Regimentation

Businessmen took a look at a joint Army-Navy-WPB letter last week and braced themselves for the final wrench to real regimentation.

"Where a certain minimum of civilian needs must be met," it read, "it may become advisable to concentrate [civilian production] ... in one or two plants and require all other manufacturing units in that industry to pool and exchange their machinery for ... maximum war production. . . ."

Such a pooling of orders has already been partially imposed on the stove industry (TIME, May 25). Its extension to many other industries on an all-out national scale requires some wartime modification of the anti-trust laws. Over that formality four Congressional committees the Army, the Navy, WPB and the Attorney General's office are already tangled in a fine row.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.