Poverty in Boom

Like a thin, cold rain, letters poured down on every Government office that deals with defense, from the Department of Agriculture to the White House itself. The letters came from farmers, businessmen, little people of all kinds--victims of the biggest production boom in U.S. history. Some of their complaints were trivial, some were serious. But the thing they complained of was always the same: shortages.

OPACS alone had over 300 letters on file last week. A sampling of them rings every change on the old poverty-in-the-midst-of-plenty paradox:

^Five hundred glass-container workers in Baltimore faced firing when Swindell Bros, found it could get no fuel oil.

^ Collinsville, Conn., where 400 workers at the Collins Co. (machetes, axes, other tools) keep the community alive, was frantic over a shortage of steel.

>-Pella, Iowa's biggest plant, the Rol-screen Co. (venetian blinds) faced wholesale layoffs for want of small die castings (aluminum, zinc).

^ Wrote the head of Sol-Ray Engineering Co. (sun-heated water systems) from Day tona Beach, Fla., begging for copper: "Is our business going to be ruined along with the investment? If so, what is a man of 50 with a family going to do. . .?" This week, copper went under full priorities.

^ Without brass, Providence, R.I.'s costume-jewelry manufacturers were on the verge of closing down.

^ In Cold Spring, Minn., the Cold Spring Granite Co., with 370 workers (annual payroll: over $600,000) and 300 dealers, found it would have to go out of the monument business by next January unless it got steel for a granite-finishing plant.

^ In Los Angeles, the Footsure Co. ("safety bathtub mats") tried to get priorities on rubber on the grounds that its product is a "safety device."

^ In Godeffroy, N.Y., Mrs. Emil Myers (who wrote straight to the President) couldn't cultivate her acre of vegetables for lack of a gasoline tractor motor; her husband, who enlarged his dairy "to aid in national defense," couldn't cultivate his feed crops for lack of i) a cultivator, 2) a team of horses, 3) help skilled enough to drive the team if he had one.

^ The aluminumware industry has laid off 3,413 of its 16,000 employes. An 0PM-industry conference over this was a complete dud. It would take unavailable new equipment, the industry decided, even to switch over to manufacture stainless steelware, let alone to get into defense production.

So far, OPACS' answers to these wails have been either "make formal application to OPM's priorities division" (which virtually means "no") or, especially where aluminum is the vital necessity, a bleak "we cannot undertake to assist you." Sometimes complainers are referred to their local Defense Contract Service organization. Rarely has this resulted in the most logical remedy: subcontracting of defense orders.

Last week the American Business Congress, sounding board for small manufacturers, met in Manhattan and sent off a blast to OPM insisting that they be allowed to participate in the defense effort, thus escape "wholesale extinction." They called for mandatory subcontracting, pools of small plants for defense production, coordinated allocation of civilian supplies, control of "unwarranted accumulation of 'priority' materials." While the Business Congress named no names, this might have been directed at automakers, who have had little trouble getting enough supplies for full production up to now. President Roosevelt himself (in a letter to Michigan's Representative Dingell) deplored the plight of small non-defense business, the prospect that huge, defense-glutted companies will emerge from the war bigger than ever.

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