The eloquence and vision of Henry J. Kaiser helped to save the 47th annual convention of the National Association of Manufacturers, held last week in Manhattan, from being a dud.

Meeting at the end of a year when U.S. business has turned in an unprecedented record of productive achievement, the Association had as great an opportunity as could be desired to prove to the people that business is not only capable of producing instruments for war but also is capable of creating jobs for ultimate peace.

This, unfortunately, was precisely the problem the old guard of the N.A.M. failed even to face. The tone was set when retiring President William P. Witherow delivered a confusing tirade against the already confused ideas of Henry J. Wallace. Cried Mr. Witherow: "I am not righting for a quart of milk for every Hottentot, or for a TVA on the Danube. ... I am not making tanks or guns to help a people's revolution ... I am making armament to help our boys save America."

Trouble with Bill Witherow's Fourth of July rhetoric was that in concentrating on the irrelevancies of Mr. Wallace, he was making himself doubly irrelevant. Equally irrelevant was many another droning oration which failed to advance the ball beyond the bitter business-Government-labor disputes of the mid '30s. Not so Henry Kaiser. Said he:

"The time has come for American industry to take the leadership. . . . The first and primary essential (of the postwar world) is employment, a nationwide, yes, a worldwide opportunity for all who want to work. If freedom to produce is taken literally, it will not be difficult to show that it comprises all the freedoms so recently and so eloquently expressed."

Having thus struck the keynote of production, Kaiser could make short work of the Wallace-New Deal plans for getting it: "There is no bounty sufficient to accomplish the task. There is nothing in the philosophy of the handout that can lead to anything but despair for the post-war world which is so rapidly approaching."

But in four great fields, argued Kaiser, U.S. industry can in fact create jobs of an unprecedented scale. They are: 1) housing, where there is a pent up demand for 9,000,000 housing units; 2) transport, where the pent up demand for automobiles is immense; 3) the need for a vast, modern highway system; 4) adequate medical facilities and care for the health problems of the industrial age. In addition Kaiser pointed out: "The Atlantic Charter is no bilateral guaranty of British-American supremacy. Let it be said again that there will never be any significant prosperity in America as long as there are great hosts of people living on the margins of poverty."

Whatever the minor defects of his ideas (such as that auto companies accept war bonds in payment for future cars), Kaiser had at least taken a positive stand. He had said what many a businessman has been fumbling to say, and what many a disgusted progressive of the N.A.M. hoped that it would say. But N.A.M. gave no endorsement to Kaiser's ideas. It got on with the business of electing next year's president, chose small, dynamic Frederick Coolidge Crawford, president of mightily successful Thompson Products Inc. (makers of aircraft engine valves). A diligent worker, a first-rate manufacturer, Crawford's business statesmanship has consisted in brushing off fears of war in 1939 as so much newspaper talk, vitriolically attacking the New Deal, violently denouncing any and all forms of regimentation of "Free Enterprise," without affirmatively defining how free enterprise is to survive and prosper.

Having thus armed itself against a still unconquered future, the N.A.M. adjourned.

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