Booby Trap
Senator Burnet Maybank, in shirt sleeves and red-eyed with fatigue, marched across a deserted Capitol corridor and pounded on a chamber door. It was long after most Congressmen had gone home. There was a muffled response from inside the room. In a molasses accent, South Carolina's Maybank shouted: "Aw right, we-ah ready." A group of scowling members of the House emerged from the chamber and rejoined a delegation of Senators in another room, there to put their tired heads together again over the provisions of the Defense Production bill--the bill to control the nation's wartime economy.
In theory, they were only ironing out differences between the House and Senate bills; actually, behind closed doors--where much of Congress' work is really done, after the oratory dies down--they were devising a law. They had been arguing their differences for almost two weeks. In joint meetings, when they got to shouting, Chairman Maybank would bang the table with a water glass and order, "Quiet down." Meeting mornings, afternoons and, frequently, nights, the joint committee of 16 men last week finally reached agreement.
Their compromise was quickly and overwhelmingly passed by both houses and sent to the President.
Adequate & Makeshift. The bill gave Harry Truman more authority than he had asked, but nowhere near the authority which Bernard Baruch recommended in his dramatic statement a month after the Korean war began (TIME, Aug. 7). In some respects the bill was adequate; in one respect it was a sorry makeshift.
The President got the power to set up priorities on all defense contracts, dole out materials as he thinks necessary, require firms to take defense orders, and requisition materials and property. Hoarders were threatened with a $10,000 fine or a year in prison or both.
The President was granted $600 million to lend as he sees fit to expand the industrial war effort; another $1.4 billion would be provided for the same purpose later on. Firms could be exempted from antitrust laws, when, working in combination, they furthered the defense effort.
The President was also given authority to set up a war board to handle labor disputes, authority to limit transactions in real estate. The Federal Reserve Board was given power to clamp down on easy-term installment buying.
The conferees managed to purge the bill of all the politically inspired "special advantage" amendments (such as Kenneth Wherry's clause guaranteeing reasonable profits to each joint of the meat industry) which had been written in by the Senate. Congress provided that most of the bill's authority must end June 1951, and set up a joint Senate-House watchdog committee to keep an unwinking eye on the President.
No Uncle of OPA. Where housewives hoped for help, there was only a vague and empty promise of it. The bill contained no workable method for price control.
Baruch had recommended rolling wages and prices back to their pre-Korea levels. That would be impossible, Maybank argued. Many firms, for example, had laid in big stocks at high post-Korea wholesale prices, now had to unload them at high post-Korea retail prices or take ruinous losses. Besides, the mere job of getting across-the-board enforcement started, Government experts figured, would cost $400 million, require 65,000 more federal workers. "I said when we started out," said Maybank, "that I wouldn't be the uncle of any damned OPA."
The conferees rejected the all-out amendment by the Republicans' Wherry and John Bricker which would direct the President, if he applied any price controls, to apply them all--and along with them, freeze all wages. Instead they gave the President power to impose selective price controls as deemed needed, but with a stern proviso: He must also freeze wages in the industries involved. Thus if steel prices were frozen, steelworkers would have their wages frozen, even though the price of their clothing and food might still be going up. Such so-called selective controls promised more confusion than stability. Bricker called the provision a "booby trap" for the President. It was also a booby trap for the people.
On other fronts: