FOOD: Nobody Wants To Be Cop

Herbert Hoover, who has had more experience than most men in feeding the hungry, spoke out again last week on the nation’s food plight. The meat black market, said he, has taken over an astoundingly large part of the business of supplying civilians. It is now, he added, “an economic force . . . that cannot be caught by a policeman.”

He then submitted a plan (his eighth since 1941) to solve the muddle. It underwrote President Truman’s proposal to coordinate all food agencies, but it went further. World War I Food Administrator Hoover recommended taking the price cop (OPA) off the beat, letting livestock growers, packers and retailers set up committees to police their own ceilings.

The Hoover plan put more heat under the U.S. public’s rising temper over shortages. Still more heat came from the governors of 13 northeastern states. Lashing out at the uneven distribution which breeds black markets, they recommended that: 1) OPA’s rationing system be overhauled, and separate points be issued for meat; 2) OPA concentrate on food controls “rather than enforcing ceilings on cocktails and fur coats.”

Heat in the House. Quick to feel the heat were U.S. Congressmen. House Republicans, joined by about a dozen Democrats, squeezed through a “Hoover amendment” which would have sheared OPA of almost all its powers over food, handed them all to the Secretary of Agriculture. Administration Democrats finally rounded up their absent members, forced a reconsideration. But at a boiling session, to the howls of “We want meat,” the Republican dissident-Democrat combination forced through a second amendment giving the Secretary of Agriculture unprecedented food control.

One Congressman who argued strongly against the “Hoover amendment” was New Mexico’s Clinton Anderson, who becomes Secretary of Agriculture and War Food Administrator next week. Said he: “I would not run from any responsibility, but I don’t want to be a policeman.”

Neither did anybody else. It was clear by now that the meat situation had got far beyond policing of markets, that apparently the only solution to black marketeering is a much larger supply of meat. (Last week the Army sharply cut its buying for the next 60 days.)

Clint Anderson thought that by late fall there would be a sufficient, but not bountiful, supply of beef for civilians (plentiful pork was at least a year away). President Truman was still confident that meat distribution would be straightened out after Administrator Anderson took office. But, said Clint Anderson, if the President meant an immediate improvement, he was “unduly optimistic.”