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Updated: June 22, 2025
We cannot shrink the Government to prewar dimensions unless we slough off these new responsibilities and we cannot do that without paying an excessive price in terms of our national welfare. We can, however, enhance its operating efficiency through improved organization. I expect to make such improvements under the authority of the Reorganization Act of 1945.
But the prewar period, which produced a high tide of prosperity, due to the unexampled calls on American industries by the Allied Powers, had revealed the enormous wealth and economic strength of the American investing community, as well as a flourishing condition of the working population.
These "other activities" include more than 2 billion dollars for aids to agriculture and net outlays for the Commodity Credit Corporation-almost double the expenditures for the same purposes in prewar years. This increase is due mainly to expenditures for purposes of price stabilization and price support resulting from the war food production program.
This means that we must achieve a level of demand and purchasing power by private consumers farmers, businessmen, workers, professional men, housewives which is sufficiently high to replace wartime Government demands; and it means also that we must greatly increase our export trade above the prewar level. Our policy is, of course, to rely as much as possible on private enterprise to provide jobs.
For example, in spite of the necessity of firing with wood, the Moscow-Petrograd express keeps up to its schedule, and on both occasions when I made the trip it took but 13 hours, compared to the 12 hours of prewar days. The food control works well, so that there is no abundance alongside of famine. Powerful and weak alike endure about the same degree of starvation.
By the end of 1945 the amount of the increase in food consumption was estimated to be as high as 15 percent over the prewar average. The record shows that the people of this country want and need more food and that they will buy more food if only they have the jobs and the purchasing power.
A policy to which we have referred was most actively followed, aiming at complete independence and self-sufficiency in all matters relevant to production, especially regarding raw materials. We mention later how the war has strengthened the strong prewar position of the I.G. in heavy chemicals needed as raw materials for the intermediates and finished dyes.
These "other activities" include more than 2 billion dollars for aids to agriculture and net outlays for the Commodity Credit Corporation-almost double the expenditures for the same purposes in prewar years. This increase is due mainly to expenditures for purposes of price stabilization and price support resulting from the war food production program.
In making this comparison account should be taken of the fact that, while prewar expenditures were affected by direct relief and work relief for the unemployed, the postwar budgets are affected by the considerable increase in pay rates and other increases in costs and prices.
Sumner and Stevens led the fight in Congress to provide each of them with forty acres and a mule, and this would have provided the basis for their developing into an independent class of farmers. However, they were doomed to remain a subservient mass of peasants. The prewar slave plantation was replaced by sharecropping, tenant farming, and the convict lease system.
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