slightest doubt that U.S. brain and muscle can accomplish anything that is asked of it--and double the accomplishment next year.

All This & More? At 64, Charlie Wilson is a magnificent specimen of an authentic 20th Century phenomenon, the American production man. He sees nothing astounding at all in the fact that the country has, in the five years since the world's greatest and most exhausting war, both manufactured and absorbed, among other things, 28,412,392 automobiles and trucks, 75,706,000 radios, 17,265,000 washing machines, 20,816,000 refrigerators, 110,940,000 men's suits, about 5 billion undergarments.

He is neither surprised nor particularly dazzled by the fact that the U.S. has been able at the same time to pour billions in dollars and goods into the war-torn countries of Europe and Asia. He is calmly convinced that the U.S. can now turn to building $50 billion a year worth of tanks, planes and guns with only a temporary halt in the flow of new houses, bigger television screens and better automatic toasters. "The productivity of the U.S. is so tremendous," said Charles Wilson recently, "that if we started an all-out economic mobilization today, we could practically fill Texas with war machines by 1952."

It was the kind of phenomenon that Charlie Wilson had learned to take almost for granted. In seven years as president of the General Electric Co., he was ringmaster of one of the biggest industrial shows on earth: a colossal sprawl of 115 factories which annually produced 200,000 different items (from miniature .06-gram light globes to 100-ton generator shafts) worth more than $1 billion, a talented industrial giant which could reach out and run the Hanford atomic works for the Government as well. During World War II, as the strong man of the WPB, he broke aircraft production bottlenecks and cleared the way for the 1944 record of 96,369 military planes. When he returned to G.E. after the war, he promptly set to raising its output by a staggering 385%.

Simple Man. Charles Wilson, like the rest of his breed, is a simple man: a big, enormously strong fellow (6 ft. 2 in., 212 Ibs.) who looks and moves like an old heavyweight fighter lightly disguised by thick glasses and well-cut suits. There is little pretense about him, even as to appearance--he once was a heavyweight club fighter. He devotes himself, 12, 14, 18 hours a day, to business. He is a meat-and-potatoes-and-apple-pie man who smokes big cigars. He flies to "get there faster." Most of his weekends belong to his family, to the Scarsdale Golf Club and to the Baptist Church. He is a fair and friendly man, but one who roars and pounds desks when he loses his temper.

To say that he has lived,, grown and succeeded without being touched by the complexities of modern life would be the grossest exaggeration. The one word--business--connotes a staggering compendium of codes, practices, techniques and philosophies. Charlie Wilson's head is full of them. He is also a Republican serving a Democratic Administration, a free-enterpriser at work administering controls, a critic of Harry Truman, the President, who has sneaked off to Washington for years to visit with Harry Truman, the man.

But his great talent is nevertheless a kind of simplicity: the ability to reduce all the vast complexities to simple terms --the belief that the right machines, manned by the right men and operated by the right principles, can do almost anything. For Charles Wilson those right principles can be summed up just as simply in a phrase often misused and often self-consciously avoided. He is not in the least ashamed of talking about the American Way of Life.

Big Job. Today Charlie Wilson has more power over the U.S. economy than has ever been placed in the hands of anyone but a President. He is chairman of a mobilization board which consists of six Cabinet members and commands agencies which can regulate and control almost every aspect of U.S. life. Unlike the World War II days, when his job was simply to produce everything the military asked for, he is now charged as well with keeping the civilian economy from flying to bits in the process.

On his big, uncluttered desk he keeps a special folder called his "weather-eye file." There are laid out some of the massive problems for which he must find the answers: getting a manpower policy under way, food prices, pushing scientists into finding substitutes for critical minerals such as cobalt, stockpiling.

Last week Mobilizer Wilson was tooling up to tackle those jobs and scores more like them with the same air of conviction he has maintained since he was old enough to hold a wrench or twist a valve.

Power & Freedom. He was born into the era just before the turn of the century when U.S.A. was clearly beginning to spell POWER as well as FREEDOM. One of the first of the industrial miracles of the times, the wondrous Brooklyn Bridge, laid its shadow on his early life. His father, a bookbinder named George Wilson, was among the throngs at the opening ceremonies, on May 24, 1883. A woman fell from a perch on one of the piers, the crowd began shoving and trampling, and the elder Wilson was badly crushed. He died three years after Charlie was born, leaving his wife, Hannah, to support her son on the pittance she earned as a practical nurse.

Charlie had a hard boyhood. It was a day when Manhattan's West Side was a tough, rough place. The barkeep "Mallet" Murphy hammered people into dreamland with his bung starter. The "Gophers" and the "Parlor Mob" roamed the gaslit streets. Vice and violence were luridly prevalent. Charlie learned to fight. But his mother had antidotes for the seamy environment outside their flat. Every Sunday morning she took him to Sunday school at the Presbyterian Church on 31st Street. She told him: "Do what is right and you'll never go wrong." On top of that,

Charlie had things other than hell-raising on his mind.

"I always wanted to make a lot of money," he recalls. "And I wanted to make it quick." He went after his goal with a fierce single-purposeness that left little time for anything but work. He sold papers--but only extras on which he could make 300% profit. During the summer, when he was eleven, he got a job at a gin mill and fishing resort on Long Island, and assumed, among other duties, the task of bottling Old Popskull from a back-room hooch barrel. In his spare time he went clamming. By rowing ten miles a day and wrestling a pair of gigantic steel tongs, he made $150.

When he was 13 he quit school, went up to 34th Street and got a job as office boy at the foul-smelling factory of the Sprague Electric Co. The job paid $3 a week and provided an idol--Bill Ruete, the plant superintendent, a huge hulk of a man who wore a handlebar mustache and a glittering ruby and diamond stickpin. The new office boy told the boss he had two ambitions: to become manager and get a diamond stickpin. That was 1899. He never took a backward step.

Sprague Electric became his school, and big Bill Ruete a sort of boss, teacher and father rolled into one. Ruete not only showed him the secrets of the company's products--hoists, cables, motors, electric fans--but also taught him how to tie his tie, to keep his fingernails clean, and pushed him into studying. As he grew, Charlie Wilson took lessons in shorthand (and learned phonetics to compensate for his Hell's Kitchen English), night-school courses in accounting, engineering and mathematics. He studied physics. He was a shipping clerk at 15, plant accountant at 16, paymaster and purchasing agent at 18.

But if Bill Ruete steered him, Charlie Wilson proceeded under his own steam. He was not only ambitious and bursting with vitality, but a natural leader who could never bear to take second place. Recalled one of his associates with a wry grin last week: "He's a great team man--so long as he can be captain."

The Coal Pile. Young Charlie Wilson's successes did not all stem from brain work. The Sprague plant was a tough place--all arguments were settled with fists beside the basement coal pile, and the losers were provided with ice to reduce black eyes and swollen noses. Charlie not only battled by the coal pile; to work off steam after his 59-hour week he fought in stags and smokers, where he could pick up an occasional $5 purse.

At 21 he was making $25 a week, was married, and had--with a sense of triumph that only a poor New York boy would understand--moved his wife and mother uptown. He was also an employee of a big corporation: G.E. had bought up Sprague Electric. The changeover made little difference at first. But during World War I (Wilson was turned down by the Army because of his bad eyesight) the Sprague branch opened a shop to build aircraft instrument panels. Charlie ran the show.

By 1923 he was one of the corporation's favored sons, a man marked for tempering and testing under the hard eye of G.E.'s stern President Gerard Swope himself. A year later Bill Ruete died. Just before he passed away, he said: "You know, Charlie, that stickpin of mine has been the secret of your success. You worked your head off for it. So here it is." Charlie locked the pin up in a box and, with a characteristic gesture, added a provision to his will, directing that the pin go to Bill Ruete'c grandnephew.

The Springboard. Wilson had been moved to G.E.'s great plant at Bridgeport, Conn., a change which gave him the luxuries of which he had dreamed: a house with a lawn and trees, golf, a Peerless automobile ''built like a locomotive." At Bridgeport, too, he landed on the springboard which was to propel him to the final dizzy pinnacle of the G.E. hierarchy. President Swope--in one of the sweeping changes of policy which have always been one of the keys to American productivity --decided to take the services of electricity to the people.

G.E.'s moneymaker was the heavy works at Schenectady; it turned out small appliances, often at a loss, only to increase the use of electricity and thus provide a demand for its great generators. But Swope sensed a new and enormous market--25 million people, he believed, were ready for mechanical servants which could be plugged into a light socket: coffeepots, irons, toasters, dishwashers, ranges, home freezers, alarm-clock radios. Charlie Wilson, first in the unfamiliar world of sales, then back in the world of production, rode the rising comber of G.E. appliances.

He stayed in Bridgeport for 14 years--probably the happiest years of his life. In that time, things like washing machines, ironers, refrigerators (it was Wilson who took the cumbersome coils off the top of the G.E. refrigerator, streamlined it, and made the housewife covet it) became some of the mainstays of G.E. Charlie Wilson made them--made more of them faster and better. It was a production man's dream.

In 1937, he was ready for the next step. Tapped for command, he was moved to G.E.'s gold-domed building on Manhattan's Lexington Avenue. In 1939, Swope resigned; Charlie Wilson, his handpicked successor, became president of the G.E. colossus at $175,000 a year.

Shop Man. His 40 years of scaling the heights had made few basic changes in him. He had learned endlessly. He had met and made his way among the mighty. He had forced himself to become a public speaker, a painful process in which he had tempered, though not dropped, his West Side accent (he sometimes produces an astonishing Harvard "a").

But he was still a "shop man" with a limitless interest in prowling through plants and greeting machinists by their first names. The boy from Hell's Kitchen had never found much time for social life; he and his wife seldom went out, seldom entertained. His work was still his life, and he drove other men to work simply by example--by his own almost fearful enthusiasm, energy and capacity for toil.

His one escape from the world of machines and production charts was still the religious faith his mother had first given him on Manhattan's rowdy West Side. It was something he never dramatized, but he had never lost a strong sense of duty to the church. He had become a Baptist in his teens, had taught a Sunday-school class of Chinese children. Later, at Bridgeport, he had organized and conducted a course for young men in comparative religions. Now, in suburban Scarsdale, he headed a drive to pay off the church mortgage.

Quick Change. Gerard Swope had centralized G.E. manufacturing. Charlie Wilson, certain that times were changing, set out to decentralize G.E.'s authority--and to make the planning, manufacture and sales of every product an integrated operation. World War II suddenly switched him from this huge job to a huger one--making G.E. into a war industry. And in the middle of that, Franklin Roosevelt asked him to come to Washington to work the bugs out of the WPB.

He had been there once before for two months as one of General Hugh Johnson's assistants on NRA. He hated Washington, hated its confusion, its backbiting, its hordes of jet-propelled reformers. But he dutifully gave up his G.E. job and went back, still hating it, took his punishment and his $8,000-a-year Government salary, and did his damndest to break the nation's production jam. He was under the authority of Donald Nelson, a man he came to dislike cordially, and with whom he violently disagreed, particularly about Nelson's plan for early reconversion. As one of the biggest of Big Businessmen, he was fair game for jealous New Dealers. But he discovered that he could operate in Washington. Painfully, almost unwillingly, he got a new education.

Part of his successes were simply due to his capacity for decision and his instinct for sweeping aside triviality. He refused to stoop to the Washington weapons of gossip and rumor. But when Columnist Drew Pearson wrote that he was eavesdropping on Navy Secretary James Forrestal with a special electronic device, he angrily threatened to sue--not Pearson, but each of his 500 newspapers--and forced Pearson to print a retraction which Wilson wrote himself.

Tropical Fungus. In Wilson's absence, G.E. had grown like a huge, tropical fungus. There had been 34 plants with 76,000 employees and 29 million square feet of space when he went to Washington. There were 69 plants with 170,000 workers and 41 million square feet of space when he got back. And six months later, G.E. began running the Hanford atomic plant. There was nothing he could do, in good conscience, about avoiding the atom project, although it bothered his religious scruples to associate so closely with a force akin to hellnre. But the sight of G.E., overgrown, overweight, and facing the disturbances of reconversion and a competitive market, stirred him to prodigious effort.

He set out to achieve his $2 billion gross (as compared to $412 million in 1940). He threw himself into the task with that all-but-appalling subjugation to business which is the hallmark of the big U.S. executive. His lunches were business lunches. His dinners were business dinners. His speeches were business speeches. Each & every postwar summer he made ten separate trips to a G.E. summer camp near the Thousand Islands to reach those of G.E.'s 6,000 executives who were brought there in batches; he had to make ten separate addresses.

This sort of thing was simply the lighter side of the job. He also made decisions, some of which--like his insistence on cutting the prices of G.E. products during 1949 because he felt the company had a moral obligation to help stem inflation--reverberated through U.S. industry.

His planning, effort and toil were not wasted. By the end of last year, he had achieved his goals.

The Answer. One Sunday morning last December, as Charlie Wilson was dressing to go to church--concentrating on getting his necktie tied the way Bill Ruete had taught him--the downstairs telephone rang in his eleven-room Scarsdale house. After a moment the Wilson maid announced, with some fluttering, that the President was calling.

Charlie picked up the phone--wondering, despite himself, if by any chance his friend, neighbor and business compatriot, Sidney Weinberg, could be pulling his leg. But the voice on the phone was Harry Truman's. He wanted Wilson to come to Washington immediately.

Wilson hesitated. Then he told the President that he was just starting to church. Could the visit wait until the next day? It could. On Monday Harry Truman told the man from G.E. that the country needed him. "I want an answer," the President said. "I want it quick, and there is only one answer, and that is yes."

Wilson laid down his conditions--full authority, full responsibility. The next day the President told him they would be granted. Charlie Wilson said yes. Back in New York, he resigned from G.E. and packed a bag. Within the week he was hard at work as a servant of the people.

Last week, after only a month and a half at his new job, Wilson had already drawn a sporadic fire of criticism. Old New Dealers, who remembered him from other days, whetted their knives, and whispered that the Administration had sold out to Big Business.

But few of his critics quarreled with the size of his talent--Jim Carey, chairman of the C.I.O. Electrical Workers, a man who disagreed violently with G.E. labor policies, was quick to say that Charlie Wilson belonged "on the first team."

One of thousands of delighted U.S. businessmen put it a different way: "We started winning the war the day Charlie Wilson went down to Washington again."

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