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"There is only one answer--controls," said Defense Mobilizer Charles E. Wilson last week. "I hate the word--so do you. But there is no other way. Voluntary methods will not work. That has been proven. The power of law must be invoked . . . for prices, rents and wages--for whatever controls are necessary to prevent inflation, to promote production for defense and provide a fair distribution of commodities among all our citizens . . . We must proceed with courage, speed and forthrightness."

There was no longer room in the mobilization high command for opponents of immediate price and wage curbs. Mobilizer Wilson called Economic Stabilizer Alan Valentine to his office and served him with an ultimatum: come up fast with a workable plan for controls or else. Valentine put in a distress call for the price czars of World War II days--Leon Henderson, Paul Porter, Chester Bowles--and conferred earnestly with them for two days. He patched together some suggestions and sent them to Wilson. They were not enough. With a flick of his wrist, Mobilizer Wilson got Valentine fired and installed in his place Washington-wise Eric Johnston, $125,000-a-year boss of Hollywood's Hays office and ex-president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (see below). Before Johnston even got his feet planted under a bureaucratic desk, a freeze of prices and wages and a partial rollback of prices were in the works.

"That Evil Day." Specific details of the new control plan required a few more days for working out, but the long-talked-about probability had finally become a reality. Price and wage controls were on the way back again. Other Government controls were on the horizon. One was rationing, often the handmaiden of price and wage controls. Wilson thought that could be postponed indefinitely, perhaps even avoided. To the Senate Small Business committee he said: "If America can produce as I think it can produce, we can put off that evil day."

Another possibility was manpower control. Already the armed forces, Government agencies and industries were competing for persons with special skills. ("Government agencies and industries are after my engineers all the time now," reported a men's dean at Georgia Tech--see EDUCATION.) As mobilization rolled on, the squeeze would reach down through all levels of the manpower supply.

Central Principle. The same day that Mobilizer Wilson sounded the call for industrial control, President Truman announced what he proposed to do about the manpower squeeze. If & when it becomes necessary, he said, the Government will impose manpower controls more stringent and more universal than any adopted during World War II. He hoped to accomplish the job through "voluntary measures," the President added. But if that voluntary approach failed, he would use his present powers and ask Congress for any additional ones needed to let the Government: 1) tell employers the numbers and kinds of workers they may hire, 2) see that individuals serve in the jobs for which they are best fitted, 3) require the hiring of women, physically handicapped and older workers and members of minority groups, 4) import workers from friendly countries if necessary.

In one sentence, Mr. Truman explained the policy's central principle: "Each individual will be expected to serve in the capacity in which he can contribute most to the total mobilization program." Plans were being drafted for a new agency to run both military and civilian manpower .needs under Mobilizer Wilson's direction.

No Limits. All the talk about controlling wages, prices and manpower had a single purpose: to rebuild U.S. military power against a determined enemy. "So long as we can wisely apportion our resources of manpower, materials, plants and power, and judiciously relate them one to another," Charles Wilson explained, "there are no physical limits to our growth. When we add to these physical factors the human elements of enthusiasm and patriotic inspiration, there are no limits whatsoever . . . The last ten years have shattered any idea that ours is a matured, established, limited and satiated economy."

Americans had already proved, in World War II, the job they could do. "And I tell you categorically," said Charlie Wilson, "that we are better equipped to do the job than we were last time."

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