Catalytic Agent

(See Cover)

One afternoon early last October a happy, jaunty Irishman, whose bantam-sized body houses an almost inhuman store of nervous energy, strolled into his four-room apartment in Washington's elegant Shoreham Hotel. With sly casualness, fully aware of the dramatics of the occasion, he said to his wife: "Well, Maude, I've just given up my job." The job was that of Associate Justice of the Supreme Court--which had seemed, 16 months before, like the pinnacle of achievement to a man born on the wrong end of famed, aristocratic King Street in Charleston, South Carolina.

When Franklin Roosevelt appointed

James Francis Byrnes to the Supreme Court in June 1941 he remarked that he wished he were Solomon: he would like to cut Jimmy Byrnes in two, put half of him on the Court, leave half in the Senate, where Jimmy had been a super-politician, a knowing, super-successful leader. Now Franklin Roosevelt had called Jimmy off the bench and installed him in a White House office as Director of Economic Stabilization with such broad authority that only Franklin Roosevelt remained more powerful. Perhaps Franklin Roosevelt now wished he were a super-Solomon and could divide Jimmy into three.

In the Left Wing. In the three months that Jimmy Byrnes has functioned as the U.S. economic czar of World War II, the U.S. people have heard but little more of him than when he operated within the cloistered walls of the highest court. Every morning, shortly before 9 o'clock, a White House car calls at the Shoreham, takes Jimmy to his high-ceilinged office in the White House east wing (Jimmy delights in calling it the left wing). Jimmy sits at a huge, unlittered desk with one telephone.

Jimmy hardly moves from this room all day. Like his boss at the other end of the White House, he has lunch at his desk at 1 o'clock. He talks frequently with the President by telephone, sees him two or three times a week. Most of his day is taken up with conferences with the great layer of civilian and war-agency administrators below him; there are telephone conversations with Senators and Representatives, reading of reports and memorandums, plotting of strategy with his seasoned idea man, Benjamin Victor Cohen. (Except for idealistic Ben Cohen, Jimmy Byrnes's staff consists of but three others: Donald Russell, his onetime law partner in Spartanburg, ex-Washington Reporter Samuel Lubell, and corpulent Office Secretary Edward Prichard.) At 7 o'clock the White House car takes Jimmy Byrnes home for dinner; usually he takes a brown Manila paper envelope full of reports with him. Almost his only relaxation is walking his wire-haired fox terrier, Whiskers, along Washington's tree-lined streets at night.

Order 9250. In its simplest terms, Jimmy Byrnes's job is to rivet a lid on civilian economy that will prevent an uncontrolled inflation from breaking out. In the words of Executive Order 9250, he is directed to "formulate and develop a comprehensive national economic policy relating to the control of civilian purchasing power, prices, rents, wages, salaries, profits, rationing, subsidies and all related matters"; and is given the absolute power to order any Government administrator to carry out the points of that policy.

It is a unique job, a terrible job, a job that would frighten almost any man. In no other country does one man carry so many back-breaking duties on his shoulders. Only snow-haired Bernard Mannes Baruch, now a frequent Byrnes visitor, ever had comparable responsibility in the U.S. when he was head of the War Industries Board in World War I--and the strain on him had not yet become unbearable by the time the war ended.

It is a job of a million details which range from the imposition of a broad fiscal policy down to reducing the number of milk deliveries; it calls for action in any sudden civilian crisis (such as the Eastern fuel shortage), involves umpiring any major dispute between warring Government agencies. It touches U.S. economic life at its periphery and at its core, in a year when that life is rolling along at the fastest clip in history.

The broad outlines of the U.S. wartime economic policy were already drawn when Jimmy Byrnes took his job: ceilings on prices, rents (in defense areas), wages, salaries and profits; rationing of critical commodities; increased taxation and encouragement of saving. As the nation's pay envelope grew bigger & bigger, as the bulging of the nation's arsenal cut production of civilian goods more & more, the problem was reduced to one of crucial simplicity: now there are shortages of everything except money.

Best estimate is that this year income payments, after the deduction of personal income taxes, are likely to reach some $118 billion. If the U.S. people save as much as last year, they will put some $25 billion into savings accounts, war bonds, insurance premiums, payment of debts and mortgages. Washington hopes to cut the amount of purchasable civilian goods and services back to $75 billion. This leaves some $18 billion rolling around loose, and nothing to spend it on--money which may cheerfully be used to break price ceilings. Economists call this the inflationary gap; to Jimmy Byrnes it must seem less a gap than a yawning and terrible crevasse.

Fateful Six Months? That is the crux of Jimmy Byrnes's task: to prevent these loose, jangling dollars from cracking the nation's economic life wide open. As of this week, he hoped to attack it with a pay-as-you-go tax plan and compulsory savings; an attack in which he would need all the help the 78th Congress, convening this week, could give him.

It will be a tough fight, both in & out of Congress. The new Congress is certain to examine closely any Administration proposal; from another angle, its farm bloc is primed for an attack on farm ceiling prices (see p. 77). There will be other difficulties: higher taxation and compulsory savings will inevitably reduce the amount of normal, voluntary savings. It may thus be that Jimmy Byrnes will be forced to take another tack: gradual breaks in the price ceilings and a controlled inflation. So more and more the question arises: What manner of man is this, who is face to face with so many and such awesome problems?

Self-Made. Jimmy Byrnes, now 63, could well say that the rigors and sacrifices of a wartime economy can best be understood by a man born to simple wants. Jimmy was born to near-privation; his father, a municipal clerk, had died several months earlier. His mother taught him shorthand; at 21 he won a competition as court reporter at Aiken, S.C. He kept the court job for eight years, studied law at night. His eyes were on politics. In 1908 he was elected solicitor (district attorney); two years later he made the jump to Congressman, winning by 57 votes.

Fourteen years in the House made Jimmy a seasoned legislator; from a vantage point on the Appropriations Committee he absorbed thousands of details of Government operations, learned much about his country. He learned much about war in 1918 as a member of the subcommittee which passed on all war appropriations.

Harmonizer, Fixer? Jimmy Byrnes's real talents for politics were best displayed when he reached the Senate in 1930. His talents were those of a compromiser; his friends call him a harmonizer; his enemies, a fixer. A celebrated Byrnes statement of principle: "You've got to sacrifice your opinion to your party on minor questions, or you'll lose all your influence on big issues. But if you start giving in too much on the big issues you might as well go home."

Never a political theorist, Jimmy Byrnes's value as a Senator lay in his ability to get Administration programs translated into action. When Secretary of State Cordell Hull was pressing for renewal of the Trade Agreements Act in 1940, Jimmy Byrnes--who carried a complete catalogue of every one of his colleagues' likes, dislikes, habits, thoughts and prejudices in his mind--took a quick survey, found the agreement would not pass the Senate because of opposition of Western mining and beef Senators. He bluntly told Cordell Hull: the beef and copper trade provisions with Argentina and Chile would have to go, otherwise the agreements would founder. Jimmy seemed to take no side in the controversy: he merely knew what could and could not be done. Secretary Hull gave in.

As de facto leader of the Senate, much of Jimmy's work was done in a small, private room just off the Senate corridor. The room held nothing but a desk and a few chairs; the desk held nothing but ash trays and, sometimes, a bottle of Scotch. Here Jimmy Byrnes best exercised his persuasive powers and charm.

They were used to great advantage after the start of World War II, when Jimmy pushed most of Franklin Roosevelt's war measures through the Senate. In earlier years he had, with equal determination, opposed many a Roosevelt project (Wage & Hour Law, the 1938 purge, relief spending), but the two men never lost their respect for each other. He was a Roosevelt-before-Chicago man in 1932; campaigned on a Roosevelt & Byrnes platform for re-election in 1936; next to Harry Hopkins, he did more than any man to stage-manage the third-term nomination in 1940.

Man In a Blue Suit. Striding down the street, compact Jimmy Byrnes looks like Jimmy Cagney doing an impersonation of the late George M. Cohan. He has some of the Cohan philosophy: live a clean, honest, extrovert life, get your work done, don't gossip or meddle in other people's business. Although he loves to tell salty tales of the Old South, no one has ever heard him tell an off-color story, few have ever seen him laugh at one. He once described his wants as: "Two tailor-made suits a year, three meals a day, and a reasonable amount of good liquor." The suits are almost invariably blue; his favorite dish is "real" gumbo, a well-stewed concoction of tomatoes and okra.

When Jimmy Byrnes went to the Supreme Court, there were raised eyebrows in legal circles because he had never before sat on the bench. He surprised His colleagues by his passion for work; he brought to the Court a strict sense for interpreting the will of Congress. Jimmy Byrnes was restless on the Court; he longed to be in the thick of his country's battles. But in leaving what must have seemed to him an exacting job, he jumped into one a thousand times more grinding. For to attempt to keep stable the economic life of the greatest country in the world during the greatest of its dislocations calls for the pooled knowledge of the greatest of its economic and political thinkers and a will to fight till hell freezes over.

Jimmy Byrnes's friend and World War I counterpart, Bernie Baruch, had a vast store of knowledge gleaned from business experience; once he had the facts on which to base a judgment, he backed that judgment with a furious will. Jimmy Byrnes need never apologize for not being Bernie Baruch. His varied talents lie in other directions. If his will has more often been bent toward compromise, he has, at least, bent it toward securing action. No pure theorist could fill his shoes; Jimmy Byrnes has been the catalytic agent who could fuse warring factions into achieving some goal.

He has been the smooth worker, the student of human relationships, the advocate of getting things done (perhaps at a cost), the shrewd estimator of the public mind, the charming advocate of the cause he believed in, the great believer in common sense. For this job Byrnes's very great talents may or may not be enough. No warring country has ever clamped a tight lid on inflation; perhaps no one man can do it in the U.S. Jimmy Byrnes will soon know.

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