Evening Republican, Volume 22, Number 125, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 28 May 1919 — PLACES READJUSTMENT DATA AT COMMAND OF BUSINESS WORLD [ARTICLE]

PLACES READJUSTMENT DATA AT COMMAND OF BUSINESS WORLD

Research Division of the Council of National Defense Offers All Its Facilities to Aid in Reorganization of Industry and Resumption of,Trade —Burden of Reconstruction Must Fall on Industry.

Washington —The council of national defense announces Its readiness -to place at the command of the business world the information contained in the voluminous collection of data brought together, classified, indexed, and partly digested by its reconstruction research division. It also offers the services of this division in the procurement of such further special information as may be desired and which may aid in the reorganization of industry and the resumption of trade, or which may in any other manner promote progress in the reconstruction. , Just what the information here offered consists of may be indicated best by reference to some of its sources and by mention of a few subjects under which the material is subclassified: Official Information—The division has undertaken to chart all the federal official bodies that have a point of contact with demobilization or reconstructibn, and to possess up-to-date information as to accomplishments and plans of each such body or bureau. Furthermore, through its “field service,” branching out info 184,000 state, county, and community organizations, Including some 1,000 women’s units, the division is enabled to maintain direct contact with every eort of state and local reconstruction activity in the land. A digest Is kept of state reconstruction news. Foreign Reconstruction—The division has access to every important report of foreign reconstruction activity, proposed or accomplished, that reaches this country. Domestic Business Background—The division has official contact with all the war administration boards, bureaus. and investigation commission, as well as with the federal departments themselves. Thus it has access to e great deal of statistical and other unpublished information, ranging all the way from domestic prices data and production estimates, wage data, labor supply problems; to notes on foreign production, the foreign labor and emigration situation, foreign market conditions, and finance. The division has advices as to which industries and which sections of our country are picking up end making their reconstruction readjustments the more promisingly. Of course such a range of Information, covering physical resources and available goods, the money and credit outlook, relative price and price tendencies, foreign prpspects, and the trend of actual business development as represented by reports of current projects and undertakings throughout the United States —such a survey mus> tend to yield more reliable Impressions as to what the future may be expected to bring than can be derived from the more restricted basis of judgment of the average business group. Devices of Clipping Bureaus. Public Opinion and General Information —The division has its own clipping bureau, supplemented by the service of the chief commercial clipping bureaus. Thus it is enabled to sift practically everything in public print that has a bearing upon any phase of reconstruction. All this material is classified, Indexed, and made ready for reference. The Industrial or financial organization or trade paper that chboses to tap this resource will no doubt find unexpected stores of Information. From the siftings of Its Incoming information the division Issues a daily digest of reconstruction ■news. Intended primarily for the use of the council and government bureaus, but available also to other institutions whose relations to reconstruction problems are such as to entitle them to the service. In thus proposing to extend its service, the council opens to tfia business public probably the largest and most complete assembly of up-toithe-minute reconstruction Information In existence. The undertaking also implies the proffer to industry and commerce

of the services of an organization that for many months has been establishing connections and perfecting facilities for the securing of every sort ot vital Information at the earliest possible moment it is available. Through the fact that the council of nationaldefense itself consists of six secretaries of administrative departments of the government, and by virtue of the further fact that for more than two. years the council has been engaged in the closest co-operation with national, state, and local agencies of private as well as public bodies, the reconstruction research division has been from its inception possessed ot invaluable contacts in all directions. The material and staff now placed at the service of business was originally intended primarily for governmental use, and they will, of course, continue to function as the governmental clearing house of reconstruction information. The beginning of the council’s researches into reconstruction and readjustment matters in this and foreign countries followed upon a memorandum addressed to the six cabinet members forming the council by Grosvenor B. Clarkson, its director, on May 6, 1918. The president of the United States received a copy of this memorandum, and shortly afterward authorized the council to begin its studies. In the memorandum in question Mr. Clarkson, after defining the prime problem as being that of industrial reconstruction —in broad terms, the reconversion of industry from the war basis back to the peace-time basis and the reabsorption into industry of the labor employed in,the service of the United States—said : . “It Is elementary that after the war America will not be the same America. Already she has in many directions broken with her past and she is being hourly transformed. The metamorphosis is going on as much in the thought of the country as it is in the structure; the same thing will be "true in the period after the war. New conditions and relationships create new problems for nations as well as for individuals; and, let me add, the change will be as great in the thought and ideals of the nation as it will be in its strictly material problems, whether these be military, commercial, or those having to do with labor. “Let us grant that we shall gain military success. Let us then not fall into the danger-trap of allowing the material effects of such, success to overshadow consideration of the higher values which give a nation its life. The civilized world today, as we know that world, may be said to be one great altar of sacrifice. If that is not true now, it certainly will be true if the war continues for another year. It ls«our duty in any adequate intellectual conception of the task to see to it that the gains to the moral as well as the material well-being of the nation shall square with the sacrifice. A • little reflection will convince one that this aspect of reconstruction is the fundamental aspect and that upon It must be predicated all successful plans in this direction. “A year ago we were a great, lazy democracy. Lincoln said, ‘A fat hound won’t hunt.’ That sentence illumined our national disease. The transformation from that condition is already under way. Soon the spirit of the nation will be a burning flame. There will be sloughed off the scales fostered by a love of luxury and the loose'and boastful thinking that have been our curse in the last generation. Out of the turmoil and the sacrifice will come discipline and orderly living and thinking; and, therefore, with sequential and irresistible logic will 'come demands for new conditions of living commensurate to the new Ideals. Again I repeat, here is the fundamental reconstruction to which the American government should address itself ( and only herein can be found the policy which shall be the groundwork of any

enlightened organization for reconstruction. “History records but few fruitful governmental agencies that did not have a firm and penetrating quality at the base. Raising the framework for the task is merely a matter of mechanics in organization. • • • In the meantime the council and advisory commission should accumulate all of the literature bearing upon this question and form it into a working library. “It may be that as the war nears its ends and as the issue between autocracy and democracy becomes ever sharper and more terrible, the civilized world will demand that immediately at the war’s close all reconstruction of the world’s affairs be based upon the dictum of Lincoln that no man is good enough to govern any other man without that other man’s consent, to the end of approaching the proper readjustment of national, international, and racial relationships. I offer this, though, not for the purpose of injecting idealism in a discussion where undue accent of it does not belong, but to emphasize anew that none of us can see the end of the road and that therefore all plans for reconstruction should be builded so as to permit of flexibility of action and, even of minor policy at any given time. The main thing now is to come to concrete thinking and study of the entire problem.” Director Clarkson immediately began the organization of a staff of experts, including O. M. W. Sprague, professor of finance and banking at Harvard, and Herbert N. Shenton of Columbia. Out of this staff work grew the reconstruction research division, which was organized on February 3, 1919, with Mr. Shenton as its chief. “The reconstruction research division,” said Charles H. Chase, a member, “has comejto feel more and more, as the reconstruction has progressed, that its information service should ba made available to the leaders of private enterprise, just as it is made responsive to the needs of governmental agencies. The problems and responsibilities of reconstruction tend, as time goes on, to fall more and more heavily upon the shoulders of business and relatively less upon governmental machinery. Of the two grand divisions of reconstruction, demobilization and reorganization, the former belongs chiefly to the government and the latter devolves mainly upon private enterprise. The former tends steadily toward its conclusion; ths latter broadens into the foundation of an indefinitely expanding future. And though the government has, and will continue to have important responsibilities in connection with the economic reorganization of the nation, It must be acknowledged that those who are to deal with these problems hand-to-hand are the directors of business undertakings. » “It must be recognized, also, that we have come out upon a new world, in a sense, in emerging from the world war. Our industrial and commercial reorganization must be effected under conditions that have undergone considerable alteration during thp struggle. Not only price levels, but price ratios also, have been changed, and in many cases permanently so. New industries have arisen; markets have been altered; international economic relations are modified; means of transportation and communication have been partially revolutionized ; but nothing has undergone greater change than our social viewpoint, and especially the viewpoint of labor. There are new opportunities and new and promising outlooks, hut they are not quite like those of pre-war times. The chessboard has been shaken; spine of the chessmen have disappeared, while several others have been moved forward or backward, a little. “Not only have purely business factors altered, but new duties have arisen—the social responsibility of the business enterprise has become a much more serious matter than it used to be. In the light of world developments it is obvious that our business system must prove its resourcefulness; it must demonstrate hitherto unrevealed capacity for readjustment; it must show a disposition to meet and satisfy certain species of expectation which have gained recognition during the war and can no longer be unceremoniously Ignored Or suppressed. As Secretary Redfield Says: We cannot be tSlaw unto ourselves any more.’ General and continuous prosperity must he underwritten and guaranteed, if our institutions are to avoid the risk of a trial at the bar of public discontent. Rules of thumb are liable to prove inadequate in this period of readjustment. Nothing short of alert open-mindedness, reinforced by possession of the fullest available information, will serve. In view of these facts the., business world’is entitled to the fullest measure of assistance that governmental agencies are prepared to render it. It is in the spirit of that principle that the files of the council’s reconstruction research division are now thrown open to the business public.” Inquiries may be made by written communication, by telephone, or by personal representative. Requests should be addressed to the Reconstruction Research Division, Council of Na, 1 tlonal Defense, 18th apd 1 D strset* N. W„ Washington, D. O.