Tsar Kanzler

For the first time ever the U.S. auto industry has a tsar: broad-shouldered, 6-ft., Ernest Carlton Kanzler, high-voltage president-on-leave of car-financing Universal Credit Corp. The scepter was handed to him by War Boss Don Nelson, and with it went the huge job of converting the auto industry to 100% war work.

Both Washington and Detroit agreed Nelson had picked no mere throne-warmer. Kanzler started off as a Detroit lawyer in 1915, moved into the Ford orbit a year later when he and Edsel Ford courted (and later married) sisters. With ack-ack rapidity, Kanzler became Ford Motor Co. production manager, then director, then vice president. From Big Bill Knudsen (who then worked for Ford), he picked up production dope never taught in a law school. But Kanzler was always a lawyer, never a down-in-the-shop production man. So in 1926 he became executive vice president of Ford-controlled Guardian Detroit Bank; two years later he organized Universal Credit Corp. to handle Ford dealer loans. When U.C.C. was sold to Commercial Investment Trust in 1933, Kanzler stayed on as president.

If Kanzler was stunned by the vastness and complexity of his new job last week, he did not show it. Right after he got the green light, he piled aboard the Red Arrow for Detroit, there set up temporary, wire-partitioned offices on the ground floor of the Federal Building. Then he rushed to Detroit's huge Masonic Temple, laid down the law to 1,400 auto and auto-parts moguls. Said Kanzler: "We must have at once an all-out war economy."

As Nelson's deputy, Kanzler has the power* to rip machine tools out of G.M., hand them to Ford; he can take brains and manpower from Packard, give them to Nash. Whether such pooling would be attempted was undecided this week. Detroit dopesters expected Kanzler to ring himself with specialists: Chrysler's fast-moving Eddie Hunt for tank production, Ford's burly Charles Sorensen for bombers, G.M.'s Ormond Hunt (no kin to Eddie) for ordnance work.

*Asked what specific authority gave him such powers, Nelson replied: "Who's going to sue us?"

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