Off Base

Everybody was caught napping. With a view to helping small businessmen get a fair share of defense orders, the House Small Business Committee's Chairman Walter C. Ploeser had slipped in an amendment to the draft bill. Neither the committee's colleagues in the House & Senate, nor the White House, noted the real meaning of the amendment. Only after President Truman signed the draft bill last week did the fact come fully clear: Congress had unwittingly provided for the broadest draft of U.S. industry in peacetime history.

Under the new law, the President can force any "plant, mine, or other facility" to give top priority to defense orders, no matter how large. If the Government thinks the prices too high, it can cut them to its estimate of "fair and just compensation." Even more important than this contest of prices and production, the President can order the steel industry to allocate unlimited amounts of its output to defense plants. Any company that balks is subject to Government seizure. Any individual who fails to comply faces a maximum penalty of three years in prison and a $50,000 fine.

The Administration, which had repeatedly asked for much milder stand-by powers only to be ignored by the Republican Congress, was wholly unprepared for the sweeping powers concealed in the draft act. So far there is no need for them. Except in the aircraft industry, defense orders are generally small. For the first half of this year, military needs in steel totaled only 670.000 tons, about 1% of total U.S. production.

Steelmen, who were just about to launch a voluntary allocations plan of their own, feared that if the military got all it wanted, ECA and other vital civilian programs would suffer and the "nonessential" users of hard-to-get steel would starve. Despite White House assurance that the law would not be used recklessly, George A. Renard, executive secretary of the National Association of Purchasing Agents, protested that it opened a "Pandora's box of controls." Mindful of the wartime jungle of red tape, one manufacturer fervently prayed that "every second lieutenant in the armed forces would not slap on priorities for everything purchased for national defense."

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