Around Right End

In the 16 years of the New Deal revolution, businessmen had learned to be wary as alley cats. Even when they plied their trades unmolested, they knew that any time they carelessly stepped into the light they were apt to catch a flying epithet or get tripped into a bureaucratic deadfall. If it was not class warfare, it sometimes seemed a lot like it.

Last week some odd sounds were coming from Harry Truman's Administration. They were made by Secretary of Commerce Charles Sawyer. Sawyer looks like a businessman and talks like a businessman, and back in his native Ohio he is one (two radio stations, a newspaper, a sports arena and an amusement park).

It's Not a Curse. For months, Sawyer had been making the chicken-a-la-king circuit of businessmen's luncheons, often talking "off the record," but to big crowds, of the need for reducing Government spending. He even ventured some tentative criticism of the Administration's Brannan Plan. Last week for all to hear, he briskly announced: "The President has requested me to take the lead in designing a program to preserve and strengthen free enterprise."

That was not all it sounded. It was merely a way of saying that he had been put in charge of Government's policies toward business monopoly and unfair competition. This week Secretary Sawyer hinted that he would ask for repeal of wartime excise taxes, as something that would give "an incentive to business." It all had an unfamiliar, friendly ring.

Addressing the Public Relations Society of America, Sawyer had some even kinder words: "We have passed the time when intelligent Americans use the word 'profit' as a curse," he said. "The idea of accepting a relatively modest profit in order to sell more goods to more people is one of the most progressive ideas in the world today. I will go further. I will say that this idea is the only really radical idea in the modern world."

Fixed Ideas. Sawyer also issued a pointed warning to farmers and labor--the sharpest rebuke yet heard from a member of the Truman Administration. "Some so-called liberals," he said, "have adopted . . . the fixed idea that any increase in purchasing power of any one group is good no matter what its effect may be on other groups. To assume, however, that we can continue at all times and places to increase the share of the worker and the farmer without concern for the need for capital savings and the incentive of the businessman is out of keeping with the liberal attitude."

Did the Boss know what his man was saying? Obviously he did, and presumably Sawyer had his blessing. That did not mean that Harry Truman would hesitate to plaster the "special interests" with fresh taunts if politics dictated. It did mean that like many successful politicians, Harry Truman was capable of contradictions within himself, and of trying to run in two directions at once. It also suggested that the Fair Deal was proposing a guarded and perhaps temporary truce. Business would remain wary. But in what often seemed a friendless world, a pat on the head was better than a savagely aimed kick, on any terms.

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