Word: mcnutt
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Manpower. Since April, when President Roosevelt made tall, tan and terrific-Paul Vories McNutt head of WMC, Americans have expected the Manpower Tsar to start ordering them around: to tell businessmen whom they could hire, snatch housewives out of their homes. They did not realize that his title was ersatz, that he has authority to make policy but none to carry it out, that in all Washington there is hardly a man willing to lift a finger to give him that power. He cannot yet give orders to any worker. The nation's 6,500 independent draft boards take...
...these circumstances it is not surprising that McNutt made less noise than any other high Washington official. He spent the last two weeks of August on vacation, returned to his office for one day, promptly took off on a four-day junket for a Labor Day speech in Omaha. He returned to Washington for nine more days, then was off to make a speech at the American Legion convention in Kansas City...
...last fortnight has brought a promising new burst of activity in McNutt's air-conditioned offices. He worked out the voluntary freeze of Western miners and a similar plan for the Northwest lumber industry. He set up management-labor committees in cities where shortages are worst. He persuaded the Army & Navy to check with draft boards before accepting enlistments, and set up a drastic manpower plan for Government employes (who henceforth are subject to being moved to new jobs anywhere the Civil Service Commission sees fit). And before the House Tolan Committee, he made the strongest, clearest case...
...question is whether Americans like Paul McNutt, and American families like his, have the will to see a tough war through. Britain's will was prepared for the drafting of all war manpower by the shock of Dunkirk. In this war it may be that nations have the choice of steeling themselves to hard decisions in order to avoid disaster or being steeled when Dunkirks give them the willpower...
...McNutt succeeds in his job, WMC may-more than any economic theorists or post-war planners-set the shape of things to come for America. His problem is the problem of the Administration, of Congress, of the nation. All of them may go down to defeat unless they master the will to tackle the ugly, painful...