A while ago, I tried out my analogy about the complaint that the WRB was underfunded. The WRB was designed to facilitate the programs and projects of private relief organizations (and oversee general policy ideas), not to implement and pay for large operations on their own. So criticism at the time about WRB funding is really disappointment that the agency isn’t going to function the way the relief organizations might think they should. Post-war criticism of the Board’s “lack” of funding results from either misreading the documents or making an unfair criticism. One can’t fault the WRB (or FDR) for lack of funds when they weren’t meant to have a large project budget in the first place.
The same can be said about staffing, though that wasn’t a criticism at the time. The same historians who criticize the WRB for lack of funding also say that the WRB was understaffed–that there were no more than 25 staff members at any given time. This is actually untrue (and, if you’re going to make a criticism of understaffing, you should need to point out examples of where this was a problem). The WRB had a max of 25 (later 30) that they could have specifically working for their agency. Many members of the staff (including the director, Pehle) were on loan from other departments and didn’t count in the official staff count. In reality, the 25-30 people specifically working for the WRB were almost all support staff–secretaries and clerks specifically hired for the agency.
This document is a meeting memo between Ward Stewart of the WRB and the State Department discussing the foreign attaches (at this point, they were referring to Ira Hirschmann and Leonard Ackermann) and how these attaches would administratively fit into the embassies (and how they would be paid). They agreed that the attaches would be part of the State Dept. (Ironically, the first three attaches didn’t fall under this agreement. Hirschmann was paid separately, Ackermann already worked for Treasury, and so did Iver Olsen, the WRB rep in Stockholm who will be appointed soon.)
