Manpower, Unlimited

The U.S. prepared to mobilize for total war. This meant manpower-and woman-power; every man, woman, youth and maid, of every race, color and creed who is not lame or halt or blind. The move was one of potentially vast scope: it meant, if carried all the way through, a shake-up of U.S. life so deep, so wide, so far-reaching it could not yet be grasped. It might take another year or more of total war to bring the earthquake shock full home.

To start the great job, the President created a War Manpower Commission. He named as boss the man who had drawn up the first tentative plan: Federal Security Administrator Paul Vories McNutt. And to Manpowerman McNutt he gave an executive order that was a basic blueprint for regimentation-if the demands of total war required regimentation. The 132,000,000 U.S. citizens, unsure and shaken, prayed that Mr. McNutt would use his great power wisely.

Manpower, the nation's greatest asset, was being wasted--by lack of coordination, in government and out, by the draft, by unregulated enlistments of men who were more useful in their jobs than in the services, by industrial competition for skilled and able managers. The order would stop all that-as fast as McNutt could act.

For months, ideas and plans for such a manpower mobilization had floated across the White House desk, to sink out of sight in the President's "dead basket." The clear-cut necessity for such a mobilization had been sidetracked by the usual scramble of power politics-and by the President's reluctance to set in motion such an upheaval. Then a fortnight ago four White House advisers (Supreme Court Justice William 0. Douglas, Budget Director Harold Smith, and Brain-Trusters Judge Samuel I. Rosenman and Anna Rosenberg) met in secret sessions, emerged with a final plan. Last week the President moved, named as chairman the man who had always hankered after the job. WPB's Sidney Hillman, who had also wanted the job, was shunted into a corner as "special assistant to the President on labor matters."

McNutt, whom organized labor had once opposed on account of his past labor record, in the past two years had carefully made his peace in that quarter. Now the sun rose in glory upon politically ambitious Mr. McNutt. While the full scope of his authority was not entirely clear, men who expertly analyze White House orders were sure that snow-crested Paul McNutt, who had rejected a sure Vice Presidential nomination in Chicago in 1940 because Franklin Roosevelt wanted Henry A. Wallace, had received a compound-interest reward.

His War Manpower Commission was to be a nine-man board, to include the Secretaries of War, Navy, Agriculture & Labor, WPB Chairman Nelson, representatives of the labor-production division of WPB, the Selective Service system, the Civil Service Commission. In all matters of manpower these mighty ones were directed to defer to Chairman McNutt.

To him was also given power over Selective Service's system of classifying draftees; his own Federal Security Agency employment service and training schools; WPA's placement and training work; Civil Service job placing; Railroad Retirement Board Employment Service; Bureau of Labor Statistics (the darling of Madam Perkins); the Labor-Production Division of WPB; Civilian Conservation Corps; Department of Agriculture's farm-labor statistics, migratory farm labor camp programs, "and other labor-market activities"; Office of Defense Transportation's labor supply activities. Authorized first to estimate the manpower requirements of industry, agriculture and the armed services, and to coordinate all available labor-market records, McNutt was empowered to proceed thence into a practically boundless area. He may:

>"Establish policies and prescribe regulations governing all Federal programs relating to the recruitment, vocational training and placement of workers. . . . >"Prescribe basic policies governing the filling of the Federal Government's requirements for manpower, excluding those of the military and naval forces, and issue operating directives. . . .

>"Formulate legislative programs . . . [for] the most effective mobilization and utilization of the manpower of the country; and, with the approval of the President, recommend such legislation as may be necessary. . . ."

Included in the Manpower Commission's profound and plenary power was authority to step between the Army and essential labor (farmhands, skilled workers); authority to transfer men to war industries, and to jobs where they are more urgently needed; to see that war contracts are placed in areas where there are pools of unemployed; to establish priorities which will control the labor supply, just as priorities control the materials supply. Factory owners as well as factory workers will come under Mr. McNutt's sway: he may require employers to use skilled workers only at jobs where such skills are required.

Implicit in the order was Federal power to strip a non-defense plant of its personnel, keep it from turning out nonessential goods by leaving it without workers. Said Mr. McNutt: "Most of the 13,000,000 war-production workers who will be placed in jobs during the next year will come from those who are now employed in nonwar industries."

And the order involved more power than mere manpower. Said a White House statement: "The executive order . . . definitely includes woman power, and a special announcement will soon be made with respect to the voluntary registration of women throughout the U.S. for their mobilization in the war effort."

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