The Glacier Moves

The 3,400 members of the National Association of Manufacturers who trooped into Manhattan's swank Waldorf-Astoria Hotel last week were in high spirits. With lowered taxes and an upcoming boom for their products, this seemed like the best possible year for their Golden Anniversary Congress of American Industry. As sauce for this feast of good fellowship and confidence, N.A.M. invited some critical outsiders to tell it what they thought was wrong with it.

A large spoonful of chili was dumped on their plates by brash, young (26) ex-Sergeant Marion Hargrove, author of the best-selling See Here, Private Hargrove. In a speech aptly called "See Here, Private Enterprise," Hargrove talked up to the N.A.M. like a Dutch nephew telling off his stick-in-the-mud uncles.

Said he: "I find it difficult to speak to you . . . since I've never been able to figure out your purpose as an organization. ... I can't remember a single thing you've been for [or] a single con tribution the organization itself has made or a single constructive thing it's done. . . . The N.A.M. has such a bad name . . . that even when it's right about some thing it can't draw public support to it. Even when a man gets mad at the unions he doesn't side with N.A.M.

"N.A.M., to the average thinking person, I would say, means something stubborn and reactionary and obstructionist. Even when it's right, it always seems to be right for the wrong reason. In an argument . . . the opposition [to N.A.M] uses facts and logic even if it's bad logic, and your N.A.M. spokesman gets up and begins to talk about Bolshevism, the American Way, and the evil forces that are out to ruin the country; and all that old-style . . . hogwash goes out with the imprint of the N.A.M. and the apparent sanction of American industry.

"It seems to me that you have very definite and very great responsibilities and you refuse to meet them."

When Hargrove finished, everybody swallowed and forced a polite smile. One gallant NAMster patted Hargrove on the head and said: "Don't-take it too seriously. This kid's all right. He's a good boy."

The New Plan. By contrast, OPAdministrator Chester Bowles's whacking of N.A.M. for its drive to end price controls by Feb. 15 seemed almost a caress. The U.S., said Bowles, had saved $66 billion by not modifying the Price Control Act, as N.A.M. had suggested 18 months ago. N.A.M.'s demand that controls be lifted now, when inflation pressure is at its greatest, "is a risky, reckless, gambling policy which in all likelihood would produce a national disaster."

Of all the outsiders, Politico Harold E. Stassen, Republican ex-Governor of Minnesota, gave the N.A.M. most to chew on. Candidly admitting that he has often disagreed with N.A.M., he fully agreed with its championing of free enterprise, suggested a ten-year plan to make it work better (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS).

New Attitude? These critical straws from outside were not the only indications of how the wind was blowing. Onetime N.A.M. president Frederick Coolidge Crawford, bitterly hated by organized labor, but proud of his personal labor relations in his own open shop plants of Thompson Products, suggested that 1) it was management's job to increase productivity; 2) management was often at fault for labor troubles. Said he: "You sit in your office wondering what your workers are thinking. Do you know that the answer to your human-relations problem lies within the four walls of your plant? Go into your factory. Call your workers together. Ask them about their problems. Explain the relationship between wages and job security and productivity. You will be amazed at the response. . . ."

Likewise, outgoing President Ira Mosher, who had once snorted at the very thought of getting together with labor on a labor-management charter (TIME, April 9), now took a more sympathetic view of President Truman's suggestion for fact-finding boards in strikes. He approved the plan in general, but whittled down its scope by restricting it to disputes "vitally affecting public health and safety," separate boards for each case.

New President. For its new president, the 133-man N.A.M. board chose an example of what free enterprise has meant in America's past: Robert Ross Wason (rhymes with ah son), 57, president of Manhattan's Manning, Maxwell & Moore, Inc. (cranes, hoists, safety valves, etc.). Born a poor boy in Ashtabula, Ohio, Wason got his first job at eleven, worked his way through high school as a janitor. After graduation he worked as a longshoreman, blacksmith's helper and dock hand, and cub reporter on the Ashtabula Independent at $15 a week.

Lured by a $3 raise, he shifted to the advertising department, later worked for several Cleveland ad agencies. By the time he was 40, he was making $20,000 a year and was ready to move to Manhattan. He did so, as president of Manhattan's Clarke Lighter Co., just in time to have it collapse under him during the depression.

When he got a job at Manning, Maxwell & Moore, which operates plants in Bridgeport, Boston. Muskegon and Tulsa, he decided he would rove no more. The company was long on engineering skill, short on merchandising. Wason supplied the merchandising so effectively that sales increased 17-fold in the next ten years.

At his first press conference he voiced contemporary business doctrine when he said: "Mr. Bowles has failed to understand the productive capacity of America."

New Hope. Those who love the N.A.M. as a rock of conservatism might well have been disappointed this year. Those who dislike it for the same reason might well have been encouraged. Thanks to the flop of last year's $1,000,000 advertising campaign (which featured "Guts" and "Griping"), N.A.M. was convinced that something more was needed, had shaken up its entire publicity policy to get it. As their Executive Vice President Walter B. Weisenburger said: it was time N.A.M. stopped shouting to the public to help save free enterprise. What N.A.M. should do is to show the public how free enterprise can do a better job than any other economic system.

Even the long list of resolutions, which NAMsters, like all conventioneering Americans, love to pass, had a realistic ring. Example: when N.A.M. called for balancing the federal budget, it sensibly asked that it be done, not at once, but by 1947-48 (when Treasury Secretary Vinson thinks it can be) and at a reasonably liberal figure of $20 billion.

These were small signs. But in the huge, unwieldy mass of 14,300 NAMsters. any change had to come slowly. The glacier was inching forward.

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