Plenary Session Transcripts

Governors discussed preparations for life after war, including potential food shortages and employment reconversion.

With respect to potential food shortages, Governor Thomas E. Dewey of New York noted: "In the last twenty years we have become familiar with the great value of the soybean as an animal feed...Now it is discovered that when the bean is sprouted...[i]t becomes easily cooked and palatable for humans...[Soybeans] are not a substitute for meat...But for the days when there is little or no meat they make a splendid supplement."

Regarding the proliferation of federal bureaus, Governor Herbert B. Maw of Utah said: "...the states can never again be brought into their own until the greatest lobbying power in Washington--the federal bureaus--has been overcome...If anything is to be done, we must do it...the combined strength of the forty-eight Governors...supported by a public who will sustain us if we will fight for them, is far greater than the combined power of all the bureaus in Washington."

Governor Arthur B. Langlie of Washington spoke of the development of natural resources and its promise for job production: "The pioneer could dam a mill stream to grind his wheat but he did not even visualize a Grand Coulee dam to irrigate an agricultural empire and turn the wheel of factories hundreds of miles away. He hewed sturdy logs for his cabin but to turn out prefabricated houses by the hundreds would have seemed fantastic to him. That Douglas fir bark would produce cork and the clays of Washington fields produce aluminum for airships in the sky would have seemed to him more visionary than the tales of Jules Verne. Yet it is in the development of these things that we are keeping faith with our fighting men, and with those now occupied wholly with winning the war in our shipyards, our airplane factories, and our munitions plants...I think we would be breaking faith did we not consider what shall be done, once fighting ceases, to provide our people with stable jobs...It is through the development of our resources to a higher degree that we may maintain our American standards of living and push them ever upward."

Selected Resolutions Adopted:
This was the first time that Governors adopted a resolution related to foreign affairs--in this case expressing their admiration for the courage of the Russian people and offering them congratulations on their victories, accomplished after great sacrifice of life and property. Governors also adopted resolutions similar to those they had adopted earlier urging federal respect of state authority and return to the states of any powers that had been relinquished to the federal government for the purpose of furthering the wartime effort.