THE WEST: No Cause for Alarm?

Every day thousands of Westerners angrily tell each other: “As soon as the European war ends, Eastern business will reconvert. But the West will have to go right on turning out ships and planes. By the time the Jap war is over, the East will have grabbed all our postwar markets—and we’ll be flat on our backs.”

Nevada’s silver-maned, paunchy Senator Pat McCarran, busily running for reelection, fortnight ago tried to turn this Western suspicion into votes. He proposed to the Senate that $7,000,000,000 worth of Government-owned war plants in eleven northeastern states be “frozen.” Much Eastern reconversion would thus be halted till postwar industry could be expanded in the West and South. (Cried Massachusetts’ Governor Leverett Saltonstall: “A plan characteristic of Hitler.”)

Share the Pie. Last week WPB unreservedly promised: the West will get an ample share of the overall cutbacks in war production after V-E day. In the first year after Germany quits, and if Japan is still fighting, the rising scale of cutbacks for the U.S. will average 32% (maximum: 40%). For the West Coast, the average will be “something more” than 25%. The lower percentage is due to the hard fact that the bulk of the weapons still needed to fight Japan (i.e., B-29 and B-32 bombers) are being made in the West. Furthermore, use of West Coast facilities will ease the Army & Navy’s critical transportation problem, speed up ship repairs. So far the West Coast has had more than its share of reconversion. For example, of the first batch of WPB permits to make civilian goods under the new “spot authorization plan,” West Coast plants got 25% by number, 13% by dollar volume (West Coast’s prewar share of U.S. production: 7%).

Said one WPBster bluntly: “I don’t see where the West Coast’s holler about V-E day comes in. It will keep slightly more war contracts, but with a pretty good shake on reconversion its position ought to be pretty good. But some Eastern cities where the bulk of the contracts will be canceled at once will be up against it. They’d be only too glad to have some of that West Coast war production.”

Straddle. Actually the solution to the West’s problem of using war-built plants in peace may depend less on WPB or politicos than on manpower. Some 25,000 workers are now trekking from the West to the East every month (TIME, Aug. 21). An all-out campaign might stop this migration—but it might also saddle the West with huge relief bills, if a postwar slump comes. Yet, if workers drift back East, the West may lose juicy civilian orders because it has no manpower to fill them. Western businessmen have found no way to straddle this dilemma.