Kankakee Valley Post, Volume 11, Number 10, DeMotte, Jasper County, 23 January 1941 — GENERAL HUGH S. JOHNSON Saus: [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

GENERAL HUGH S. JOHNSON Saus:

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Washington, D. C. TWO MAN CONTROL There will doubtless be consider- ! able criticism of the executive order , setting up the new War Industries , board—called, for some prideful reason, “The Office of Production Management.” It may be said that twoman control (Knudsen-Hillman) is ; an administrative abortion, that not enough authority has been delegat- j ed and so on and on. That criticism will not come from this column which has been yapping for such action for two years. Mr. j B M. Baruch, the father of industrial mobilizations and war indus- j tries boards, is also enthusiastic. i I have just been looking up the 1918 documents that set up the War I Industries hoard. The essential one i ■was a simple two-page letter from President Wilson to Mr. Baruch. It ! is far less explicit than President I Roosevelt’s executive order and ' delegates less specific authority. Yet it worked to a marvelous result. It j worked because, notwithstanding the supremacy of excellence or the j ultimate in sloppiness in drawing up organization charts and orders, sue- j cess or failure will depend on the i ability and fitness of one man. Regardless of organization charts, “Wherever the MacGregor sits is the head of the table.” The principle question is not the curious “law firm” concept of two-headed executive control (Knudsen-Hill-man). While a law firm is utterly inappropriate for executive action, the real question is whether or not Bill Knudsen is the MacGregor, as Mr. Baruch demonstrably was. It’s all up to Knudsen. He says with,* some satisfaction that he can now j “keep his hat on and spit where ■ he pleases” (which is a quaint com-, bination of the unmelancholy Dane and Uncle Remus) but now let’s see whether he will do it. One doubt is that.JVlr. Hillman is there to tell him at least where he can’t spit. ..That doesn’t trouble me very j much. I have worked with Sidney .Hillman. The President says he j knows them both and isn’t worried. I know them better and neither am s I worried. Undivided responsibility f is better than compromise, but Mr. Hillman is both a realist and a high- j ly educated and intelligent leader j H e will obstruct only on the greatest of provocation and the clearest case. On complete analysis, what Mr. Hillman has is no more than a limited veto power. In truth, it is less than that? It is a power to declare j a division resulting in an automatic and instantaneous appeal to Caesar who, in the clutch of circumstance, must instantaneously and automatically decide. That would follow . anyway if Knudsen were supreme and any such differences arise as w'ould compel Mr. Hillman to make a fight * * * AUTOMOTIVE INDUSTRV The "Captains and the Kings” of the production lines don’t need any “talking at” for extreme effort in national defense, at least not in tha* aytomobile industry. I was asked by Mr Knudsen to pinch-hit for him at his long dated .engagement at a convention of the Society of Automo- I 1 1 vt Engineers It was supposed to be a “pep talk,” a sort of harangue i especially urging the farming out of a orders, greater co-operation with j the airplane industry and The inven- j tion of methods to use all idle skilled j , men and idle machinery. My prepared talk sounded pretty silly. 1 arrived in Detroit several | liours before I was scheduled to talk. ! In conversations with old friends in this industry and in press announce- i ments that day, it became apparent that all I was supposed to talk about ; is being done, was started long ago 1 and is proceeding with all the speed ■ and vigor that is to be expected | from this particularly swift and robust industry. All the large companies are joined ; up with the big airplane companies to produce parts or engines for air- j plane assemblies on a scale that is its magnitude. There may once have been some mutual rivalry, j some fear among the aircraft mans- ! facturers that the automobile people would like to take over their business, some apprehension among the motor folk that airplane work would hamper car production There is no, evidence of anything of that kind now ; The Detroit people are actually taking the lead in combined production and, so far as I can see, holding back nothing. It isn’t confined to aircraft production either. These great manufacturing establishments j are straining every effort to do whatever the Office of Production Man—agement wants them to do on tanks, shells, guns, cartridge cases, \ armored cars or whatever else they can fit into their production lines. They are not haggling about profits or commercial conditions. This confirms at the manufacturing end what I heard at the overhead management end in Washington before I came to Detroit. In many ways, the extent to which this has gone is astonishing. In our competitive system where combination and joint action by manufacturing concerns is forbidden under heavy penalty by the law, it requires at least some government leadership, j if not ' outright government sanction, for competitors to act together. Z