A Sense of Urgency

In a week when U.S. troops were ordered to stand or die in the mountains of Korea (see WAR IN ASIA), and when other trouble spots in the world were alive with peril, Washington was planning as if the most important problem was how to avoid disturbing things at home.

There was every sign that the country was well ahead of its Administration and its representatives in Congress in realizing the danger, and in preparing to make whatever sacrifice was necessary.

Total or Creeping? Some of Washington's trouble was an argument over words. Should there be "total" or "creeping" mobilization? The distinction was more apparent than real. Sensible mobilization --even a large-scale one--had to be orderly, and therefore gradual. Just as a new automobile begins on the drawing board, progresses through the ordering of materials and dies before assembly lines can be set up, so mobilization had to proceed by degrees. First, military needs had to be restudied and clearly stated--what Korea needed, what was necessary to put out brush fires in other places, what would be required in case of all-out war; then orders had to go out to industry to provide the arms and equipment for men called up. Then would come the scurry for materials, the setting up of production lines. Some of these steps had been anticipated, but not thoroughly enough.

The gradual nature of mobilization was no longer at issue. The real question under debate this week was how to guard against the inevitable dislocations that even gradual mobilization would bring.

Lectures or Actions? There was a clamor of voices saying different things. Senators like Robert Taft, always cautious about increasing the powers of the President, argued that he did not now need the authority to allocate and restrict and might never need them. Harry Truman himself asked for moderate powers, seemed to hope that by lecturing capital, labor and consumers, he could get by. Men like Bernard Baruch argued that the longer the grant of full powers was postponed, the harder it would be to invoke controls when they were needed.

Steelmakers got into the discussion (see BUSINESS), seemed to be lined up somewhere near the Truman position. Yet even though steelmen felt sure that by voluntary rationing they could supply defense needs and a cut-down civilian demand as well, their plan bore no preventive of a grey market in steel.

Already prices were shooting up in dozens of spots. Already the U.S. economy was at a high point of production and consumption. Soon it would have another $15 billion and probably more of Government spending added to it. Yet the President was only asking now for $5 billion more in taxes to pay the bill. Even with gradual mobilization, the danger of inflation was already clearly apparent. What

Bernard Baruch, and apparently most of his fellow citizens, were saying was that the President had better have the power to head inflation off, whether he himself thought he needed it or not.

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