Plenary Session Transcripts

Governors Attending:

Guests:

Discussion Subjects:

Public works as an aid to employment; industrial reconversion; state contributions to postwar reconstruction and development; Social Security; tax and fiscal policy; veterans’ affairs; post-war military policy; natural resource conservation; and wartime food program

Points of Interest:

War and post-war life remained key topics of discussion. Guest speakers included General George C. Marshall, U.S. Army Chief of Staff, Admiral Ernest J. King, Chief of Naval Operations, and Bernard M. Baruch of the Office of War Mobilization. Baruch asked Governors to use their influence to ensure congressional approval of legislation to provide federal contract termination payments to private sector participants in the wartime effort, to facilitate their conversion to peacetime work and help maintain steady employment levels.

In addition, because the meeting took place in Hershey, PA over Memorial Day weekend, the Governors held a memorial service at Gettysburg at which one southern and one northern Governor spoke.

Memorable Quotes:

In a speech about the influence that states were gaining relative to the federal government, Governor Thomas E. Dewey of New York said: "...the governors of the states are heard with new force and influence...It stands for a revival of powers close to the people...the people want to bring responsibilities and obligations closer to home. For the most part, our states will emerge from the war in a relatively stronger financial position than that of the federal government...[which] will be confronted with an enormous debt."

Governor Earl Warren of California, in a speech on industrial reconversion from wartime to peacetime production, said: "We have been working largely on government money, with small regard for costs, with little concern about risk, and with a minimum of competition. When the war is over this situation will be entirely reversed. Competition will be resumed, costs will have to be reckoned...we have so increased war production and so decreased civilian consumption that today nearly 70 percent of the total production of the nation is being diverted to war materials and supplies...The problems of reconversion are greatly intensified by the fact that under this war pressure we have developed new techniques, new machines, new materials [which are] steadily decreasing the manpower requirements per units of production." He went on to say: "...many war plants have been brought into being by the government...because of some natural advantage for war purposes, such as transportation, hydroelectric power, or accessibility to previously undeveloped natural resources...To allow these plants to shut down would be calamitous to the workers, their communities, and the states in which the plants are located."

At the memorial held at the Gettysburg battlefield, Governor J. Melville Broughton of North Carolina said: "North and South stand united today. No economic, political, or religious differences threaten our unity. We are together determined upon victory in the great cause for which we fight. Our bond of friendship and loyalty is sealed by the blood of our sons who side by side are fighting at this moment on farflung battlefields to preserve an America worthy of Washington and Jefferson, Lincoln and Lee."

Selected Resolutions Adopted:
(1) Approving and urging the cooperative development of peacetime public services, with all levels of government participating financially and immediate supervision of cooperative programs in the hands of the States; (2) requesting return to the states of control over employment services--which Governors had agreed to cede temporarily to the federal government after American entry into WWII; (3) recommending the establishment of a federal-state commission to study federal, state, and local taxes so as to develop a system that would enable all three levels of government to have access to adequate taxable resources; (4) urging action by Congress to demobilize members of the armed forces and factory workers for the resumption of peacetime production and to terminate contracts with private industry and clear factories to release them for the resumption of peacetime production; and (5) expressing the belief that whenever the federal government came into several contiguous states to accomplish some new federal program, it should first give those states the opportunity for full and free consultation and joint recommendations.