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Economic War II. A plain fact about the U.S. preparation for the Second World War is that very few men concerned with its administration bothered to profit by the experience of the War Industries Board, and specifically, from Baruch's well of wisdom. The general assumption last year was that, since the military aspects were different, so were the economics. Franklin Roosevelt, as a close friend of Baruch's for 25 years, naturally consulted him, but many of the Janizariat regarded him as senile, an old croaker whose economics were dimmed. But Baruch continued going to Washington, seeing the President, patiently conferring with the President's appointed defense chiefs. Two days a week he held court in The Carlton.
Months went by and things in Washington didn't go very well or very fast. The President had called together a Council of National Defense, which he immediately superseded with a National Defense Advisory Commission. Finally he set up the Office of Production Management, under the Knudsen-Hillman twins. He moved again, vitalized the Office for Emergency Management, set under it all defense bureaus. OPM became the mere physical workshop of defense.
The plain conclusion was plainer: Franklin Roosevelt had not yet found the man to run the U.S. wartime effort, was doing it himself, at great cost to his own strength and to the country. But he had found Leon Henderson, to manage one vast phase of the effort as long as his sacroiliac held out.
Butcher Boy. Henderson was the kind of boy who is called "high-spirited" unless he goes to jail. He was the boy who dressed up the Abraham Lincoln bust in the Millville, N.J. high-school auditorium in a straw hat, bow tie and glasses; the school villain who lined up all the senior girls on a dam to "take their picture" and then gave the gatekeeper the nod to duck them all. He delivered newspapers, showing up early on rainy days to earn double pay by carrying the routes of boys who dodged the weather.
Although a devotee of Harrigan pool (Western for Kelly pool) he seemed so industrious and studious that several Millville citizens chipped in to send him to college. At Swarthmore he got six "A"s and one "B" in a single semester, and a sharp reproof from one backer, who growled: "You always were weak in math, weren't you?'' He worked his way through by some 15 part-time jobs, earned letters in baseball, football and basketball, and a combination of the appetites for work and play that later earned him a description as "the Paul Bunyan of Bureaucracy" (which he likes), and as "a spittoon economist" (which makes him mad).
He taught school, worked in Chautauqua, worked for Gifford Pinchot as an economic adviser. He moved over to the Russell Sage Foundation as an economist. In 1934 he went to Washington to squawk about NRA, squawked so loud and well that General Hugh S. Johnson snarled: "If you're so good, why don't you go to work here?" "I'm game," said Henderson, and hung up his hat.