Time: The Present

WAR & PEACE

Next -week the U.S. will face the third year of world-wide war.

In two years U.S. life and thinking have been changed far more than those who lived through them find it easy to understand. But sometimes some contemporary thing emerges, like a mark left on a building by a flood, to show how much the water level of life has altered. Such a mark is the August issue of FORTUNE, devoted entirely to the U.S. war effort and the effects of that effort on the U.S.

FORTUNE’S appraisal is based on the assumption, unacceptable to isolationists, that the U.S. is already engaged in an inescapable struggle. Herbert Hoover, Alfred Landon, Burton Wheeler, John L. Lewis, Charles Lindbergh and many a lesser citizen in their several ways question or deny that assumption.

But as important as the discussion of what the U.S. should do about the war is the discovery—written bold across the —75 pages of FORTUNE’S facts, figures, charts, graphs, criticisms and proposals—of what the war has done to the U.S. This is not questionable and not deniable. The war has been fought across the economic and social face of the U.S. just as certainly as it has been fought across the geographical face of Europe. Whether or not the U.S. is rightly at war, it has been and still is in the war.

Because the August issue of FORTUNE provides an extraordinary vantage point from which to examine the U.S. in the war, TIME herewith undertakes to review it:

In every period of sweeping change, life outruns its popular interpreters. Happenings come too fast; old familiar actors on the stage of history are whisked away and disappear; newcomers crowd in, get half through their opening lines and vanish with a dull thud and a gurgle.

Two years of war and sweeping change have given the U.S. a new cast of characters, still undefined, appearing on new stages, still barely seen. There are the army officers and admirals whose names are becoming familiar; the army camps and airfields that are still dim and a little disquieting to citizens. In its war issue, FORTUNE appraises the U.S. war effort from the point of view of editors to whom the new scenes are familiar, the new faces long known. And the net of their appraisal is that the U.S. is not succeeding in the task of organizing itself to cope with the world of war. They say that it is not mastering the complexity of its industrial life. The U.S. that emerges has shortages in many things—in raw materials, steel, power, transportation—but they argue that it has its greatest shortage in ideas, ideas of what it can do and how it can win. They assert that it has the men who can put the ideas into effect—but that the men have not been called. So far, in the great fields of its efforts, they find that the U.S. is not winning. It is losing, and it is losing fast.

“All over Washington the word is still ‘defense.’ In the mouth of a fainthearted army officer—there are many—it sounds natural enough; only when you hear it from men whose actions stamp them as dedicated to all-out effort does it strike you as odd and sad that this token word has taken root everywhere. . . . This arsenal of democracy, this strongest of all industrial nations, continues to view with shuddering abhorrence the world of conflict in which it finds itself. Confronted with the bloodlust of Hitler’s Germany, it still wishes it could continue to dream about colored bathtubs. . . .” Stultified by this spirit, the U.S. is not merely falling short; it is failing spectacularly, in nine different ways and nine different places. The editors’ conclusions:

I. There is no plan.

II. We are short of materials.

III. Transportation facilities are critically overtaxed.

IV. Power is running short in some regions while in others there are unused surpluses.

V. We are not putting first things first —shortages in basic materials demand priorities which are not being efficiently handled.

VI. We are facing the threat of inflation—and “there is little indication that Congress or the Administration intends to apply a hard-boiled tax and fiscal program.”

VII. Labor is preoccupied with its two great aims: more and better jobs after the war, and more say in national policies and industrial management. But the war has never been explained to the American working man.

VIII. The U.S. has made a beginning at waging war politically and economically, but its plans are not comprehensive and its objectives are vague.

IX. No country ever won a war that it entered leaden-hearted and unconvinced—and though Americans are not exactly leaden-hearted, they have not yet accepted the war as their job, they have not yet been asked to do what is necessary to win.

What makes this elaborate failure sensational is that it was not necessary. The potential might was there—as FORTUNE had clearly shown. Only 18 months ago, it had published a 202-page issue that attempted nothing less than an over-all survey of the U.S.—the number and conditions of its farms and factories, its resources, its possibilities, its culture, its dispossessed. In that issue the statistics of strength were so many they ran over the top of the page. They gushed up like the oil of Texas: the U.S. had mines, trained men, machines, land, power & light to dwarf the rest of the world. All the charts showed a satisfying line in which U.S. production of something shot way above anybody else’s; there would be a little wavy line way down at the bottom of the page for the rest of the world and a curve swooping right up to the top for the U.S.

The U.S. which emerged from that survey was not all green and growing—there were the dispossessed and the unemployed, photographs of sharecroppers’ children with beaten, intelligent eyes staring up from Asiatic squalor—but the general impression it communicated was that the U.S. would fix such conditions, and that in spite of everything the U.S. would get along all right. The U.S. that emerged from that issue of FORTUNE—through the articles, the charts, the statistics, the figures, the quotations from Walt Whitman, the photographs of nice big factories, wheat fields, mountains, orange groves, and reasonably good, independent-looking people voting, plowing, inventing, building, dancing, playing games, going to shows, or just loafing around the depot—was fairly buoyant and hopeful.

And again, when U.S. airplane production was a major U.S. concern, FORTUNE devoted its April 1941 issue to U.S. aircraft production. This one ran to 240 pages, and was crammed with figures of flight, with colored photographs of fighting planes in the air, with charts showing how bombs drop, with maps of the world’s airlines and with intricate diagrams, explaining yaw, windstreams and something called a “compressibility burble” which was said to be essential to flight. The U.S. in the air seemed to be equal to any test put upon it: the U.S. had enough technical experience, enough trained men, enough facilities for research, to meet any challenge. And so—though many a reader felt he would rather beat Hitler with his bare hands than master FORTUNE’S graphs—the U.S. that emerged seemed self-confident, capable, even in the face of a world fighting its first great war in the air.

But the U.S. that emerges today when it is examined with a view to how well its machinery is being organized for war is snarled and tangled throughout. Items in FORTUNE’S indictment: Spending. “We have authorized or appropriated $46.9 billion. . . . Contracts let came to only $21 billion; and the sums disbursed — for war goods received — came to $7 billion. After a little over one year … we have succeeded in … diverting a pitiful few per cent of our national income to the job of maintaining our sovereign strength. And only about $100,000,000 worth of the supplies were lend-lease goods that could help England win.”

Waste. “When the Chrysler Corp. is given orders for the production of 2,600 tanks, those tanks go into production without benefit of Chrysler’s criticism as to how, as automotive vehicles, they could be improved. The result is an engine of war that, at the very start of its production, is already militarily obsolete; the fault lies equally with the Army and with Chrysler. . . .”

Shortages. “The worst shortages already upon us are those in aluminum, magnesium, copper and nickel. There will be hardly enough aluminum to build the planes we know we’ll need, let alone supply other military needs. . . . We have in this country only about a half-year’s supply of rubber. . . . Wool and tin are also short. . . . The U.S. has little more than a thimbleful of high-grade chromite deposits from which to make ferrochrome, the master alloy in stainless and chrome steels. Supplies depend on the sea lanes and tons of chromite are already piling up in Rhodesia and New Caledonia for lack of ships. . . . The Government’s Metals Reserve Company, belatedly building a stockpile, had 422,000 tons on order, only 31,700 tons delivered. . . .”

Labor. “Responsible labor leaders . . . believe . . . that labor should have a larger, not a smaller, share in the councils in Washington where the economic policies of the war and particularly the postwar world are going to be framed. Labor will fight for an economy premised on full employment; it will not fight for a return to relief or the dole. . . . Washington is even now open to criticism because it has not effectively explained to the forces of labor what it is trying to do. . . .”

Army. “The military and the civilian throughout our history have regarded each other with suspicion, usually justified on both sides. . . . What the people of the U.S. never tried was to make the armed forces their own, to make them a functional element of democracy, to make them so much the people’s army and the people’s navy that the armed forces . . . would be regarded with the same pride that is lavished on other national accomplishments.”

Who Is Responsible? Here less than two years since they presented the picture of a U.S. that was potentially confident, potentially capable, the editors present, with no end to the documentation, a picture of a U.S. whose war effort is “grimly unimpressive.” The U.S. is repeating the mistakes of 1917-18; for good measure it is also repeating the British mistakes of 1939-40.

The different agencies, whose overlapping functions FORTUNE charts in detail, are supposed to gear together the country’s armed effort with its industrial capacity; they are not succeeding. There is no forceful high War Policy Board. There are innumerable agencies at the same level of authority. There is no integrated authority. There is no rational organization. There is no rational plan. Who, or what, is at fault? “The major responsibility for this state of affairs rests squarely on the doorstep of the President. …”

The President of this mismanaged country emerges from these pages a far different historic personality than the man whom the U.S. has come to recognize. In some respects he is a bigger character. He is a man of unquestioned idealism, “the most powerful voice in the world,” who in his speeches outlines a course of action which, if carried out, means a revolutionary transformation of the world. But he also declares a national emergency “after which nothing happens.” He is a paradox:

“When some further emergency forces the President of the United States to act as seriously as he talks, and to establish a War Policy Board whose only function is to checkmate the might of Hitler’s Germany with every resource of brain, heart and hand that America possesses, we may then possibly see … not only . . . how we are to win our gigantic battle but what we shall do with the fruits of peace and plenty which it will finally bring us.”

The President is a profound student of naval strategy, a genius at political maneuver. But he does not delegate authority. He is not at home in the realm of industry and production. Above all, he does not call forth the national will to action—although, because he is the President, it can scarcely act unless he leads.

But FORTUNE does not conclude that the President is solely responsible for the fact that more powerful leadership has not come up to direct U.S. war efforts more effectively. Part of the difficulty is that the dollar-a-year managers do not exercise the authority necessary to do a satisfactory job of management. Says FORTUNE: “More power—much more power—could have been Mr. Knudsen’s for the taking. . . . Probably the second most powerful figure in Washington is Jesse Jones—not because President Roosevelt feels particularly warm towards him … but because Mr. Jones fell on a ball.” Effective management is also lacking because throughout the U.S. there are the men who can make the U.S. war effort work, who have not been asked, who have not been tried, and who have not volunteered.

But the managers who are not yet managing are likewise not solely responsible. Each U.S. citizen, as consumer, wage earner, factory worker, housewife or as a silent contributor to morale, faces the same responsibilities. Today, the U.S. consumer has more buying power than he ever had before in his history. Soon there will be $5 billion banked up behind the houses, the automobiles—the items known as durable consumers’ goods—that he wants and will not be able to get.

Metal shortages have already cut into an odd assortment of consumers’ goods: zippers, outboard motors, dollar watches, bicycles, compacts. Home builders now have trouble getting pumps, electric motors, bathtubs, copper tubing, brass fittings, light fixtures. A good share of the extra dollars that U.S. consumers have to spend will go into bigger purchases of food (of which the U.S. has enough, ex cept for temporary shortages like toma toes and salmon, bought up by the Army and the British). More will go for “soft” consumers’ goods like clothes (the U.S. has a 9,000,000-bale cotton surplus).

But what happens when the consumer, with his increased buying power, begins to bid up the prices of goods for which the supply remains steady, or diminishes? For vital war materials the Government steps in, sets the price, allots the material —theoretically at least—to where it is most needed. But who is to set the price of lingerie, women’s stockings, boys’ hats, golf balls and the million other items that indirectly contribute to the cost of living? In Germany, where prices are fixed, the people are used to taking orders about prices and distribution. Britain is a tight geographic entity where the enforcement of Government price edicts is reasonably simple. But, say the editors, the multiplicity of U.S. life makes it desirable to let the market,, operate as far as possible to fix prices, using taxes and Government savings bonds to hold back consumer purchasing power.

One of the 17 articles in this issue of FORTUNE is an essay on price fixing by Marriner S. Eccles. Says Eccles: “Instead of discouraging savings we need now to encourage them. Instead of encouraging consumer expenditures, we need to apply curbs on private spending whenever it threatens to encroach on defense needs or to distort prices. Instead of stimulating consumption by deficit financing, we need so far as we can to reduce the deficit and to approach a balanced budget. . . . Instead of a tax structure designed to encourage consumption, we need one that will recapture for the Government a large part of the outlays for defense.”

Two years ago such ideas were wholly alien to the U.S. Government and most of its people. Now after two years of war, we live, even in our own land, in a changed world.

Central Character. Says FORTUNE:

“The ultimate responsibility for victory rests upon the people.” As the citizen appears in these pages and as he is polled by the FORTUNE Survey, he is a strange character. He is the factory worker on whose production the course of history depends, but he is also the union member who is entangled in fights within his union. He is the wage earner whose income is now greater than it ever was, but he is also the buyer of things—houses and automobiles—that take materials of which the U.S. has not enough. He is the small manufacturer who, when he goes to Washington, cannot find a hotel room, the proper office, or the organization with authority to help him switch his productive equipment to making the weapons for war.

As regards the war, he is ready to go a long way to beat the Nazis to their knees. The FORTUNE Survey finds that by majorities as big as, and bigger than, those with which he re-elects Franklin Roosevelt, the citizen believes Hitler means to conquer the world; is willing to risk war to help Britain win; would pay willingly twice his present taxes on luxuries like movies, tobacco and liquor; would put up without complaint with a general sales tax if the U.S. were at war; would cut his gasoline consumption by a third; would gladly train one day a week for home defense; would do this and much more if asked. But “he” is also a “she” in the U.S. when measured by the polls: the women do not want him to fight. He does not like the new world at war in which he finds himself; in his heart he wants to go back to the way things were—well, not exactly —when the war ends.

In short, he is a reluctant interventionist who wants to return to an isolationist America after the war; he is the businessman working in Washington who—between lunches at his desk and 14 hours a day of work—dreams of some day being shut of this and going home again. He cannot get it through his head that America may never go home again.

If FORTUNE’S picture of the U.S. today proves anything, it is that, regardless of what path the U.S. ought to take, the old home is no longer there to return to.

Task. Readers who do not believe in FORTUNE’S basic assumption will find its arguments less convincing than its picture of the facts. To people who believe like Herbert Hoover (“Freedom in America does not depend on the outcome of struggles for material power between other nations.”), the tasks in which FORTUNE’S editors say the U.S. is failing are themselves unnecessary. Unpredictable developments in the war may reduce the urgency on which the editors insist—the Germans and the Russians may cancel each other out more than they believe possible; the turns and twists of modern war may change the U.S. picture as much as it has changed Russia’s or Britain’s.

Many a dollar-a-year man trying to make the best of things in Washington may feel that FORTUNE is ingenuous in implying that only his own lack of initiative prevents his taking control of the production effort and making it hum. Many may feel that FORTUNE failed to give due credit for the absolute accomplishments to date—the camps constructed, the plants built, the ships launched, despite the confusion and misjudgments.

FORTUNE’S deepest assumption is that man can use his foresight to forfend against the evils he faces. The U.S. has learned that modern war reaches into every part of a nation’s life, that war changes its mind, changes its habits, takes the pots & pans away from the housewife, the silk stockings from the legs of the pretty girl across the street. But it remains to be seen whether Americans are prepared for the organized effort they must make if FORTUNE’S view of the U.S. task is right. If the editors are right the task of organization is the greatest in human history. Distilled out of all the articles, the figures, the guesses, the proposals, the task demands great strength, great tact and patience:

> To beat the Nazis to their knees, to organize the 132,000,000 self-respecting people of the U.S., to gear in the 412,000 corporations of the country, to do it within the framework of democracy, to see the end, to will the means, to overcome the shortages and deficiencies

> To meet the demand of labor that there will be no return to the past with its household shortages of lights, food, work, hope

> To see that the consumer has enough and yet not bring about the inflation that makes certain he will not have enough

> To see that power is used and that the freight cars go where needed; to plan the effort, to visualize the peace, to resolve the confusions

> To cut down the production of automobiles and yet see to it that neither the car dealer nor a Government snooper becomes a petty dictator determining who can ride

> To mediate among the different groups and races in the U.S. (see p. 53).

History will decide whether the editors are right or wrong in their gauge of what must be done. But in this view the new smoky stage sets of history become a little clearer; the emerging cast of characters becomes more sharply defined. The time is the present. The time is the extraordinary present, in which the U.S. now—not as it is supposed to be next summer, next year, next millennium, when the air forces are to be built, the two-ocean Navy completed, the Army trained, the finances in order, the citizen cheerful, self-sacrificing, prudent, wise, farsighted, quick, able, industrious, thoughtful and good—faces a titanic production job for which, according to the editors, the plant is unsuited, the materials short, the organization inadequate, and the plans yet to be made.

The time is indeed the Present, the remarkable, violent, inescapable, exhilarating, depressing, blundering, stirring, terrible Present, short of chromite, full of nonsense—the elusive, mysterious, future-destroying Now.

The Future. “For Mr. Roosevelt has before him an even greater task than winning the war against Hitler’s Germany. He and America have before them the task of reconstructing a stable world and making it not only peaceful but plenteous.” In short, the root of the world’s economic and political problems is that man for the first time has the means—the agricultural and industrial and transportation means—of providing enough for everyone. Yet want and the fear of want took on a new power in a world that had the physical equipment for providing enough for everyone. “The deep and restless desire of the peoples of the earth is to establish, upon the ruins of the scarcity that has hitherto enslaved them, an economy of plenty. . . .”

But in the past as the industrial wealth increased within each country, no country tried to secure its own well-being by increasing the standard of living in other countries. Each sought its own advantages and the interchanges of the world—of its cultures and ideas as well as of the things that people recognize as goods—were cut off. At the heart of the modern world there was a fundamental conflict between industry, which promised an end to want, and nationalism.

So the greatest force that Hitler has mobilized has been this fear of want. “Adolf Hitler is cruel. He deals in murder and lies. With regard to the Christian virtues he is the Antichrist.” Yet in nationalizing industry, and then militarizing his nation, he ended one of the conflicts of the modern world—between industry and nationalism—though his “solution” is no solution by any other standards than his own.

To suggest the outlines of a democratic solution FORTUNE has an editorial signed by Russell W. Davenport. Not all will agree with his proposals for insuring, under the democratic system, that a world of plenty is realized—the creation of an area of freedom, the socialization of large parts of the economy and the freezing of others for venture and risk. But few are likely to question that the war is a war to determine who is to run the future and under what organization of life the future is to be run. The editorial concludes:

“We live today in the midst of a revolution—a revolution against scarcity. So far we have allowed Hitler to claim that revolution. But we need not do so. There exists within us the elements of a leadership new to the world; a leadership by which we could make that revolution ours and channel its great forces into the free life for the development of a free world.

“The essence of all the principles involved is the Christian doctrine. It is now tragically clear that we Americans cannot flourish, unless by our policies and commitments we cause other peoples to flourish. We cannot even hope to keep freedom unless we help others to be free. . . .

“The concept of irresponsibility is not worthy of a free people or of a people who believe in God. We are responsible to other free peoples—and they are responsible to us. Cain never received an answer to his outraged question, ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ But we all know the answer. The answer is: ‘You are.’ “