Youth Be Served

Into the gilded ballroom of Manhattan's Waldorf-Astoria Hotel last week trooped 3,000 members of the National Association of Manufacturers for their annual convention.

They were there to promote "New Strength for America"--their own confident combination of productive know-how, acre-straddling plants and free enterprise. But they also exhibited a sign of rare self-examination. They had invited as their guests 49 students, 32 college professors and school administrators from all over the U.S. From the younger generation N.A.M. hoped to get a new and fresh answer to the perennial question of N.A.M. and businessmen in general: How are we doing?

A Ready Answer. In three days of speeches and group discussions there was plenty of doing. Secretary of Defense Louis A. Johnson had a few encouraging words for N.A.M.'s consistent plea for economy in government. Said he: "The $15 billion budget of 1949-50 for our department will be reduced in 1950-51 to $13 billion . . . and our defenses will be appreciably improved. There will be less waste, less duplication, and more efficiency--and the taxpayer will get one dollar's worth of defense out of every dollar spent." From ECAdministrator Paul G. Hoffman there was another encouraging report: the cold war was about half won, he said. But, he cautioned, "it is the easiest half that lies behind us."

Then Brookings Institution's president, Dr. Harold G. Moulton, pointed up the responsibilities of businessmen and their government.

Said he: "Our future prosperity [depends upon] an intensification of technological progress . . . increasing productivity [and] a constantly broadening distribution of purchasing power by an ever-improving ratio of prices to wages [i.e., higher wages or lower prices]. Unless the buying power of the masses, whose wants create markets, is progressively expanding, business will have to be content with a virtually static situation."

As for government: "The American economy is not ... strong enough at present to carry the . . . mounting tax load . . . The continuance of fiscal uncertainty and instability will . . . undermine the system of free enterprise, by killing the incentives to take the risks essential to a dynamic, expanding economy."

An Ambitious Program. To preserve incentives, N.A.M. wanted the U.S. to 1) abolish present excise taxes except on tobacco and liquor, and substitute a uniform manufacturer's excise tax on all end products excluding foods; 2) limit the 1951 budget to $33.6 billion (some $11 billion below present estimates); and 3) return to the gold standard.

To promote this ambitious program, N.A.M. followed its recent policy of picking a small businessman as president. Its choice: handsome, athletic Claude Adams Putnam, 59, head of the 200-man Markem Machine Co. in Keene, N.H., who succeeds Salt Lake City's Paint-Maker Wallace F. Bennett in N.A.M.'s top elective post. Putnam got his start in business at 16 as a machine-shop apprentice, and joined Markem when it was founded in 1911. He soon became its top salesman, and in 1929, its president. Proud that his non-union company has never laid off a single man, he speaks fondly of his employees as "the Markem gang," refers to the plant's janitor as "the man in charge of cleanliness facilities."

Platitudes & Pensions. How had all of this impressed N.A.M.'s student & teacher guests? Too many of the NAMsters, the students felt, talked in such platitudes and generalities about the drift towards Socialism, the welfare state, taxes, that what they had to say lost its effect. What was needed, said one student, was a clear, fresh exposition "to the man in the street in terms of the simple why & wherefore of the price of his bread."

A further student criticism was that, in panel discussions, the NAMsters "were often unqualified to answer our questions." Said one knowledgeable girl: "I asked one of them what was the difference between socialism and social welfare, and he didn't even know that!"

One student put his finger on N.A.M.'s biggest trouble: its failure to capitalize on opportunities to catch the public's ear. For example, in private talks, students had been impressed by the quiet, sensible reasoning of some NAMsters on employees' pensions. But when Retiring President Bennett got an opportunity at a public press conference to make some of the same points, all he said was: "We in the N.A.M. feel that the whole pension system is so new and so mixed up that there is no pat answer. We have appointed a new committee to spend next year studying the whole field."

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