Mr. Baruch gave some instances of this, though they were not the instances that are calculated to throw the most light on the inner workings of the organization. He said:
“The Capital Issues Committee (where Mr. Meyer reigned), in the Treasury Department, had a man who sat with the War Industries Board (where Mr. Baruch reigned), and who always came to the War Industries Board to find out whether the individual or the corporation who wanted this money was going to use it for the purpose to win the war. To cite a case that happened at Philadelphia, that city wanted to make extensive public improvements; New York City wanted to spend $8,000,000 for schools, which would take an enormous amount of steel, labor, materials and transportation. We said, ‘No, that won’t help win the war. You can postpone that until later on. We cannot spare the steel on all these various things.’”
Very well. Does Mr. Baruch know of an enormous theater which a Jewish theatrical owner was permitted to build in an eastern city during the war?
Did he ever hear of non-Jews being refused permission to go ahead in a legitimate business which would have helped produce war materials, and that afterward—afterward—on almost identically the same plans, and in the same locality, a Jewish concern was given permission to do that very thing?
This was a terrible power, and far too great to be vested in one man; certainly it was such a power as should never have been vested in a coterie of Jews. The puzzle of it becomes greater the deeper it is probed. How did it occur? How could it occur—that always, at the most critical and delicate points in these matters, there sat a Jew enthroned with autocratic power?
Well could Mr. Baruch say—“I had more power than any man in the war.” He could even have said, “We Jews had more power than you Americans did in the war”—and it would have been true.
2. Authority over all materials.
This, of course, included everything. Mr. Baruch was an expert in many of these lines of material involved, and had held interests in many of them. What the investigators endeavored to learn was in how many lines he was interested during the war.
