SURPLUS PROPERTY AND SCARCE NEWS

...If he hasjruts as well as liberalism, he will im-mediatelj- re-appoint Sturges as counsel despite the pressure the big boys and the brass hats are bound to bring to bear to keep Sturges far far away...

...This would mean that Robert Hurley and Edward Heller, original and Roosevelt-appointed members of SWPB, would go...

...For the story was not a tough one to dig out or write up...

...Then F.D.R.—some said out of pure pique at Congress—used the 3 appointments as a ward politician would have used them, and in so doing named an incredibly weak and incompetent Board...

...But it ' is a peculiar thing—and perhaps not entirely irrelevant —that so many men seem to retire from the Army and Navy into soft, well-paid, and usually "advisory" jobs with Big Business...

...For the press well knows that if the people come to understand how much is at stake, they will see to it that their interests, and the nation's, are protected by Congress and the President...

...His presumed choice for the job, if Congress complies with his request, will be his friend W. Stuart Symington of St...

...One test of Symington will come early—provided the law passes and he gets the job...

...Clearly Truman wants to get rid of Heller and Hurley in the simplest way—by abolishing their jobs...

...Even before the Truman request, Drew Pearson had done a column on the sub-surface situation at the Surplus War Property Board (SWPB)—a column which was a first-rate reporting job and gave his readers a background of facts from which to catch the meaning of the President's subsequent move...

...Maybe the brass hats just want to get the stuff off their hands...

...SEVERAL members of Congress are grumbling about the Truman request...

...It also means—and this is even more important —selling most of it in big blocks or batches, which in turn means selling it to the big companies who alone can afford to buy in bulk...

...Yet practically the whole of the press, from the AP, the UP, and the New York Times (complete with Arthur Krock's column) on down, muffed it—and they must have muffed it on purpose...

...On the way it is sold, and particularly on to whom it is sold, that national economy of ours—its scope, its direction, its vitality—may well depend for decades to come...

...Apparently he got so in the hair of the 3 Big Business H's—Heller, Hurley, and Howse —that they could no longer stand his insistent and intelligent heckling...

...No more than that...

...Any reader would reasonably suppose that no more was involved than a rather abstract dispute over government theory: Should the discouragement of graft and favoritism, theoretically implicit in a 3-man board where each member can keep an eye on the other 2, weigh heavier in the scales than the theoretically superior efficiency of a single administrator...

...They will see to it, for all the efforts of the press to play down a vital and bitter battle between progressives and reactionaries into so dull and petty a problem as whether surplus property ought, in the abstract, to be administered by 3 men or by one...

...One hundred billion dollars' worth is a lot of property, even in a national economy as vast as ours...

...Bills will be introduced...

...And there was Edward Heller, a Californian of great inherited wealth who had never held public office but had presumably contributed plenty to the Democratic Party...

...And Clayton in turn did not like the prospect of perhaps being outvoted, and so declined to be one of three...

...Far and away the ablest man connected with SWPB had been its counsel, Wesley Sturges, a progressive with courage and vision...

...Their supposed reason—so reported straight-faced by the press—is that not so many months ago Congress overrode President Roosevelt's desire for a single administrator and set up, on its own, the 3-man Board, on the theory that there could be less graft, favoritism, or other skulduggery with 3 men running the, show than with one—and that this theory still holds water...

...Why Hurley, who is not wealthy and who used to campaign as a New Dealer, takes such advice is harder to explain—but it will be interesting to watch what sort of berth he lands in next if the Board should be abolished...

...That wealthy, weak Heller would welcome advice from the big boys is obvious...

...The best of the trio was Guy M. Gillette of Iowa, former Senator and defeated Democratic candidate for re-election...

...One would get rid of it fast—which means 2 things...

...IT was Hurley, never known in his home state for intestinal fortitude, who immediately turned sour...

...Almost all Washington knew it—and knows it— at least in part...

...There is little doubt that Gillette had no part in any of this...

...Backing this policy is every man in Washington—or out—who by any stretch could be called a genuine progressive, honestly concerned with the welfare of the whole people...

...The opposing policy would dispose of the hundred billion dollars' worth slowly, carefully, at decent prices, and with preference given to small businesses, new business, co-ops—to every group whose ownership would help diversify, or un-concentrate, the produced and productive wealth of the nation...

...Clearly, the same men in Congress who voted for a 3-man SWPB to get Clayton out will support the President and swing back to one administrator to get Heller aifd Hurley out...

...The intermediary who undoubtedly transmits such "suggestions" is the Board's "Administrator" or glorified office manager—a slow-witted former furniture dealer and Army Colonel named A. E. Howse...

...Now how about the newspapers and their bromidic little bedtime story...

...Since Heller, like Hurley, is neither very strong nor very able (Clayton, by contrast, was both) the 2 have probably been taking orders—or, more politely, "suggestions"—from the fat cats and the brass hats around Washington...

...Here is the whole of the story as told by the regular press—and more than was told by some of it...

...And clearly every progressive should back the move, Symington, who recently replaced Gillette and is slated for the post of lone administrator, is said to be a liberal with small-business sympathies...

...THERE are 2 directly conflicting policies about how to get rid of all that stuff...

...Could it be that the press is so strong on Big Business' side, so anxious to see that hundred billion dollars' worth of stuff knocked down cheap to the monopolists, that it doesn't quite dare give the people the facts...

...No question of the calibre of any specific man or men, and no concern over the type of policy that specific men have followed or might follow...

...they objected to Clayton in person in the job...

...It means selling the stuff comparatively cheap—and thus at a tremendous total loss to the taxpayers who now own it, but at a tremendous eventual profit to the lucky companies who would buy it...

...He had regularly honored Sturges' advice, and his own resignation from the Board, in obvious disgust, coincided almost exactly with Sturges' removal...

...instead, deliberate...

...There was also Robert Hurley, former Governor of Connecticut and, again, a defeated Democratic candidate for reelection...

...Only against this background does President Truman's request for a new law and a single administrator make the slightest sense...

...But backers of Truman's proposal are pointing out that Will Clayton, F.D.R.'s original single administrator of surplus property, refused to serve on any 3-man board on the ground—or so he said and the press reported straight-faced—that it would be clumsy, inefficient, and unworkable...

...Truman wants one man instead of three to head the agency charged with selling surplus war property...

...For there is almost one hundred billion dollars' worth of that property, ranging from ships to shoes, from factories to buttons—stuff which the Government bought or built to wage the war, which was paid for with public money from bonds and taxes, and almost all of .which is soon to be sold into private hands...

...They first barred him from Board meetings—an unusual and deliberately insulting step—¦ and then, when he determined to stay on and fight instead of resigning, they unceremoniously fired him...

...Barely beneath the surface here was a big news story, a hot news story, a news story loaded with explosive significance...

...Actually, the battle oyer surplus property that is being fought just below the publicized surface is perhaps, the most important business going on in Washington today...

...Surplus Property And Scarce News By FRED RODELL EVERY too often the press of the nation handles a pregnant piece of news so ineptly and inadequately as to raise a strong suspicion that the mangling was not stupid but...

...They did not object to the idea of a single administrator...

...Friction within the Board came to a head a few weeks ago...

...The Truman proposal would make no sense whatsoever if Symington, too, were in the Big Business camp...

...Actually, most members of Congress who voted for a 3-man board a few-months back will vote for a single administrator this time—and there will be no trace of basic inconsistency in what they do...

...The Senate gagged a bit at confirming them but, after all, it was a Democratic "Senate— and Gillette and Hurley, at least, were supposed to have their hearts in the right place...

...But the bulk of the public knows next to nothing about it...

...It could be, indeed...

...A couple of other' columnists have touched on the true story since...

...Maybe...

...His supposed reason—so reported straight-faced by the press—is that this would centralize responsibility and lead to quicker decisions and greater efficiency...

...Actually, the real issues here are by no means abstract but are highly personalized...

...So it was when President Truman recently asked Congress to abolish the present 3-man Surplus War Property Board and turn its job over to a single administrator...

...This sort of policy is earnestly espoused by Big Business and by its many and influential representatives and hangers-on in Washington, including especially the brass hats of the Army and Navy...

...It was in order to get Clayton out—or at least outvoted—that Congress insisted on a R-man board...

...Instead, just a dull impersonal puzzle, fit for a political scientist to ponder...

...Louis, newly-appointed chairman of SWPB...

...What they know is what the regular press has seen fit to tell them—and it is simply this: Mr...

...For some months, in practically every vital Board decision, he teamed with Heller to vote down Gillette in favor of Big Business...

...Prosperity or depression, 60,000,000 jobs or 20,-000,000 unemployed, truly free enterprise or bigger and better monopolies—the answers to these alternatives hinge in large part on what happens to that hundred billion dollars' worth of stuff...

...Clearly, someone with progressive sympathies—possibly Fred Vinson, possibly Gillette—got to Truman with the story and made it stick...

...Now, when President Roosevelt named WilljClayton to head, single-handed, the first surplus property setup, a howl went up from progressives everywhere simply because cotton cartelist Clayton was by every interest and instinct a Big Business man...