Bloodless War

Out of the long struggle for wartime power in Washington, a team finally emerged last week to take command of U.S. economic warfare over the world: Vice President Henry Agard Wallace and his right-hand man Milo Perkins. Their Board of Economic Warfare was nine months old; but the power given them by the President and the importance of their seats in his cut-down War Cabinet were not only new but big.

BEW, started, built and run by the Wallace-Perkins team, now took full stature with the Army, the Navy and Donald Nelson's War Production Board. By executive order, BEW took stockpile control from the slow hands of Jesse Jones. BEW took the final say on international trade away from the State Department, the first successful raid by the New Deal on Secretary Hull's demesne since 1933.

In the field it once shared with a half-dozen other agencies, BEW is the new boss: over imports of rubber and copper; over the freeze-out of the Axis from foreign markets; over deciding where U.S. bombs must drop to cripple Axis production; over help to friendly nations by sending them what they need.

Little Acorn. BEW began only last August as a 50-c- edition of Britain's Ministry of Economic Warfare. All it had was Wallace, Perkins and a problem: in the delicate, murderous, bloodless warfare that is half diplomacy and half business, the U.S. was taking a bad licking.

The Axis, whose State and business are synonymous, always moved in a straight line. Its businessmen abroad had one job: to win the war. They grabbed war-essential raw materials in exchange for cameras or money, without figuring the price. They let everything else go, foregoing nickel-nickel peacetime profits for the great rewards of war.

But to the U.S., diplomacy, business and war were three different things. The U.S. lagged in setting up stockpiles, sold scrap and oil to unfriendly nations.

Wallace and Perkins had a hard time setting Washington afire. BEW's zeal for stockpiles was muffled in asbestos by Jesse Jones. Its zeal for mixing diplomacy and business was iced by the State Department. BEW had great plans to cut off oil from Spain, get useful chrome instead of useless gold from South Africa; the State Department cooled them off in a hurry.

Big Oak. For all his detachment, Henry Wallace knows how to handle himself in Washington clinches. This time he had potent help from Donald Nelson and quiet, able Budget Director Harold Smith. Last week's executive order lifted Wallace above wrangling. Henceforth Jesse Jones must sign any check Wallace shoves at him. Henceforth the State Department may enter only formal protests.

Wallace, who will soon resign from WPB's board to give full attention to BEW, already has a hand-picked staff of 1,100,*swarming all over a new apartment building on Washington's Q Street. Above all, he has Milo Perkins, 42, of Milwaukee, Wis.

Stocky, slit-eyed Milo Randolph Perkins, instead of going to college, sold newspapers, magazine subscriptions, fruits and vegetables, gunny sacks. At 23, risen to sales manager for Bemis Bros. Bag Co. in Houston, Tex., he quit to start his own business. At 35, he was making $20,000 a year.

Perkins tired of making gunny sacks, and evangelism burned in his blood. He sat down and wrote a Nation article excoriating his fellow capitalists for shortsightedness. He wrote a bashful, deferential letter to Henry Wallace, asking for a job in the New Deal. Offered $5,600 a year as Wallace's assistant in the Agriculture Department, he snapped at it.

H. A. and Milo. When he arrived in Washington in 1935, Perkins was just a routine curiosity: a successful businessman who had embraced the New Deal. But after he thought up the food-stamp plan for giving surplus food to poor families -- a scheme that pleased grocers as much as relief clients -- he was a sensation. This was one New Deal program that worked without a squeak from anyone.

Wallace and Perkins became devoted friends. They threw boomerangs on early morning walks along the Potomac, conferred daily at their offices. Perkins had the tough executive ability that Wallace lacked. Wallace had the long-range vision that drew Perkins' first bashful letter.

When BEW was set up last summer, with Wallace as chairman, Perkins was in bed, recovering from an abdominal operation that nearly killed him. But until he was up & around, organization of BEW had to wait: Wallace would have no one else for the job of executive director.

*Fired from BEW last week was balding Dr. Maurice Parmelee, attacked by the Dies Committee for writing a book on nudism in 1927. BEW said that his job had been abolished in reorganization.

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