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Show GENERAL HUGH S. Johnson Jour: Voxel Fiun 'W ScfW Washington, D. C. TWO MAN CONTROL There will doubtless be considerable consider-able criticism of the executive order setting up the new War Industries board called, for some prideful reason, rea-son, "The Office of Production Management." Man-agement." It may be said that two-man two-man control (Knudsen-Hillman) is an administrative abortion, that not enough authority has been delegated delegat-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, B. M. Baruch, the father of industrial indus-trial mobilizations and war industries indus-tries boards, is also enthusiastic. I have just been looking up the 1918 documents that set up the War Industries board. The essential one was a simple two-page letter from President Wilson to Mr. Baruch. It is far less explicit than President Roosevelt's executive order and delegates less specific authority. Yet it worked to a marvelous result. It worked because, notwithstanding the supremacy of excellence or the ultimate in sloppiness in drawing up organization charts and orders, success suc-cess or failure will depend on the ability and fitness of one man. Regardless of organization charts, "Wherever the MacGregor sits is th head nf the table." The prin- the head of the table." The principle prin-ciple question is not the curious "law firm" concept of two-headed executive control (Knudsen-Hillman). While a law firm is utterly inappropriate for executive action, the real question is whether or not Bill Knudser. is the MacGregor, as Mr. Baruch demonstrably was. It's all up to Knudsen. He says with some satisfaction that he can now "keep his hat on and spit where he pleases" (which is a quaint combination com-bination of the unmelaricholy Dane and Uncle Remus) but now let's see whether he will do it. One doubt is that Mr. Hillman is there to tell him at least where he can't spit. That doesn't trouble me very much. I have worked with Sidney Hillman. The President says he knows them both and isn't worried. I know them better and neither am I worried. Undivided responsibility is better than compromise, but Mr. Hillman is both a realist and a highly high-ly educated and intelligent leader. He 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 limit-ed veto power. In truth, it is less than that. It is a power to declare a division resulting in an' automatic and instantaneous appeal to Caesar who, in the clutch of circumstance, must instantaneously and automatically automat-ically decide. That would follow anyway if Knudsen were supreme and any such differences arise as would compel Mr. Hillman to make a fight. AUTOMOTIVE INDUSTRY 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 the automobile industry. I was asked by Mr. Knudsen to pinch-hit for him at his long-dated engagement at a convention of the Society of Automotive Automo-tive Engineers. It was supposed to be a "pep talk," a sort of harangue especially urging the farming out of orders, greater co-operation with the airplane industry and the invention inven-tion of methods to use all idle skilled men and idle machinery. My prepared talk sounded pretty silly. I arrived in Detroit several hours before I was scheduled to talk. In conversations with old friends in this industry and in press announcements announce-ments that day, it became apparent that all I was supposed to talk about is being done, was started long ago 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 airplane air-plane assemblies on a scale that is dizzy in its magnitude. There may once have been some mutual rivalry, some fear among the aircraft manufacturers manu-facturers that the automobile people peo-ple would like to take over their business, or some apprehension Dusiness, ui &uiuc D1J. 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 produc-tion and, so far as I can see, holding hold-ing back nothing. It isn't confined to aircraft production either. These great manufacturing establishments are straining every effort to do whatever what-ever the Office of Production Management 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 prof-its or commercial conditions. This confirms at the manufacturing end what I heard at the overhead management man-agement 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 combina-tion and joint action by manufacturing manufac-turing concerns is forbidden under j heavy penalty by the law, it requires I at least some government leadership, leader-ship, if not outright government sanction, for competitors to act to-' to-' gether. |