Bigger & Bigger

Up in the Senate last week rose Montana's James E. Murray, wealthy, New Dealing chairman of a special Senate Committee on Small Business. In his hand he had a 359-page report on "Economic Concentration and World War II." Its gist: Big Business, fattened on prime war contracts, was now bigger. He underlined this with a bit of demagogy:

". . . concentration is the forerunner of collectivism . . . are we preventing collectivism when . . . corporations controlled by five financial interest groups* hold nearly one-third of our capacity; when 2% of the concerns account for 62% of the total manufacturing employment; and when big corporations are granted the patent rights on the fruits of [wartime] scientific research conducted at the taxpayers' expense?"

Other champions of small business have also been alarmed by the trend towards bigness. The 250 largest U.S. corporations in 1944 operated some $38.5 billion worth of manufacturing facilities, two-thirds of the U.S. total. This included $8.9 billion of usable federally financed plants on which the giants hold options to buy. In 1939,75,000 U.S. manufacturers together owned only $39.6 billion worth. The thing to do, said Senator Murray, was to raise this year's appropriation for the Department of Justice's Antitrust Division from $1,700,000, already approved by the House, to $7,000,000.

Nobody denied the statistics in the Murray report. But, actually completed in January and based largely on data covering only the years through 1944, it was open to criticism. Big business got the bulk of war contracts because it alone had the tools, technicians and resources to mass produce planes, tanks, etc. War's end and the disposal of surplus plants, notably, aluminum producers, has radically altered this picture in many places. Moreover, small businesses closed by war have reopened. Fortnight ago the Department of Commerce reported a net increase of 400,000 new firms in the last two years.

Nevertheless, the report had again raised a pressing problem which the U.S. must solve: How can the real benefits of bigness, mass production and low prices be retained without barring the door to new competition?

* J. P. Morgan & Co. & First National Bank of N.Y.; Kuhn-Loeb & Co.; Rockefeller, Mellon and Du Pont families.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.