Word: rationalize
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...hardly had time to draw a deep breath after his third inaugural before he gave the state a breath-taking demand for emergency powers in case of atomic attack or invasion. Dewey wanted stand-by authority to: make law by proclamation, seize private homes and property, conscript manpower, ration raw materials and finished goods, set up constructions priorities, fire any public officer who refused to obey his order (including mayors and police chiefs). This was not exactly martial law, an aide explained, because the Army would not be in charge, and injured citizens would still have recourse to the courts...
...Must Go Up. By spring, autos were in such demand that customers again had to wait as long as three months for delivery. Makers of TV sets and refrigerators began to ration their output. By June the economy was at the highest production peak it had ever been in peacetime. Industrial production had climbed to 199 in the Federal Reserve Board's index (1935-39 = 100), four points higher than 1948's boomtime top. Employment rose almost 2,000,000 in a single month. In mid-June, the stock market officially blessed the new growth of the boom...
...present, President Truman had decided to invoke only part of his powers. The mobilization that he decreed would fall far short of total mobilization, with its millions in uniform and 24-hour-a-day factories, its censorship and brownouts, its ration books and black markets. Partly, this reflected some of the lingering doubts inside Harry Truman's own Administration on the wisdom of a total commitment now to a garrison state. Partly, the apparent caution merely recognized the inevitable lag between intent and performance. With Charlie Wilson on the job, more rigors and more vigor could be expected...
...drew back slowly before the Chinese assault, the evacuation at the dockside went on apace. There was no panic, no disorder. But the tempo of the operation stepped up sharply. At the docks themselves, U.S., Norwegian and Japanese merchant ships took on load after load of trucks, tanks, gasoline, rations, dismantled aircraft, jeeps, tents and kitchen stoves. The black, mud-choked roads within the dock area were jammed bumper to bumper with mud-spattered supply trains grinding and slithering down to the ships. The supply convoys passed acres of gasoline drums, quarter-mile-long warehouses piled high with C-rations...
What is this, he asks the Minister of Agriculture, about a cut in the sugar ration for bees? "Pray let me know what was the amount previously allotted . . . what is the saving?" When, during Churchill's illness with pneumonia, his doctor prescribed a novel for light reading, he chose Defoe's gamy Moll Flanders, "about which I had heard excellent accounts, but had not found time to test them." Having finished it, he gave it to the doctor "to cheer him up. The treatment was successful...