Postwar Employment

In its annual meeting last week the U.S. Chamber of Commerce settled for a minimum of the American Dream: "fairly constant employment" after the war.

That phrase came from the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Georgia's Walter F. George, in one of the 70-odd speeches made in the three-day "War Council" sessions, held in Manhattan's Waldorf-Astoria.

"Fairly constant employment" more nearly expressed the postwar expectations of the 3,000 businessmen present than did the "full employment" bespoken by the Chamber's ebullient, optimistic (and reelected) president, Eric A. Johnston of Spokane. President Johnston's thesis: full employment is absolutely necessary if the peace is to be won. On this haunting subject the businessmen ranged from agreement with Johnston to approval of the Los Angeles Chamber's Frank P. Doherty: "Full employment is possible only in a slave state." But most of them were willing to let Johnston do their phrasemaking, to let him stage a somewhat synthetic "unity with agriculture and labor" convention.

American Federation of Labor President William Green appeared on the platform (for the first time), along with Edward A. O'Neal, president of the American Farm Bureau Federation, and General Electric's Owen D. Young. Green declared that labor is ready to "work, serve and sacrifice with you" for free enterprise's "ultimate triumph." O'Neal: "An artificially inflated price structure will crash and threaten the survival of ... democracy."

Disgruntled, the Chamber's die-hards lurked on the sidelines. Their most picturesque spokesman was Yale's aging (65) Economics Professor Fred R. Fairchild, who blandly remarked that the U.S. must abandon "grandiose notions of policing, feeding, reconstructing the world," give up "certain parts of the Atlantic Charter and the Four Freedoms which imply performing, indefinitely, costly services for the rest of the world and doing it for nothing." As the convention ended, the phrase resounding in most ears was neither Fairchild's nor Johnston's. It was Senator George's "fairly constant employment."

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