MANAGEMENT: Bellyful

As wartime chief of the Army Service Forces, General Brehon Burke Somervell handled the world’s biggest supply problem, and got a bellyful of civilian gibes at Army red tape. Last week Old Soldier Somervell, now president of Koppers Co., told the Baltimore Association of Commerce of another kind of pain: he was fed up with the red tape and regulations which the Government has loaded onto businessmen.

“If the Army is regimented,” he said, “business is in a straitjacket . . . Government has usurped the decisions which formerly were made by individuals and regulated by economic laws . . . There has been an increasing tendency on the part of the Government to decide what is good and what is bad for all of us … Government decides what is and what is not restraint of trade for business, but very carefully avoids deciding what is or what is not restraint of trade when applied to labor unions and other political blocs. “Do not think that the use of this power is only sought by bureaucrats, or by those who would travel the last mile to socialism. When Averell Harriman was Secretary of Commerce he told me that I would be amazed at the number of so-called rugged industrialists, business leaders, who trooped to him to try to get the Department of Commerce to use its influence in their behalf against their competitors. If we, as businessmen, believe in reasonable liberty of action for management, we must not ourselves seek in private the things we decry in public . . .”