Time for a Change?
In the big, ornate hearing room of the House Ways & Means Committee last week, a businessman took over the chairman's table. "For the first time in American history," joked Clarence Randall, chairman of Inland Steel and head of the President's Commission on Foreign Economic Policy, "Congress has made a mistake. The clock is three minutes slow. The hearings are being run on the chairman's watch, which, I am embarrassed to say, is a Swiss watch."
Not all of Randall's colleagues were amused as he thus began his hearings on U.S. tariff policy. Two of them were Congress's vociferous high-tariff advocates-Colorado's Senator Eugene Millikin and Pennsylvania's Congressman Richard Simpson, who want to keep out such things as Swiss watches. They _ listened with displeasure as leaders of industry, labor and agriculture trooped up to demand freer trade and lower tariffs as the only sensible means of cutting foreign aid and easing the dollar shortage.
Only one witness gave much cheer to the high-tariff stalwarts. He was O. R. Strackbein, an ex-A.F.L. representative, who now, as a paid agent, runs an outfit called the Nationwide Committee of Industry, Agriculture and Labor on Import-Export Policy. Strackbein lashed out at such free-trade advocates as Henry Ford II: "A voice from the automobile industry [sneers] at the 'pinpoint dislocation' of the 'small groups' that might be injured by freer trade. To Mr. Henry Ford, evidently the cattle and sheep and dairying industries are so many pinpoints ... managed, no doubt, by pinheads . . ."
Senator Millikin himself began firing potshots when one of Detroit's leading free-traders, John S. Coleman, president of Burroughs Corp. and chairman of the Committee for a National Trade Policy, took the witness stand. Coleman, noting that the West Virginia town where he grew up used to make buggy whips, testified that it now "employs four or five times the number of people" making home freezers. Similarly, he suggested that U.S. industries not efficient enough to compete with foreign goods might also try making something else. Asked Millikin: What would he do about Colorado's sugar beets, wool and mining products, all of which could be "produced and landed and [sold] in this country cheaper than we can?"
"Senator," replied Coleman, ". . . if we put 'm' in place of 'c,' you are spelling out my whole state of Michigan. We have sugar beets ... we have manufacturing . . . and we have deep-pit mining of natural copper up in the Northern Peninsula
. ." He added that Michigan's copper mines could not compete with other U.S. mines and were closing down. But industry and the state had spent $25,000 on a survey and found other uses for the men and communities. He cited the dislocation of 4,000 woodworkers at Iron Mountain, Mich, when wooden station-wagon bodies went out of style. "Today we have produced at Iron Mountain chemicals, cast-iron forgings, castings and electronic instruments, and we are employing about half a thousand more than were employed in the station-wagon business . . ."
Other telling arguments: P: Said the A.F.L.'s Research Chief Boris Shishkin: abolition of all tariffs would not displace more than 300,000 U.S. workers and none of the liberalizations proposed could displace more than 90,000 at the most. C.I.O. Education and Research Director Stanley Ruttenberg proposed that Government subsidies could be provided to help relocate such displaced workers, and help factories get readjusted. P:Chicago's Meyer Kestnbaum, president of Hart Schaffner & Marx and chairman of the Committee for Economic Development's trustees, said: "The dislocation resulting from gradual tariff reductions will ordinarily be less than our industries experience from domestic causes, such as new technological processes."