Famine to Feast

The West Coast, hopeful of a great postwar future for its $190,000,000 war-born aluminum industry, has recently been beset by a horrid rumor. It was whispered that WPB, wallowing in an aluminum surplus, was already planning to shut down many a West Coast plant. Last week the rumors got a solid grounding. The Office of Defense Transportation suggested to WPB that to effect "maximum" savings in transportation, some four-fifths of the West Coast's low price aluminum production would have to be stopped. The raw material, alumina, is another burden on the West's overloaded railroads.

West Coast Congressmen charged down on WPB. From Washington's Senator Homer T. Bone came dark mutterings of an "international cartel" seeking to throttle the new industry. But the situation smacked less of an international cartel than of an international aluminum surplus.

Whittle a Club. Since World War II began, the U.S. Government, faced with its enormous aircraft expansion program and fearing that Britain's aluminum industry would be bombed out, has poured $500,000,000 into expanding the nation's aluminum manufacturing facilities. U.S. production has rocketed from 327,000,000 lb. in 1939 to the current rate of 2,100,000,000 lb. yearly. Booming production in Britain and a slash in armed force requirements has rolled up the surplus.

Three weeks ago WPB cautiously began to cut back production. Before long, six eastern plants will be partly or completely shut down. U.S. production will be cut some 14%--a round 300,000,000 lb., almost equal to the top prewar year's poundage. Pleas to divert excess aluminum to civilian uses have brought a stock WPB answer: no manpower.

To date, no West Coast plants have been shut. And WPB took pains to explain that the ODT survey was only part of a nationwide checkup. But WPB also ominously predicted that, by the end of the year, one-quarter of U.S. aluminum-making facilities will be shut down. Against the possibility that further cutbacks may hit the Coast, Western Congressmen are whittling a political club, aimed at aluminum imports from Canada.

Ready to Swing. The U.S. has been getting some 40,000,000 lb. monthly through a deal Jesse Jones's Metals Reserve Co. made with the Aluminum Co. of Canada, Ltd., subsidiary of Aluminium, Ltd.,* when the U.S. was still aluminum poor. RFC handed out $69,000,000 as advance payment on 1,370,000,000 lb. of aluminum.

With the cash, Aluminum of Canada expanded its facilities on Quebec's Saguenay River, helped the U.S. over the aluminum hump with quick shipments from its reserve. But Aluminum of Canada still has some half-billion pounds to ship, and has a hard & fast contract requiring the RFC to pay a 5-c--a-lb. penalty if the contract is canceled.

So far, WPB has justified importing aluminum, while cutting back U.S. facilities, on the ground that the closed U.S. plants were using power from coal. The closing of a single plant alone saved a monthly 70,000 tons of coal. But West Coast Congressmen know that no such reasoning applies to their hydroelectric-powered plants. They are keeping their club ready to swing.

*For three years, Thurman Arnold, then Assistant Attorney General, tried to prove in an anti-trust suit still pending before the U.S. Supreme Court that Aluminium, Ltd. was a subsidiary of Alcoa. In his decision Judge Francis G. Caffey of the U.S. District Court in New York held that there is no financial connection between the two companies.

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