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But most of the actual work will fall on C.E.D.'s research director, Chicago's tall, suave Theodore Otte Yntema (whose salary is $20,000 a year) and on his assistants : Gardiner Means, of the now-defunct National Resources Planning Board, and Howard Myers, ex-economist for the WPA.
Ted Yntema is best known to business men for the price studies he prepared for U.S. Steel during the TNEC investigation, which proved — at least to Big Steel's satis faction — that the industry's pricing poli cies were about right. His contribution to C.E.D. cannot yet be judged: the Division's first studies come out this fall.
C.E.D.'s bylaws provide that they may be published (though not at C.E.D. expense) even if C.E.D.'s board disagrees with them. Research has been put down for 40% of the $1,000,000 that C.E.D. is trying to collect from businessmen and corporations for the next sixteen months.
The Dangers. Cynics have already begun to attack C.E.D. and Paul Hoffman.
They say:
> C.E.D. has made itself vulnerable to political attack because 1) its origin links it too closely to Jesse Jones; 2) its grassroots autonomy has led to the appointment of some regional and community chairmen hitherto known as Old Dealers, Republican and Democratic. It is charged that some bitter Roosevelt-hating big shots are more interested in C.E.D. as a potential political weapon than as a potential builder of employment.
> Even C.E.D.'s pet community committees have already showed up some difficulties in the Hoffman approach. Peoria, C.E.D.'s first test city, made a fine case history statistically; its businessmen made concrete plans to employ 30% more people after the war than they did in 1940. But when it came to publicizing their survey, all individual company plans had to be left out: they were trade secrets.
> So far, the only concrete help C.E.D. has advanced to the little businessman—whose main concern is bound to be next week's payroll—is advice and a plan for a research brochure. In his less evangelistic moments, Hoffman admits 1) that he is not worrying about the 400-500 really big businesses: he thinks they can take care of themselves; 2) that the very small enterpriser will be hard to reach in any concrete way. Yet the future of U.S. employment is almost certain to be made by these extremes of enterprise.
The Hopes. The great hope for Paul Hoffman's C.E.D. is simply stated: to the extent that businessmen create their own economic environment, a national, expansionist, company-by-company program can do incalculable good.
At the least, such a program can measurably shorten the crucial time lag between war and peace production, by making a sizable number of employers blueprint their conversion to peace in advance.
At the most, C.E.D. could itself affect the postwar business "climate" by making business believe in expansion and competition, and act upon that belief. Every individual business is a cell in the body economic. Only if each cell is active and healthy can the body be healthy. This is the condition that C.E.D. is trying to create.