This wasn’t the war. This was an exercise in top-level organization, a test run for the American economy, a trial marriage between the bureaucracies of government and business which made strange bedfellows out of the career men of Washington, New York, Detroit, and way stations; it was the War Production Board, crowned with dignity and power and fixed a little lower than the angels, properly busy in the air-cooled halls and offices of the modernistic Social Security Building, engaged daily in conferences, in arguments-by-telephone, in the fabrication and distribution of innumerable pieces of paper. The war that was fought here was a cold, bloodless war—a conflict of theories, of ideas, of programs, of orders—and while a good many feelings were hurt, first and last, nobody was actually getting killed.
But the trouble was that the other war, the real war, wouldn’t stay put. The real war was tragedy and pain and death, and it was being fought by human beings, and the bits of paper that were being shuffled endlessly in the Social Security Building were due to turn up some day as the justification for somebody’s bloodshed and agony; and the terrible question, “What are we really fighting for?” kept coming up for answer, demanding attention from men who would greatly have preferred to take their patriotism straight and let others worry about the abstractions. Yet the abstractions were at the heart of it, somebody had to work them out, the answers had to be found right here in WPB, and no sooner were items like the role of the dollar-a-year man and the handling of army procurement disposed of than the same problem would bob up again in some other guise. As, for example, in the matter of patent rights, technological advances, and industrial processes.
These are often fairly dull, unless you happen to be a technician, an economist, or an industrialist, but in the spring and summer of 1942 they offered the busy men in WPB one more chance to look the idea of an all-out war in the face and decide whether or not they could go for it. As usual, they found that they could not. For all-out war deals in absolutes; it means the last curtain and the final bugle call for Things as They Were; it means that this carefully formalized exercise in the Social Security Building might suddenly go haywire and become a swiftly-humming machine for building a new heaven and a new earth, so that the intangibles which men are dying for will transcend in value the sacred rights of custom, of property, and of Our Two Million Stockholders. And all of these matters were bound up in this question of patent rights, technological advances, and industrial processes.
It began innocently enough, as so many wicked things do, when a couple of Catholic scientists from Cincinnati visited Washington one day in March, 1942, to call on Maury Maverick, former congressman, former Mayor of San Antonio, and at that time the chief of WPB’s Bureau of Government Requirements.
The two visitors were Monsignor Cletus A. Miller and Dr. George S. Sperti, both from the Institutum Divi Thomae, a Catholic institution for scientific research. They were interested, at the moment, simply in finding a means to protect public health during the war; Maverick’s bureau, which was responsible for screening the requests made by state and city governments for materials and equipment, was their port of call because it was up to Maverick to determine whether a city water works, for instance, could have chemicals for water purification purposes. Thus the two men sat down to talk with Maverick, and presently they discovered that they had ideas in common about the necessity for an all-out war and ways and means of achieving it. As a successful inventor, Dr. Sperti had discovered a thing or two about the difference between perfecting an industrial device or process and actually getting it used; and before long the three had stopped talking about public health measures and were discussing the way in which scientific skills and techniques are sometimes monopolized in industry, the way in which such monopolies can interfere with an all-out war effort, and the importance, for war and for peace, of finding some way to take the shackles off the nation’s productive power.
(And why should three men who sat down to talk about filtration plants and chemicals find themselves discussing big industry, monopoly, and the American dream? This was none of their business, as men’s business was gauged in the spring of 1942; the war was being fought by and with big business, and nobody had asked these three to worry about the prospect that it might turn out to be fought for big business as well. The Social Security Building’s war was Detroit and Pittsburgh and Chicago and Los Angeles, not to mention Wall Street, and the time to worry about monopoly was far behind anyway….Except that this other war, the war in which the ordinary human being was proving once again his eternal and incomprehensible readiness to die for something bigger than himself, was going on too, and these three men somehow felt that they had to do a little thinking about what the ordinary human being was going to be given in exchange for his life. If all he stood to get was what would trickle down, ultimately, from the high centers of power, then he was being sold down the river and it was time to do something. And what better place to start doing it than right here in Maverick’s office?)
It was wholly characteristic of Maverick that the discussion should have taken this turn. In the early days in Texas, Maverick’s family name had been turned into a common noun meaning an unbranded critter that is out on the plains on its own hook, answerable to no one, and the noun fitted the man himself. He was short, stocky, swarthy, intensely irascible, and inordinately loyal—both to people and to ideas—and he was a scrapper who lost all his inhibitions in the clinches. The dollar-a-year men, for the most part, would have liked to look on him as a comic figure (he looked on most dollar-a-year men as figures out of the bad place, so that made it even) except that they felt he was too dangerous to be funny. He was an unconverted New Dealer, in whose eyes Roosevelt’s one mistake was his reliance on captains of industry to help win the war—a mistake which, Maverick felt, was all too likely to be fine for monopolists and bad for ordinary folk who had to do the fighting.
So when the conversation got onto the problem of the monopolist, Maverick decided to take steps. After spending a good deal of time comparing notes and working out ideas with Monsignor Miller and Dr. Sperti, he prepared a memorandum on the matter. The whole business was outside of his field, but the war was still young and it hadn’t been won yet, and Nelson was showing a refreshing willingness to consider any idea, no matter where it came from, that promised to bring victory more quickly; and, anyway, Maverick was a maverick and the range hadn’t been fenced in yet. So Maverick sent his memo off to Herbert Emmerich, then executive secretary of WPB, outlining “a plan for the organization of the scientific research laboratories of the United States in a co-operative research program to meet the problems of shortages of materials and to assist industry and government in war production.” The memo proposed that WPB set up a bureau to organize commercial and industrial research operations, and warned that it would be important to distinguish between “those problems which benefit private industry only and those problems which benefit the nation in the total war effort.”
This memo was passed on to Nelson, who liked the idea. There existed, then and throughout the war, a most effective organization of scientists to help the Army and Navy develop new weapons—the Office of Scientific Research and Development, under Dr. Vannevar Bush—but there was nothing like it on the non-combatant side. If the military men needed a new explosive, a new range finder, a new fuse, or anything similar, Dr. Bush’s organization could quickly bring the best scientific and laboratory skill of the country to bear on the problem. But there was no way to bring about a similar mobilization of talent for purely industrial problems, and there was no way to make sure that devices or processes which might be developed during the war would be made readily available to all manufacturers who might need them. Clearly, industrial production could be speeded and victory could be brought nearer if there were, on the industrial side, a good counterpart to Dr. Bush’s organization. Accordingly, in mid-April, Nelson appointed a committee to look into the matter and recommend a course of action.
Nelson made Maverick chairman of this committee. Other members were Dr. Charles I. Gragg, a consultant to the chairman of WPB, on leave as member of the faculty of Harvard’s Graduate School of Business Administration; Harold Stein, an officer in WPB’s Division of Civilian Supply—the old Leon Henderson organization that made so much trouble for the auto industry eight months earlier; Lessing Rosenwald (the Rosenwald), chief of WPB’s Bureau of Industrial Conservation, and Dr. C. K. Leith, technical consultant to WPB’s Materials Division, in private life a geologist on the faculty of the University of Wisconsin. These men were instructed to find out what kind of office or bureau WPB should set up in order “to make use of the scientific resources of the country,” to keep abreast of industrial research, and to take action on inventions, new developments, and so on.
Late in April, 1942, then, these five men sat down together to examine what was currently being done along these lines and to see whether more should be added to it.
It was easy enough for them to conclude that WPB needed a much more vigorous direction and co-ordination of industrial research and development. What was already being done was good as far as it went, but it was clear that it did not go far enough. Dr. Leith pointed out that he himself was at the head of “an inadequate center, where there are only twenty of us” for the clearance of research problems. Ever since July, 1940, he recalled, the Defense Commission and its successors had been using the National Academy of Sciences for technological assistance, sending requests for aid to the Academy and getting the answers from scientific committees which the Academy would thereupon call into being. In addition, he said, WPB had from time to time used the services of such government agencies as the Bureau of Mines, the Geological Survey and the National Bureau of Standards; further, the several WPB branches and divisions were constantly asking for research of various kinds in industrial and university laboratories—the laboratories, for instance, of General Electric, Westinghouse, General Motors, Chrysler, the Mellon Institute, California Tech, and so on. There ought to be a much better integration and direction of the whole process, he said, with some such sum as $5,000,000 for a war chest; this board should take charge of all general requests for scientific research work, should be headed by an outstanding professional in the field, and should avoid setting up new committees or administrative units that might duplicate the work already being done by the WPB industry branches and divisions.
So far, so good; this was a war of technologies, and all five men on the committee agreed that America’s technologies had better be good. But at that point the agreement ceased. For it was one thing to agree that all scientific and technological resources must be used; it was quite another to determine exactly where those resources existed, how they were to be discovered, and in what way they could best be harnessed. All of these resources “must be used”; and precisely what do we mean by “used”? Used how, by whom, for whose benefit? The answers to these questions determine, ultimately, who really runs the country. The committee split in two, with Maverick, Gragg, and Stein in one group and Rosenwald and Leith in another, and the split was permanent.
What the Maverick group was shooting at was a completely new approach to the whole problem. It believed in the removal of all the invisible impediments that stand between the age of scientific achievements and the fullest possible use of those achievements. What it was actually demanding was production-for-use translated to the entire field of industrial research and technological advance. Stein brought the point of view out clearly at one of the early committee meetings.
Industrial scientists and technicians, he said, were guided by the profit motive—that is, they looked for products or devices which would make money for their own corporations. Okay, they had to play it that way; the corporations are in business to make money, that’s how we operated. But there was a war on now, and the war emergency needed something which the profit motive couldn’t supply—“ideas of a revolutionary sort,” as Stein put it, the determining factor regarding which being “not whether they are desirable for making money,” but whether, all factors considered, they are desirable for the country as a whole, which might be quite a different matter. And he added:
“We have reached the curious point in our course where we have to think about things which in normal times would appear ridiculous.”
True as four-ply gospel, but was there ever found on land or sea a human organization less prepared than this War Production Board to “think about things which in normal times would appear ridiculous”? How far do you gentlemen think you are going to get with this idea, anyhow?
Much farther than anyone would suppose; so far, in fact, that they almost got away with it. But first there was the committee itself to deal with. The committee was fully agreed that WPB should have an office to take responsibility for industrial research and development. But how should the men who would run that office be selected? Should they be technicians or laymen? Technicians, argued Dr. Leith, “because this is not a business matter” and because the office would be dealing with purely technical problems; laymen, argued Maverick, because the office would really be dealing with social problems and its responsibilities would be social rather than scientific.
Maverick undertook to illustrate with a case from his own experience as Mayor of San Antonio. They had had a civic orchestra, he said, which had fallen on evil days. Its governing body was composed of cultured and talented folk who knew a great deal about music but who did not seem to know very much about keeping an orchestra solvent.
“We finally got the most ignorant man in town and put him in at the head,” said Maverick. “He had never been anywhere, and these cultured people had been to New York and many other places. But he made a howling success of it. Then he died, and the cultured people got control of it—and it went broke again. So you have to have—“
“What,” interrupted Rosenwald, “is the moral of that story?”
“The moral of that story,” said Maverick, “Is that you have got to have a few people who are not specially trained along a certain line, and if you get all those men on a committee you look at it purely from a technical and research point of view, and not according to economic, business, and social problems.”
Dr. Leith protested that even so Maverick had not made his most ignorant man the conductor of the orchestra; but Stein got the argument back from Texas by remarking that what they were really up against was “the necessity for making decisions which the technicians are afraid to make.” Synthetic rubber, for instance; the basic questions about that highly crucial program should be decided, not by the men who knew exactly how synthetic rubber is made, but by men who felt the terrible urgency of the situation and were resolved that the best technical processes should be used no matter whose vested interests or postwar expectations might be hurt.
Tied in with this there was a subsidiary question which revolved about the same central issue: Assuming that we must greatly intensify industrial research, do we continue to rely on the research agencies that are now doing the job, merely giving the program better direction and a broader scope, or do we reach out to enlist the researchers who are not now being used at all—the men in the laboratories and experiment stations at small colleges and universities, the lesser research laboratories in private industry, the unattached scientists and inventors who have not yet been put to work in the war effort? Dr. Leith felt strongly that the established channels of industrial research were competent to do the job and ought not to be disturbed; Maverick argued heatedly for bringing in all of the little fellows.
Now this, dressed up in a different costume, was essentially the same breath-taking specter that had arisen to terrify the godly at the time the Reuther plan was up for consideration. This, again, was the proposal that the nation, beset by great dangers, increase the total of its strength by finding and using to the full all of its previously unused sources of strength. Beyond any ism or manifesto, this idea is revolutionary; for it presupposes a readiness to play the game in an entirely new way, an imaginative confidence that the nation will transcend itself by committing its future, without reservation, to the belief that it has at all levels the stuff that makes for greatness. Ultimately, it is this affirmation: What we are now is less than the shadow on the wall of what we can be if we trust ourselves.
All in all, a large idea for a modest committee of five overworked men; too large to be resolved, obviously. What the committee did, at last, was send to Nelson a dead-pan report which recommended the establishment in WPB of an Office of Technical Development empowered to co-ordinate active research projects, to use all available research facilities, to sponsor tested projects, to disseminate scientific information, and to give full consideration to all new proposals. This would fit either the Maverick or the Leith point of view, depending on the way in which the recommendation was put into effect. The report contained little hint of the deep disagreement which had split the committee.
The covering memo which Maverick sent to Nelson was not dead-pan, however. With a lofty disregard of normal government formality (after all, Maverick was the man who invented the word “gobbledygook” to describe regular governmental language), he headed the memo: “Report of Scientific Committee; Recommendations for Office of Technical Development; It is Bloody Urgent.” Then he went on to insist that WPB “must openly, freely, and honestly go into the matter of patents and new processes: and that it must approach the whole problem with the determination not to allow “certain special interests or individuals to get a superior interest over the public and the single will to victory.” And just to give Nelson a fill-in on the current rumor that the five committeemen had been having quite a time with one another, Maverick added this paragraph:
“I can report to you now and authoritatively that the general relations of various elements who have been ‘talking about each other’ are much better now than when we started the committee hearings. However, I detect certain undertones of underground conflict wherein certain persons refer to each other by the like. In MY opinion, certain persons referring to ‘politicians’ are THEMSELVES politicians, while there is much to be gained with the spirit of the Three Musketeers, we can win the war; and yet I must warn that there is much more to these hearings than would appear on the surface.”
Having said which, Maverick closed his memo with the reiteration: “But the matter is bloody urgent, and I choose my words with care.”
Dr. Leith was quite aware that Maverick was trying to put some backspin on the committee’s innocent report. In a letter to his own superior, Alec Henderson, who was then in charge of WPB’s assorted materials branches, Dr. Leith noted that “Mr. Maverick has transferred his effort to Don Nelson to get immediate action along the line of his philosophy,” and added:
“A plan is being drawn up by one of the members of the Planning Board who is in touch with Maverick to establish a corporation with large funds to take over and promote new technological inventions and ideas and keep them out of the hands of business.”
Quite correct. The Maverick committee might have turned in a compromise report, but Maverick’s underlying idea had been picked up by a man who at that moment drew a great deal of water around WPB —Robert Nathan, author of the Victor Program and head of Nelson’s official brain trust. Not long after becoming chairman of WPB, Nelson had made Nathan head of a three-man Planning Committee with broad authority to formulate and propose for the chairman such policies and programs as Nathan thought necessary; and the Planning Committee was now taking Maverick’s plan and giving it some top-drawer elaboration.
Specifically, the Planning Committee presently recommended to Nelson that the Office of Technical Development be established as Maverick’s group had proposed; but it further urged that there be set up under this office a War Research Development Corporation, with a capitalization of $100,000,000 and with complete authority to carry on scientific research in a wide variety of fields, to test new industrial processes to build pilot plants and to construct factories for the exploitation of processes or techniques which needed to be brought into full-scale operation. The Office of Technical Development would be the skipper of the operation, sifting technical ideas and suggestions and determining just what the country’s important unfilled needs might be; aggressive development along the lines thus indicated would then be undertaken by the Corporation, and there would be a broad-gauge program not merely to provide industry with new processes and products but to make sure that the new processes and products were extensively used once they were provided.
This really added up to the most far-reaching, fundamental change that had yet been proposed by anyone in connection with the war program. If the Reuther plan had reached into the office of industrial management, this one reached straight into the board rooms and the counting houses. For what this proposal actually said was substantially this: If there is, or by any exertion of our best intelligence can be, any technical means whatever for increasing the productivity of our industry, then our government is going to see to it that it is used to the absolute maximum no matter what this does to competitive relationships, profit-and-loss statements, or who-owns-what. Period.
And Donald Nelson, the solid and conservative man of business from Chicago, promptly accepted the proposal and prepared to put it into effect. In his Vincennes speech he had said that fear of change was not going to hold him back. Perhaps he really meant it.
Perhaps other men did too, for that matter. Have a brief look at the Planning Committee which formulated and recommended the proposal.
The Planning Committee had three members. Its chairman, Nathan, was a kiver-to-kiver New Dealer, having come to the defense organizations from a spot as career economist and bright-young-man in the Department of Commerce. The second member, Thomas Blaisdell, was another New Dealer, drafted by the defense agencies from the National Resources Planning Board, the very seal and symbol of all that was abhorrent in government planning. But the third member was a crusty gentleman of the Republican persuasion named Fred Searls, Jr., and he was a solid and substantial mining engineer from private industry, about as much of a New Deal theorist as Senator Taft. Searls indorsed the new program along with the theorists, and in a letter to Nathan, written June 7, 1942, he explained why.
Previously, Searls said, he had opposed the Maverick plan, partly because of his own close friendship with Dr. Leith. Now, however, he was all for it; he had been forced to change his mind by facts recently uncovered “establishing the buck-passing procedure which has for the past several months successfully prevented utilization of the Schmidt process for the continuous nitration of glycerin by the Western Cartridge Co., which has a most urgent need for the use of this process.”
Western Cartridge, Searls pointed out, was making a special explosive, on government contract, for rockets and other new weapons. To make this it desperately needed to use the Schmidt process, but in spite of the fact that there was a war on there seemed to be a great many reasons why the process could not be made available by its owners. Searls himself had done a good deal of work on the case and he was frankly fed up; he was convinced, he said, “that this whole situation is based on the fact that Western Cartridge does not belong to the ‘club’” of high-powered corporations which held the Schmidt process. Acidly, Searls declared that “to further hamper the efforts to get production from them (i.e., from Western Cartridge) which cannot be had elsewhere, though the fear of giving them information that they might utilize commercially in competition with others after the war, should no longer be tolerated.” And he concluded that “you can put me down as backing Mr. Maverick in his belief in the necessity for revision of the present setup.”
It was exactly the point Searls touched on—the possible postwar effect of a genuinely all-out effort—that was upsetting people just then. It was easy to agree that WPB must have a center to direct scientific and technical research on production; the real question was whether such a center should have limited or unlimited objectives, because if the objectives were unlimited the changes in production processes which would occur were practically certain to bring changes in the very basis of the production mechanism. But the striving for unlimited objectives is, by definition, an essential part of an all-out war; and America’s all-out war effort was in the hands of the War Production Board, most of whose big-wigs could face practically anything except the prospect of postwar change.
Nevertheless, Nelson had accepted the proposal just as Maverick and Nathan had outlined it. It remained to find a man who could run the new show.
This quest was a tough one. The fate of the whole venture would depend on the selection of a man who would be in charge. He had to be someone who was unassailable; a man with a good technical background but one who, as Stein had said, would be capable of making decisions the technicians were afraid to make; neither a New Dealer nor an industrialist with corporate ties; a man of unquestioned competence, acceptable both to the sponsors and to the opponents of unlimited production measures. If such a man could be found and installed, the long fight would be over; the very qualities that insured his approval would mean that he would take the Maverick-Nathan thesis and develop it to the hilt.
Nelson’s choice finally fell on Colonel Royal B. Lord, of the Army Engineers. Lord seemed to fill all of the specifications. A regular army man with a brilliant record, he had been detailed to the Board of Economic Warfare, where he was then serving as assistant director, to the great satisfaction of the exacting Milo Perkins. The choice suited Nathan and Maverick to a T; they had seen a good bit of Lord when he served on a committee to study the possibilities of large cargo aircraft, and they liked the way he handled problems, his receptiveness to new ideas, and his obvious ability as an organizer and an executive. Lord’s own concept of the job ahead is revealed in a letter he wrote to one of Nelson’s assistants that summer, discussing the Office of Technical Development: “I am convinced that the Director of the Office should not have strong affiliations with large industry in view of the many criticisms that may be directed at this individual if patents or processes are commandeered by the government from industry.” At the same time, Lord’s record and his prestige were good enough to insure that the opposition would not quarrel with his nomination. Nelson wrote to Milo Perkins, who agreed to surrender Colonel Lord to WPB; then Nelson wrote to the Chief of Staff, General George C. Marshall, and asked that Colonel Lord be officially detailed to WPB as Director of the Office of Technical Development.
At which point a monkey wrench fell into the machinery. The War Department, thus reminded of Colonel Lord’s existence, discovered that he could on no account be spared. On August 10 General Marshall wrote Nelson that “the shortage of experienced regular army officers will not permit the detail of Colonel Lord at this time.” The War Department, said the General, had been concerned for a long time over the number of army officers who were on duty with civilian agencies, filling jobs which might just as well be filled by civilians, and steps were being taken to recall those officers for duty with the troops. It did not appear, the General continued, that the job Nelson had in mind for Colonel Lord really required an officer of Engineers. Therefore—sorry, no dice.
This did not simply mean that Nelson was out one director for his new office; as things worked out, it meant that the whole argument over the scope and functions of the proposed office was to be reopened. What had been a closed issue suddenly became wide open again.
Colonel Lord had been the one sure-fire choice. His removal from the scene meant, in effect, that Nelson had to shop around for a man, and in the process of shopping around all of the pressures for putting in a safe and sane man to do a safe and sane job would automatically be renewed. Lacking a director, the new office could not be formally set up; as long as it was not set up, the decision to set it up along the Maverick-Nathan line was not final; and if that decision was not final the various contestants were right back where they started, with the difference that the opposition was now thoroughly aroused while the proponents of the plan were obliged to fight with one hand because they had other pressing matters to attend to.
Nelson could not give more than a fragment of his attention to the Office of Technical Development in that August of 1942. The famous “rubber crisis”—which, by the way, was just the sort of thing an Office of Technical Development would have headed off—was just coming to a boil, with the Baruch Committee preparing its report. More urgent than this, even, was Nelson’s bitter argument with the War Department over the feasibility of the war production program—an argument which not only consumed most of Nelson’s attention but took practically all of Nathan’s and the Planning Committee’s. After having resisted for so many months all attempts to get the sights raised, the War Department had finally plunged ahead in patriotic fervor and raised them clear up to the moon. Instead of calling on the economy for much less than it could do the Department was now calling on it for much more than it could do, and it was translating this call into firm contracts specifying fixed delivery dates and quantities of material. Nelson and Nathan were fighting desperately to persuade the military men to grasp the simple industrial fact that to put a genuine overload on the nation’s productive system would be disastrous. They had to show the Army men that industrial capacity was limited, while at the same time they sought to make an unlimited effort to increase that capacity.
And this was more of a handicap than the new project could carry. There never was a chance to get the War Production Board to sponsor such a far-reaching venture unless Nelson himself could make a continuous, overriding drive for it; and after the Army pulled the plug by removing Colonel Lord it simply was not possible for Nelson to make that kind of drive. The Office of Technical Development remained a paper creation, and the original report of the Maverick Committee came to look more and more like a preliminary study which ought to be supplemented by a report from recognized scientists and technicians; and at last, by mid-September, the battle had been lost and Maverick was sadly writing to Monsignor Miller, “insofar as this particular operation is concerned I have done all I can.”
For by this time Nelson had pulled in his horns. Sometime in September, one of Nathan’s assistants on the Planning Committee staff took a draft of the proposed order setting up the new office over to the War Department, to discuss it with an opposite number in the Army Air Force, and it came to the attention of Under-Secretary of War Patterson, who reacted promptly and sternly. Patterson wrote a sharp note to Nelson, protesting the whole scheme on the ground that it would duplicate work already being done and would make it harder to maintain secrecy about new scientific developments in the military field. Nelson’s reply, on October 1, disclosed that the WPB chairman had dropped the fight. The projected order, he told Patterson, “never had my approval and was merely a suggestion proposed by Colonel Lord as a basis for fuller consideration.” WPB, he added did some kind of central scientific group to pass on new production processes; and, he concluded, “to review the whole mater and provide recommendations upon which I may make a decision, I am having this whole question studied by a small but highly competent committee of scientific people from whom I expect a report shortly.”
That did it. The most ignorant man in town was not going to run the orchestra, after all. The small but highly competent committee was the kind of group Dr. Leith had been urging from the beginning. Its chairman was Dr. Webster N. Jones, Director of Engineering at Carnegie Tech, and its members were scientists and technicians from outside of WPB; and on October 12 it submitted a report stating that WPB should have an Office of Technical Development, under a competent director, to “coordinate technical efforts,” pass on new ideas and processes, make use of existing research personnel and facilities, and so on. As a final kicker, the report stipulated that the office should “start with a modest appropriation and should be allowed to grow as its effectiveness is demonstrated.”
In the end it was so ordered. Early in November the new office, now named the Office of Production Research and Development, was formally opened under the directorship of Dr. Harvey N. Davis, president of Stevens Institute of Technology. There was a last minute effort to save some vestige of the original idea, by inserting in the administrative order a proviso that “the director shall secure from the Alien Property Custodian information on foreign patents and shall make full utilization of patents important to war production.” But this was stricken out, as was another paragraph that would have required the director to “make a comprehensive survey of national research facilities, including laboratories, scientists, engineers, and technicians, so that these resources may be utilized most effectively in the war production program.” The program went ahead, did a considerable amount of useful work before the war ended, and disturbed nobody; and the War Production Board was not, after all, compelled to “think about things which in normal times would appear ridiculous.”
In the end Maverick had the last word, after all, although by that time matters had reached the stage where words did not make any particular difference. He became chairman of the Smaller War Plants Corporation, and in 1946 he transmitted to the Senate Small Business Committee a report of the Corporation entitled “Economic Concentration and World War II.”
This report showed that during the war the government spent nearly one billion dollars for scientific research in industrial laboratories (exclusive of money spent on atomic research). This money went to some two thousand industrial organizations; the ten largest got two-fifths of it—say $400,000,000—and the 68 largest got two-thirds of the total. After pointing out that this centralization of research would almost inevitably increase the existing concentration of economic power—since the peacetime uses and applications of the technical knowledge gained at government expense would be enormous—the report of Maverick’s corporation continued:
But the trouble was that the other war, the real war, wouldn’t stay put. The real war was tragedy and pain and death, and it was being fought by human beings, and the bits of paper that were being shuffled endlessly in the Social Security Building were due to turn up some day as the justification for somebody’s bloodshed and agony; and the terrible question, “What are we really fighting for?” kept coming up for answer, demanding attention from men who would greatly have preferred to take their patriotism straight and let others worry about the abstractions. Yet the abstractions were at the heart of it, somebody had to work them out, the answers had to be found right here in WPB, and no sooner were items like the role of the dollar-a-year man and the handling of army procurement disposed of than the same problem would bob up again in some other guise. As, for example, in the matter of patent rights, technological advances, and industrial processes.
These are often fairly dull, unless you happen to be a technician, an economist, or an industrialist, but in the spring and summer of 1942 they offered the busy men in WPB one more chance to look the idea of an all-out war in the face and decide whether or not they could go for it. As usual, they found that they could not. For all-out war deals in absolutes; it means the last curtain and the final bugle call for Things as They Were; it means that this carefully formalized exercise in the Social Security Building might suddenly go haywire and become a swiftly-humming machine for building a new heaven and a new earth, so that the intangibles which men are dying for will transcend in value the sacred rights of custom, of property, and of Our Two Million Stockholders. And all of these matters were bound up in this question of patent rights, technological advances, and industrial processes.
It began innocently enough, as so many wicked things do, when a couple of Catholic scientists from Cincinnati visited Washington one day in March, 1942, to call on Maury Maverick, former congressman, former Mayor of San Antonio, and at that time the chief of WPB’s Bureau of Government Requirements.
The two visitors were Monsignor Cletus A. Miller and Dr. George S. Sperti, both from the Institutum Divi Thomae, a Catholic institution for scientific research. They were interested, at the moment, simply in finding a means to protect public health during the war; Maverick’s bureau, which was responsible for screening the requests made by state and city governments for materials and equipment, was their port of call because it was up to Maverick to determine whether a city water works, for instance, could have chemicals for water purification purposes. Thus the two men sat down to talk with Maverick, and presently they discovered that they had ideas in common about the necessity for an all-out war and ways and means of achieving it. As a successful inventor, Dr. Sperti had discovered a thing or two about the difference between perfecting an industrial device or process and actually getting it used; and before long the three had stopped talking about public health measures and were discussing the way in which scientific skills and techniques are sometimes monopolized in industry, the way in which such monopolies can interfere with an all-out war effort, and the importance, for war and for peace, of finding some way to take the shackles off the nation’s productive power.
(And why should three men who sat down to talk about filtration plants and chemicals find themselves discussing big industry, monopoly, and the American dream? This was none of their business, as men’s business was gauged in the spring of 1942; the war was being fought by and with big business, and nobody had asked these three to worry about the prospect that it might turn out to be fought for big business as well. The Social Security Building’s war was Detroit and Pittsburgh and Chicago and Los Angeles, not to mention Wall Street, and the time to worry about monopoly was far behind anyway….Except that this other war, the war in which the ordinary human being was proving once again his eternal and incomprehensible readiness to die for something bigger than himself, was going on too, and these three men somehow felt that they had to do a little thinking about what the ordinary human being was going to be given in exchange for his life. If all he stood to get was what would trickle down, ultimately, from the high centers of power, then he was being sold down the river and it was time to do something. And what better place to start doing it than right here in Maverick’s office?)
It was wholly characteristic of Maverick that the discussion should have taken this turn. In the early days in Texas, Maverick’s family name had been turned into a common noun meaning an unbranded critter that is out on the plains on its own hook, answerable to no one, and the noun fitted the man himself. He was short, stocky, swarthy, intensely irascible, and inordinately loyal—both to people and to ideas—and he was a scrapper who lost all his inhibitions in the clinches. The dollar-a-year men, for the most part, would have liked to look on him as a comic figure (he looked on most dollar-a-year men as figures out of the bad place, so that made it even) except that they felt he was too dangerous to be funny. He was an unconverted New Dealer, in whose eyes Roosevelt’s one mistake was his reliance on captains of industry to help win the war—a mistake which, Maverick felt, was all too likely to be fine for monopolists and bad for ordinary folk who had to do the fighting.
So when the conversation got onto the problem of the monopolist, Maverick decided to take steps. After spending a good deal of time comparing notes and working out ideas with Monsignor Miller and Dr. Sperti, he prepared a memorandum on the matter. The whole business was outside of his field, but the war was still young and it hadn’t been won yet, and Nelson was showing a refreshing willingness to consider any idea, no matter where it came from, that promised to bring victory more quickly; and, anyway, Maverick was a maverick and the range hadn’t been fenced in yet. So Maverick sent his memo off to Herbert Emmerich, then executive secretary of WPB, outlining “a plan for the organization of the scientific research laboratories of the United States in a co-operative research program to meet the problems of shortages of materials and to assist industry and government in war production.” The memo proposed that WPB set up a bureau to organize commercial and industrial research operations, and warned that it would be important to distinguish between “those problems which benefit private industry only and those problems which benefit the nation in the total war effort.”
This memo was passed on to Nelson, who liked the idea. There existed, then and throughout the war, a most effective organization of scientists to help the Army and Navy develop new weapons—the Office of Scientific Research and Development, under Dr. Vannevar Bush—but there was nothing like it on the non-combatant side. If the military men needed a new explosive, a new range finder, a new fuse, or anything similar, Dr. Bush’s organization could quickly bring the best scientific and laboratory skill of the country to bear on the problem. But there was no way to bring about a similar mobilization of talent for purely industrial problems, and there was no way to make sure that devices or processes which might be developed during the war would be made readily available to all manufacturers who might need them. Clearly, industrial production could be speeded and victory could be brought nearer if there were, on the industrial side, a good counterpart to Dr. Bush’s organization. Accordingly, in mid-April, Nelson appointed a committee to look into the matter and recommend a course of action.
Nelson made Maverick chairman of this committee. Other members were Dr. Charles I. Gragg, a consultant to the chairman of WPB, on leave as member of the faculty of Harvard’s Graduate School of Business Administration; Harold Stein, an officer in WPB’s Division of Civilian Supply—the old Leon Henderson organization that made so much trouble for the auto industry eight months earlier; Lessing Rosenwald (the Rosenwald), chief of WPB’s Bureau of Industrial Conservation, and Dr. C. K. Leith, technical consultant to WPB’s Materials Division, in private life a geologist on the faculty of the University of Wisconsin. These men were instructed to find out what kind of office or bureau WPB should set up in order “to make use of the scientific resources of the country,” to keep abreast of industrial research, and to take action on inventions, new developments, and so on.
Late in April, 1942, then, these five men sat down together to examine what was currently being done along these lines and to see whether more should be added to it.
It was easy enough for them to conclude that WPB needed a much more vigorous direction and co-ordination of industrial research and development. What was already being done was good as far as it went, but it was clear that it did not go far enough. Dr. Leith pointed out that he himself was at the head of “an inadequate center, where there are only twenty of us” for the clearance of research problems. Ever since July, 1940, he recalled, the Defense Commission and its successors had been using the National Academy of Sciences for technological assistance, sending requests for aid to the Academy and getting the answers from scientific committees which the Academy would thereupon call into being. In addition, he said, WPB had from time to time used the services of such government agencies as the Bureau of Mines, the Geological Survey and the National Bureau of Standards; further, the several WPB branches and divisions were constantly asking for research of various kinds in industrial and university laboratories—the laboratories, for instance, of General Electric, Westinghouse, General Motors, Chrysler, the Mellon Institute, California Tech, and so on. There ought to be a much better integration and direction of the whole process, he said, with some such sum as $5,000,000 for a war chest; this board should take charge of all general requests for scientific research work, should be headed by an outstanding professional in the field, and should avoid setting up new committees or administrative units that might duplicate the work already being done by the WPB industry branches and divisions.
So far, so good; this was a war of technologies, and all five men on the committee agreed that America’s technologies had better be good. But at that point the agreement ceased. For it was one thing to agree that all scientific and technological resources must be used; it was quite another to determine exactly where those resources existed, how they were to be discovered, and in what way they could best be harnessed. All of these resources “must be used”; and precisely what do we mean by “used”? Used how, by whom, for whose benefit? The answers to these questions determine, ultimately, who really runs the country. The committee split in two, with Maverick, Gragg, and Stein in one group and Rosenwald and Leith in another, and the split was permanent.
What the Maverick group was shooting at was a completely new approach to the whole problem. It believed in the removal of all the invisible impediments that stand between the age of scientific achievements and the fullest possible use of those achievements. What it was actually demanding was production-for-use translated to the entire field of industrial research and technological advance. Stein brought the point of view out clearly at one of the early committee meetings.
Industrial scientists and technicians, he said, were guided by the profit motive—that is, they looked for products or devices which would make money for their own corporations. Okay, they had to play it that way; the corporations are in business to make money, that’s how we operated. But there was a war on now, and the war emergency needed something which the profit motive couldn’t supply—“ideas of a revolutionary sort,” as Stein put it, the determining factor regarding which being “not whether they are desirable for making money,” but whether, all factors considered, they are desirable for the country as a whole, which might be quite a different matter. And he added:
“We have reached the curious point in our course where we have to think about things which in normal times would appear ridiculous.”
True as four-ply gospel, but was there ever found on land or sea a human organization less prepared than this War Production Board to “think about things which in normal times would appear ridiculous”? How far do you gentlemen think you are going to get with this idea, anyhow?
Much farther than anyone would suppose; so far, in fact, that they almost got away with it. But first there was the committee itself to deal with. The committee was fully agreed that WPB should have an office to take responsibility for industrial research and development. But how should the men who would run that office be selected? Should they be technicians or laymen? Technicians, argued Dr. Leith, “because this is not a business matter” and because the office would be dealing with purely technical problems; laymen, argued Maverick, because the office would really be dealing with social problems and its responsibilities would be social rather than scientific.
Maverick undertook to illustrate with a case from his own experience as Mayor of San Antonio. They had had a civic orchestra, he said, which had fallen on evil days. Its governing body was composed of cultured and talented folk who knew a great deal about music but who did not seem to know very much about keeping an orchestra solvent.
“We finally got the most ignorant man in town and put him in at the head,” said Maverick. “He had never been anywhere, and these cultured people had been to New York and many other places. But he made a howling success of it. Then he died, and the cultured people got control of it—and it went broke again. So you have to have—“
“What,” interrupted Rosenwald, “is the moral of that story?”
“The moral of that story,” said Maverick, “Is that you have got to have a few people who are not specially trained along a certain line, and if you get all those men on a committee you look at it purely from a technical and research point of view, and not according to economic, business, and social problems.”
Dr. Leith protested that even so Maverick had not made his most ignorant man the conductor of the orchestra; but Stein got the argument back from Texas by remarking that what they were really up against was “the necessity for making decisions which the technicians are afraid to make.” Synthetic rubber, for instance; the basic questions about that highly crucial program should be decided, not by the men who knew exactly how synthetic rubber is made, but by men who felt the terrible urgency of the situation and were resolved that the best technical processes should be used no matter whose vested interests or postwar expectations might be hurt.
Tied in with this there was a subsidiary question which revolved about the same central issue: Assuming that we must greatly intensify industrial research, do we continue to rely on the research agencies that are now doing the job, merely giving the program better direction and a broader scope, or do we reach out to enlist the researchers who are not now being used at all—the men in the laboratories and experiment stations at small colleges and universities, the lesser research laboratories in private industry, the unattached scientists and inventors who have not yet been put to work in the war effort? Dr. Leith felt strongly that the established channels of industrial research were competent to do the job and ought not to be disturbed; Maverick argued heatedly for bringing in all of the little fellows.
Now this, dressed up in a different costume, was essentially the same breath-taking specter that had arisen to terrify the godly at the time the Reuther plan was up for consideration. This, again, was the proposal that the nation, beset by great dangers, increase the total of its strength by finding and using to the full all of its previously unused sources of strength. Beyond any ism or manifesto, this idea is revolutionary; for it presupposes a readiness to play the game in an entirely new way, an imaginative confidence that the nation will transcend itself by committing its future, without reservation, to the belief that it has at all levels the stuff that makes for greatness. Ultimately, it is this affirmation: What we are now is less than the shadow on the wall of what we can be if we trust ourselves.
All in all, a large idea for a modest committee of five overworked men; too large to be resolved, obviously. What the committee did, at last, was send to Nelson a dead-pan report which recommended the establishment in WPB of an Office of Technical Development empowered to co-ordinate active research projects, to use all available research facilities, to sponsor tested projects, to disseminate scientific information, and to give full consideration to all new proposals. This would fit either the Maverick or the Leith point of view, depending on the way in which the recommendation was put into effect. The report contained little hint of the deep disagreement which had split the committee.
The covering memo which Maverick sent to Nelson was not dead-pan, however. With a lofty disregard of normal government formality (after all, Maverick was the man who invented the word “gobbledygook” to describe regular governmental language), he headed the memo: “Report of Scientific Committee; Recommendations for Office of Technical Development; It is Bloody Urgent.” Then he went on to insist that WPB “must openly, freely, and honestly go into the matter of patents and new processes: and that it must approach the whole problem with the determination not to allow “certain special interests or individuals to get a superior interest over the public and the single will to victory.” And just to give Nelson a fill-in on the current rumor that the five committeemen had been having quite a time with one another, Maverick added this paragraph:
“I can report to you now and authoritatively that the general relations of various elements who have been ‘talking about each other’ are much better now than when we started the committee hearings. However, I detect certain undertones of underground conflict wherein certain persons refer to each other by the like. In MY opinion, certain persons referring to ‘politicians’ are THEMSELVES politicians, while there is much to be gained with the spirit of the Three Musketeers, we can win the war; and yet I must warn that there is much more to these hearings than would appear on the surface.”
Having said which, Maverick closed his memo with the reiteration: “But the matter is bloody urgent, and I choose my words with care.”
Dr. Leith was quite aware that Maverick was trying to put some backspin on the committee’s innocent report. In a letter to his own superior, Alec Henderson, who was then in charge of WPB’s assorted materials branches, Dr. Leith noted that “Mr. Maverick has transferred his effort to Don Nelson to get immediate action along the line of his philosophy,” and added:
“A plan is being drawn up by one of the members of the Planning Board who is in touch with Maverick to establish a corporation with large funds to take over and promote new technological inventions and ideas and keep them out of the hands of business.”
Quite correct. The Maverick committee might have turned in a compromise report, but Maverick’s underlying idea had been picked up by a man who at that moment drew a great deal of water around WPB —Robert Nathan, author of the Victor Program and head of Nelson’s official brain trust. Not long after becoming chairman of WPB, Nelson had made Nathan head of a three-man Planning Committee with broad authority to formulate and propose for the chairman such policies and programs as Nathan thought necessary; and the Planning Committee was now taking Maverick’s plan and giving it some top-drawer elaboration.
Specifically, the Planning Committee presently recommended to Nelson that the Office of Technical Development be established as Maverick’s group had proposed; but it further urged that there be set up under this office a War Research Development Corporation, with a capitalization of $100,000,000 and with complete authority to carry on scientific research in a wide variety of fields, to test new industrial processes to build pilot plants and to construct factories for the exploitation of processes or techniques which needed to be brought into full-scale operation. The Office of Technical Development would be the skipper of the operation, sifting technical ideas and suggestions and determining just what the country’s important unfilled needs might be; aggressive development along the lines thus indicated would then be undertaken by the Corporation, and there would be a broad-gauge program not merely to provide industry with new processes and products but to make sure that the new processes and products were extensively used once they were provided.
This really added up to the most far-reaching, fundamental change that had yet been proposed by anyone in connection with the war program. If the Reuther plan had reached into the office of industrial management, this one reached straight into the board rooms and the counting houses. For what this proposal actually said was substantially this: If there is, or by any exertion of our best intelligence can be, any technical means whatever for increasing the productivity of our industry, then our government is going to see to it that it is used to the absolute maximum no matter what this does to competitive relationships, profit-and-loss statements, or who-owns-what. Period.
And Donald Nelson, the solid and conservative man of business from Chicago, promptly accepted the proposal and prepared to put it into effect. In his Vincennes speech he had said that fear of change was not going to hold him back. Perhaps he really meant it.
Perhaps other men did too, for that matter. Have a brief look at the Planning Committee which formulated and recommended the proposal.
The Planning Committee had three members. Its chairman, Nathan, was a kiver-to-kiver New Dealer, having come to the defense organizations from a spot as career economist and bright-young-man in the Department of Commerce. The second member, Thomas Blaisdell, was another New Dealer, drafted by the defense agencies from the National Resources Planning Board, the very seal and symbol of all that was abhorrent in government planning. But the third member was a crusty gentleman of the Republican persuasion named Fred Searls, Jr., and he was a solid and substantial mining engineer from private industry, about as much of a New Deal theorist as Senator Taft. Searls indorsed the new program along with the theorists, and in a letter to Nathan, written June 7, 1942, he explained why.
Previously, Searls said, he had opposed the Maverick plan, partly because of his own close friendship with Dr. Leith. Now, however, he was all for it; he had been forced to change his mind by facts recently uncovered “establishing the buck-passing procedure which has for the past several months successfully prevented utilization of the Schmidt process for the continuous nitration of glycerin by the Western Cartridge Co., which has a most urgent need for the use of this process.”
Western Cartridge, Searls pointed out, was making a special explosive, on government contract, for rockets and other new weapons. To make this it desperately needed to use the Schmidt process, but in spite of the fact that there was a war on there seemed to be a great many reasons why the process could not be made available by its owners. Searls himself had done a good deal of work on the case and he was frankly fed up; he was convinced, he said, “that this whole situation is based on the fact that Western Cartridge does not belong to the ‘club’” of high-powered corporations which held the Schmidt process. Acidly, Searls declared that “to further hamper the efforts to get production from them (i.e., from Western Cartridge) which cannot be had elsewhere, though the fear of giving them information that they might utilize commercially in competition with others after the war, should no longer be tolerated.” And he concluded that “you can put me down as backing Mr. Maverick in his belief in the necessity for revision of the present setup.”
It was exactly the point Searls touched on—the possible postwar effect of a genuinely all-out effort—that was upsetting people just then. It was easy to agree that WPB must have a center to direct scientific and technical research on production; the real question was whether such a center should have limited or unlimited objectives, because if the objectives were unlimited the changes in production processes which would occur were practically certain to bring changes in the very basis of the production mechanism. But the striving for unlimited objectives is, by definition, an essential part of an all-out war; and America’s all-out war effort was in the hands of the War Production Board, most of whose big-wigs could face practically anything except the prospect of postwar change.
Nevertheless, Nelson had accepted the proposal just as Maverick and Nathan had outlined it. It remained to find a man who could run the new show.
This quest was a tough one. The fate of the whole venture would depend on the selection of a man who would be in charge. He had to be someone who was unassailable; a man with a good technical background but one who, as Stein had said, would be capable of making decisions the technicians were afraid to make; neither a New Dealer nor an industrialist with corporate ties; a man of unquestioned competence, acceptable both to the sponsors and to the opponents of unlimited production measures. If such a man could be found and installed, the long fight would be over; the very qualities that insured his approval would mean that he would take the Maverick-Nathan thesis and develop it to the hilt.
Nelson’s choice finally fell on Colonel Royal B. Lord, of the Army Engineers. Lord seemed to fill all of the specifications. A regular army man with a brilliant record, he had been detailed to the Board of Economic Warfare, where he was then serving as assistant director, to the great satisfaction of the exacting Milo Perkins. The choice suited Nathan and Maverick to a T; they had seen a good bit of Lord when he served on a committee to study the possibilities of large cargo aircraft, and they liked the way he handled problems, his receptiveness to new ideas, and his obvious ability as an organizer and an executive. Lord’s own concept of the job ahead is revealed in a letter he wrote to one of Nelson’s assistants that summer, discussing the Office of Technical Development: “I am convinced that the Director of the Office should not have strong affiliations with large industry in view of the many criticisms that may be directed at this individual if patents or processes are commandeered by the government from industry.” At the same time, Lord’s record and his prestige were good enough to insure that the opposition would not quarrel with his nomination. Nelson wrote to Milo Perkins, who agreed to surrender Colonel Lord to WPB; then Nelson wrote to the Chief of Staff, General George C. Marshall, and asked that Colonel Lord be officially detailed to WPB as Director of the Office of Technical Development.
At which point a monkey wrench fell into the machinery. The War Department, thus reminded of Colonel Lord’s existence, discovered that he could on no account be spared. On August 10 General Marshall wrote Nelson that “the shortage of experienced regular army officers will not permit the detail of Colonel Lord at this time.” The War Department, said the General, had been concerned for a long time over the number of army officers who were on duty with civilian agencies, filling jobs which might just as well be filled by civilians, and steps were being taken to recall those officers for duty with the troops. It did not appear, the General continued, that the job Nelson had in mind for Colonel Lord really required an officer of Engineers. Therefore—sorry, no dice.
This did not simply mean that Nelson was out one director for his new office; as things worked out, it meant that the whole argument over the scope and functions of the proposed office was to be reopened. What had been a closed issue suddenly became wide open again.
Colonel Lord had been the one sure-fire choice. His removal from the scene meant, in effect, that Nelson had to shop around for a man, and in the process of shopping around all of the pressures for putting in a safe and sane man to do a safe and sane job would automatically be renewed. Lacking a director, the new office could not be formally set up; as long as it was not set up, the decision to set it up along the Maverick-Nathan line was not final; and if that decision was not final the various contestants were right back where they started, with the difference that the opposition was now thoroughly aroused while the proponents of the plan were obliged to fight with one hand because they had other pressing matters to attend to.
Nelson could not give more than a fragment of his attention to the Office of Technical Development in that August of 1942. The famous “rubber crisis”—which, by the way, was just the sort of thing an Office of Technical Development would have headed off—was just coming to a boil, with the Baruch Committee preparing its report. More urgent than this, even, was Nelson’s bitter argument with the War Department over the feasibility of the war production program—an argument which not only consumed most of Nelson’s attention but took practically all of Nathan’s and the Planning Committee’s. After having resisted for so many months all attempts to get the sights raised, the War Department had finally plunged ahead in patriotic fervor and raised them clear up to the moon. Instead of calling on the economy for much less than it could do the Department was now calling on it for much more than it could do, and it was translating this call into firm contracts specifying fixed delivery dates and quantities of material. Nelson and Nathan were fighting desperately to persuade the military men to grasp the simple industrial fact that to put a genuine overload on the nation’s productive system would be disastrous. They had to show the Army men that industrial capacity was limited, while at the same time they sought to make an unlimited effort to increase that capacity.
And this was more of a handicap than the new project could carry. There never was a chance to get the War Production Board to sponsor such a far-reaching venture unless Nelson himself could make a continuous, overriding drive for it; and after the Army pulled the plug by removing Colonel Lord it simply was not possible for Nelson to make that kind of drive. The Office of Technical Development remained a paper creation, and the original report of the Maverick Committee came to look more and more like a preliminary study which ought to be supplemented by a report from recognized scientists and technicians; and at last, by mid-September, the battle had been lost and Maverick was sadly writing to Monsignor Miller, “insofar as this particular operation is concerned I have done all I can.”
For by this time Nelson had pulled in his horns. Sometime in September, one of Nathan’s assistants on the Planning Committee staff took a draft of the proposed order setting up the new office over to the War Department, to discuss it with an opposite number in the Army Air Force, and it came to the attention of Under-Secretary of War Patterson, who reacted promptly and sternly. Patterson wrote a sharp note to Nelson, protesting the whole scheme on the ground that it would duplicate work already being done and would make it harder to maintain secrecy about new scientific developments in the military field. Nelson’s reply, on October 1, disclosed that the WPB chairman had dropped the fight. The projected order, he told Patterson, “never had my approval and was merely a suggestion proposed by Colonel Lord as a basis for fuller consideration.” WPB, he added did some kind of central scientific group to pass on new production processes; and, he concluded, “to review the whole mater and provide recommendations upon which I may make a decision, I am having this whole question studied by a small but highly competent committee of scientific people from whom I expect a report shortly.”
That did it. The most ignorant man in town was not going to run the orchestra, after all. The small but highly competent committee was the kind of group Dr. Leith had been urging from the beginning. Its chairman was Dr. Webster N. Jones, Director of Engineering at Carnegie Tech, and its members were scientists and technicians from outside of WPB; and on October 12 it submitted a report stating that WPB should have an Office of Technical Development, under a competent director, to “coordinate technical efforts,” pass on new ideas and processes, make use of existing research personnel and facilities, and so on. As a final kicker, the report stipulated that the office should “start with a modest appropriation and should be allowed to grow as its effectiveness is demonstrated.”
In the end it was so ordered. Early in November the new office, now named the Office of Production Research and Development, was formally opened under the directorship of Dr. Harvey N. Davis, president of Stevens Institute of Technology. There was a last minute effort to save some vestige of the original idea, by inserting in the administrative order a proviso that “the director shall secure from the Alien Property Custodian information on foreign patents and shall make full utilization of patents important to war production.” But this was stricken out, as was another paragraph that would have required the director to “make a comprehensive survey of national research facilities, including laboratories, scientists, engineers, and technicians, so that these resources may be utilized most effectively in the war production program.” The program went ahead, did a considerable amount of useful work before the war ended, and disturbed nobody; and the War Production Board was not, after all, compelled to “think about things which in normal times would appear ridiculous.”
In the end Maverick had the last word, after all, although by that time matters had reached the stage where words did not make any particular difference. He became chairman of the Smaller War Plants Corporation, and in 1946 he transmitted to the Senate Small Business Committee a report of the Corporation entitled “Economic Concentration and World War II.”
This report showed that during the war the government spent nearly one billion dollars for scientific research in industrial laboratories (exclusive of money spent on atomic research). This money went to some two thousand industrial organizations; the ten largest got two-fifths of it—say $400,000,000—and the 68 largest got two-thirds of the total. After pointing out that this centralization of research would almost inevitably increase the existing concentration of economic power—since the peacetime uses and applications of the technical knowledge gained at government expense would be enormous—the report of Maverick’s corporation continued:
“Obviously, the companies in whose laboratories this research work has been carried on will be its chief beneficiaries, not only because of their direct acquaintanceship and knowledge of the research but also because of patents. The investigations of the Subcommittee on War Mobilization of the Senate Military Affairs Committee show that over 90 per cent of the contracts made between government agencies and private industrial laboratories for scientific research and development placed the ownership of patents with the contractor, the government receiving a royalty-free license for its own use…. This means, in effect, that the large corporations which carried on the great bulk of the federally financed wartime industrial research will have control, through patents, of the commercial applications of that research.”Maybe it really was bloody urgent, at that.
[Released December 27, 1945. Dated November 1, 1945]Bruce Catton, 'It Is Bloody Urgent'
Dear Maury:
As you know, in line with my reorganization plans, the Smaller War Plants Corporation's functions are being transferred to other agencies. But there is one more job I would like for you to do for small business. It is in connection with little business in world trade.
Sometime ago I authorized you to take a trip to the countries of the Pacific. The purpose of the Mission was to make a report to me concerning the development of small business in these countries and the possibility of stimulating international trade between them and small businesses at home. Particularly, I am interested in the development of American small business in the field of international trade.
The countries to be visited by you are the Philippines, China, Korea, Australia, and New Zealand.
It is assumed, of course, that you will work closely with representatives of the Department of State in each country which you visit.
I want to congratulate you on the job that you have done as Chairman of the Smaller War Plants Corporation and for the work you have done for small business.
With best wishes, I am
Sincerely yours,
HARRY S. TRUMAN
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