The Government's Week

Last week the U. S. Government did the following for and to U. S. Business:

P: Continued to "prime the pump" (see p. 8).

P: Continued to mull over the railroad problem. Virtually everyone in the U. S. from linemen on the B. & O. to the editorial staff of the Wall Street Journal had his eye on Senator Burton K. Wheeler, whose Senate Committee on Interstate Commerce has the job of drafting railroad legislation. Senator Wheeler's first move was a conference with representatives of railroad operators and workers. Ignoring the suggestion of wage cuts, the conference took up the following proposals: further RFC loans to the roads, revision of rate-making procedure, regulation of water transport, elimination of Federal barge lines, passage of the Long & Short Haul Bill, Government payment of full rates for its traffic on land-grant roads. Reiterating his opposition to a subsidy and his belief that many roads should "go through the wringer," Chairman Wheeler disbanded the conference with an announcement that while it would be possible to put through emergency legislation at this session of Congress, a long-range program was out of the question. This week Senator Wheeler confers with a group of Government officials. P: Considered three radically new activities for RFC--financing underwriters, financing utility expansion, financing businessmen with burdensome inventories (see col. 2).

P: Discussed legislation to divorce marketing from other phases of the petroleum industry. This is supposed to be a New Deal objective as one result of the conviction, in Madison, Wis. four months ago, of 16 major oil companies and 30 of their officers of fixing the market price on petroleum products at the expense of the public. A Senate subcommittee is now considering a bill introduced by Senator Guy M. Gillette of Iowa to divorce oil production and sale much as the New Deal divorced banking and underwriting in 1933. Last week President J. Howard Pew of Sun Oil Co. went to Washington to protest. Denying that the present setup was monopolistic or unjust, he declared: "I resent such an indictment. There's nothing I consider more un-American and unsportsmanlike than the fixing of prices." P: Pressed its antimonopoly trial of vast Aluminum Co. of America. Year ago last week the Department of Justice filed suit for the dissolution of this $236,000,000 foundation of the Mellon empire. By one legal maneuver after another ALCOA delayed the trial until it was finally scheduled to start May 2 in Manhattan. Three weeks ago the Department of Justice filed a petition to subpoena ALCOA's files on all transactions relating to its growth; seeking to limit the final trial to as few issues as possible, ALCOA promptly fought the attempt to make this a blanket case. Last week's hearings on this point, therefore, looked like the last skirmish before the trial.

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