While America Burns

Benjamin Franklin's advice about hanging together might well be repeated to the men who are supposed to be doing something to alleviate the toils and troubles of manpower allocation. While every newspaper, lecture, and political analyst in the country shouts the absolute necessity of a quick solution, the important groups controlling large numbers of men are having their own private little war.

Much of the fight is centered around the position of workers in vital defense industries. The Massachusetts Director of Selective Service has just announced to Boston Manufacturers: "You want men to produce and we want men to fight. The trouble is that usually we both want the same men. Something will have to break, and it same men. Something will have to break, and it won't be the Army." He might have added that nobody will need to break the Army if it isn't provided with the necessary implements of war.

Just one week ago Secretaries Knox and Stimson sent a telegram to the president of every important corporation in the United States. They pointed out the large number of defense workers who had enlisted in the Army in fear in the draft, and expressed fears that if this exodus continued, it would make a fall-off in production inevitable. On the other hand, close connections between manufactures and Selective Service officials are resulting in the deferment of industrial workers who have no right to be deferred.

The manpower problem cannot be solved while most of the officials concerned are trying to stab each other in the back. The Army now wants absolute authority to allocate manpower; yet when the military was given complete control in England, men had to be called back from the battlefronts to work in the factories. The long awaited overall commission to deal with the manpower crisis will not become a reality until the Army, the Navy, Selective Service, the War Manpower Commission, War Production Board, and the President of the United States get together and realize they are fighting the same war. The "we-will-never-yield" attitude of such men as the Massachusetts Director may put off the winning of the war indefinitely.