Reconversion Director John Snyder, a banker-minded man not given to flowery talk, leaned back in his chair one day last week and told a newsman a parable.
“There was once an old English lord,” he said, “who felt all the privileges and authority of his position. He went down to the sea with his bathrobe, spread it out on the sands and looked toward the waves and said: ‘So far you can come and no further.’ Then he lay down. But the tide came up, covered the bathrobe and engulfed the lord. And he couldn’t do anything but move.”*
John Snyder obviously meant his parable for his old adversary on price control, Price Boss Chester Bowles. For last week while Chet Bowles fought mightily to hold back the rising tide of prices, the hem of his bathrobe was already wet.
The waves were pushed higher by Snyder and Economic Stabilizer John Caskie Collet on the new price for steel (see Labor). Then Agriculture Secretary Clinton P. Anderson announced in Chicago that he favored an 18¢ increase in the price of butter. (Said Bowles: “OPA is vigorously opposed. . . .”)
The surf licked ever higher. Labor Conciliator Edgar Warren, the man chosen to settle the threatened meat packers’ strike, hinted that the only solution was a ½c-a-lb. increase in the price of meat bought by the Army, Navy and UNRRA. Chester Bowles, his bathrobe soaked to the belt, remained mum.
But he could see the deluge approaching. When he announced his determination to set a ceiling price for cotton by Jan. 15, 22 Democratic Senators from the cotton states threatened to wash OPA off the beach and into oblivion.
Prices were going higher; Chet Bowles would have to move up the beach. But there, unless Congress actually did refuse to renew his price controls when they expire June 30, he could wrap his robe about him and make another stand.
*Banker Snyder was telling a corrupted version of the old legend of King Canute (995-1035) who, to rebuke the flattery of his courtiers, showed them that the advancing tide paid no heed to his commands.
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