The Waterbury Democrat., 1943-09-07

ruGVu NANG6 VIkAy V SkGAe eton staff and the director, Charles w. Eliot, a grandson of Harvard's great president, who now becomes a kind of undertaken or executor who has been given till Jan. 1 to settle the estate.
 The visible remains of NRpB con- sist of some 100 reports on land and water resources, public works, hous- ing, income and consumption, trans portation, technology, research, state planning, regional planning, postwar planning. The accumulate ton has been kiddingly referred to as 'Eliot's new five-foot shelf Some of the reports are pretty big and pretty tough going, unless you hap pen to be particularly interested and used to hard reading.
 Maybe that was the trouble. Too many people and all the congress- men didn't have time to find out what was in 'em, so they stopped this outpouring of words at the source. This frame of mind Is per. haps best expressed by an irate citizen in Salt Lake City who, dur. ing @ meeting to set up regional postwar plan for Utah, rose from his seat to protest that, We're sick and tired of planning all we want to know is what we're going to do.' IN THIS CORNER
 Who gets the credit for killing off NRPBp A couple of Republican congressman named John Taher of Auburn, N. r., and Richard B. Wig ellsworth of Milton, Mass, led the fight in the House Committee on Appropriations. The Senate was Q little more considerate, wanting to give the board another $2o0, 900 to string along on, but the House opin- ion prevailed.
 What scared some people off of NRPB was the fear that 1t stood for regimentation, governmental controls, planned economy and such things which were loosely interpret ed as state socialism. NRPB Spokes- men deny that the board ever had any such intent. What 1t tried to do was collect the best information 1t could get on oil, reserves, or forests, or social security, or what to do with and for discharged soldiers, passing this information on to the President, Congress or other appro- priate private or state and local government agencies whose direct responsibility 1t was to deal with the problems presented.
 The board was always rather mousey about pushing it's own re- ports. In 1884, for instance, 1t made an elaborate study of strategic ma. terials, even going 50 far at to point out the shortage which would de- velop in case of war. That was five years before war broke out. Yet no one paid any attention to 1t, and as a result, the country got caught short.
 POSTWAR PLANNING
 Tn 1889 the board wanted to rec organize to help the war effort, but in conferences with the President. he gave to the board the job Of thinking about postwar problems, not through public discussion but through research into how the transitions could be made from war to peacetime economy, profiting by the mistakes of reconve-sion that had been made in 1918 and 1919, after the last war. In 1922 the board put out its first reports on postwar planning, aimed at:
 1. The maintenance of full eT1l- ployment. 2. Security for all work CTS. 8. The continued up-building Of America.
 Then in March, 1s4s, the Presl- dent sent to Congr--s the NRPB reports on social security planning and on postwar economic adjust ments, with the request that Con- gress "give these matters full con- sideration during this session." Con- gress did nothing of the sort. h. stead, it killed NRPB, with the re- suit that today your government is doing nothing at all about postwar planning, save for the efforts of the private industry financed Commit tee for Economic Development which is sponsored by the Depart ment of Commerce.