He thought one of the best ways to get our story to the public was to appear at the public hearings held by Congressional committees. These, according to the Speaker, were good sounding boards from which to beam your point of view. Besides, you might actually influence a committee if you had an especially strong case. But it was a mistake to send lawyers or staff members of an association to these hearings. The company presidents should appear themselves; they were more convincing, and Congressmen liked to look them over. They respected men who had won their spurs in competition, especially if they also knew how to stand up and speak their pieces. “Don’t send a boy,” the Speaker concluded, “to do a man’s work.” By the middle of 1944, with the outcome of the war no longer in doubt, men began worrying about postwar and the inevitable letdown of peace. Nation-wide unemployment was taken for granted, and what to do about it became a live political issue. The aircraft industry, now one of the largest industries in the history of the world and one wholly dependent upon an inflated demand for war materials, seemed headed for the biggest bust imaginable. And while this was a problem of national interest, it had its focus in Southern California. Thousands of people had left their homes and jobs and migrated toward the setting sun there to do their several bits and incidentally enjoy the climate. Almost immediately, public officials sensitive to the reactions of the working class began proposing legislation to meet the problem; a ticket back home for the dispossessed worker and six months’ unemployment compensation were widely advocated. The fact that high wages had been paid them and that the thrifty could probably take care of themselves seemed to have been lost in the shuffle. Looking back on this situation now, we can see how completely wrong the forecasts were. Most of those workers, having basked in the California sunshine, had already determined to settle there and could not have been driven out by an air raid. Their newly acquired mechanical skills would find ready employment in new industries. The war demand and the “total war” policy had drained all the pipe lines of consumer goods while the cold fear of the ’thirties had frozen the investment market and stopped the normal expansion of housing, plant construction, and so on. What the country really faced was a pent-up demand that would lead to a postwar boom, and a dearth of labor. The automotive industry, for instance, could expect to reconvert to a demand of unprecedented proportions; the aircraft industry, on the other hand, would face an overwhelming war surplus. The problem that faced the country was not that of unemployment; the real job was to keep alive a remnant of vital defense industry.