The Waterbury Democrat., 1941-09-20

That lnclQeut 1uSplreQ uatkOua1 archives oficilas to trace the origin of the term "red tape" back to Its first use, shortly after the war be- tween the states, when 8 veteran bawled out Q clerk who was holding up a pension check, demanding that the red tape which was then used in place of paper clips be torn of his application so he could get his money. The story got wide circu- lation and red tape soon became synonymous with government delay. But here is the third defense ef- fort since Civil War days, and there is still red tape.
 President Roosevelt's announce ment that the length of time nec- essary to approve @ lease-lend ap- plication had been cut from 25 days to 16 days, and was being cut an- other 24 hours by giving Lease-Lend Administration b. Stettinius au- thority to sign the applications in place of the President is sample of the time saving that can be ef- fected.
 An amazing sidelight, however, is that one of the first things Donald Nelson had to do when he became head of priorities, succeeding Stet- tinius, was call in a staff of Chicago mail order experts and clean up a backlog of more than 5000 unhand- led applications bound up in the Stettinius administration red tape. The rule is now that all priorities applications must be cleared within 48 hours from the time of their ar- rival in Washington.
 Behind Q Commerce Department announcement of few days ago, that 1t was setting up its own clear ing house to break a bottleneck in the handling of export clearances for South America, there was ar- other long tale of grief written in miles of government red tape.
 sNARLs OVER
 A SNARL
 One of the principal concerns of the Export bank, in leaning some S150 million to Latin Amer lea for internal development of the 20 American republics, has been the stipulation that all import materials needed for these improvements must be purchased in the United States. Roads, railroads, steel mills, mines agricultural developments-all were bound to use machinery made In the U. S. 4.
 Then along came the defense of. fort. Exporters making road ma chinery, locomotives, mining equip- ment, farm implements, under con. tracts financed by Export-Import loans, suddenly found that they couldn't get priorities on steel to complete their Latin American or. ders.
 Here was a snarl that involved half a dozen government agencies State, Commerce, War, Navy, de- fense OPM, and the Export-Import bank. Finally a procedure was set up within the office of Export Con- trol, which has final say on what goods can be shipped out of the country, and where. A staff of hard- boiled Army officers was supposed to cut through all the red tape in such manner that one of these applica- tions coming into Washington could be cleared by all six of the depart- ments within three days. It didn't work.
 General Russell L. Maxwell, who had been in charge of export con. trol, was ordered back to active duty in the War Department and his organization was transferred to the new Economic Defense Board under Vice President Wallace and Milo Perkins. EDB will now try to relieve some of the red tape pres- sure which has been strangling pri- critics applications from the good neighbor countries.
 MORE
 TROUBLES
 The South Americans themselves have been screaming to high heaven. Here a country had borrowed mil- lions to develop, say, a copper mine. The copper was sold to U. s. for de- fense purposes. But when this same country wanted to buy copper pipe or tubing made in U. s. A., perhaps manufactured from its own ore, 1t couldn't get an export license. One country, Peru, solved the problem finally by threatening to put an ex- port tax on its ore. Another republic Argentina, had a commercial att tache make the acquaintance of four copper experts" in the OPM organ ization and then gave up.
 The yells of the South Americans were only slightly less painful than the yells of the American manu- facturers. Here was the government, on the one hand sponsoring short wave radio programs to win the Latins away from the Nazi propa- ganda, while on the other hand an American manufacturer of radio sets couldn't get priorities or export clearances on materials for radio parts and sets to keep South Amer jeans listening.