Word: nelsons
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Purp (formally known as the Production Requirements Plan) is Don Nelson's way to end the raw-materials "shortage."' The most far-reaching plan ever devised to control U.S. production from Washington, its job is to trail every ton of priority material down to its ultimate use. Purp would stop stockpiling and hoarding by putting all allocations on a short-term basis. The statistical job it requires is so immense that Washington wags say only six men understand it and five of them have gone crazy; it is so elaborate that, during its "voluntary" trial last spring...
...voluntary trial flopped. But last month Don Nelson ordered every war contractor to fill out the big blue Purp blanks or else. This week is the deadline for all 25,000 of them to file their estimated materials needs for the last quarter of 1942, and to tell what they did with the materials allocated them last spring. These reports will provide millions of statistics. The real test of Purp will be what use, if any, WPB can make of such a mountain of figures...
Missouri's Harry S. Truman, who heads the Senate's what's-wrong-with-the-war-program committee, neatly mixed a pair of metaphors by saying it was high time for Don Nelson to "take the bull by the horns and cut off a few heads." Angry Mr. Truman was on the beam with the U.S. temper. But he had no solution for the raw-materials mess and no over-all explanation either...
...Walter Lippmann put it last week, "Mr. Nelson is in the position of a very rich man who does not really keep books and has let all his cousins and his aunts open charge accounts which he has agreed to meet." When all the Purp reports are in, Don Nelson will have some of the most elaborate books ever kept by man. But until he or somebody else sets up a master plan, and asserts the authority the President gave him to decide what is most important, the Army, Navy and Maritime Commission can go right on upsetting the balance...
...Nelson has practically staked his control over raw materials on Purp as almost the only means he has left to make sense out of the raw-materials mess. He and his aides are working overtime to squash its statistical bugs in time for the all-out test in the fourth quarter of this year. For he too knows that this will most likely be the Purp's last chance...