War Efforts

Said one elder statesman in Washington last week: "When the Japs land in San Francisco, there will be a real shake-up." Meanwhile the war effort pooped and boggled along. Washington was gloomy over defeats in the field, and wretched over its own confusion. The press was angry. Things that happened:

> WPBoss Donald Nelson finally announced the establishment of 24 industry committees, designed to make each industry's gears mesh with the war effort, picked 24 industry chiefs. Elder Statesman Bernard Baruch and many other experts had urged this for nearly two years.

> In the heart of downtown Washington, erection was rushed at emergency tempo on a $600,000 building, to house Lowell Mellett's Office of Government Reports, the glorified clipping service which digests newspapers for busy bureaucrats. The Washington Post in a front-page editorial called it "The Great Boondoggle" of the war, pointed out that Congress had specifically refused to appropriate money for the building. The Post also dubbed it "Mellett's Madhouse." Mellett's defense was that the work of his bureau had expanded, and anyway the President wanted him to have the building.

> At a dinner in Washington, sponsored by the New Republic to celebrate the ninth anniversary of the New Deal, a group of high-up New Dealers (including Mr. Justice Hugo Black, Senators Pepper of Florida, Mead of New York, Hill of Alabama, Murray of Montana, Sidney Hillman, et al.) heard Attorney General Francis Biddle. He declared that the New Deal had been successful "because it is a political party tied up with the labor movement under an able political leader."

He drew applause when he urged New Dealers not to suspend politics during the war but to keep up the political fight for liberalism "because the opposition is going to fight whether you do or not."

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