Owen Brewster

Owen Brewster was a Republican senator from Maine and one of the original members of the Senate Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program, known as the Truman Committee. His most fully documented role in the book comes during the committee’s investigation of defective steel: there, he used an official report and pointed questions to test a steel executive’s account against evidence of the material’s failures.

Place on the Truman Committee

The committee began with seven members: five Democrats and two Republicans. Brewster was one of its original Republican members, alongside Joseph H. Ball; most members, like chairman Harry S. Truman, were junior senators. The committee’s work depended on close scrutiny of wartime spending and production, and its modest start did not last long. By fall, its appropriation had grown from $15,000 to $50,000, its membership had expanded, and its staff would eventually include fifteen investigators and as many clerks and stenographers.

As the committee grew, Brewster’s particular role came into focus. The account identifies him, alongside fellow Republican Homer Ferguson, as one of the especially tenacious interrogators at hearings. This was not a description of a senator who merely lent his name to the investigation: in the steel inquiry, Brewster directly confronted a witness and brought the committee’s documentary evidence into the questioning.

The steel inquiry

The hearing examined Carnegie-Illinois Steel Corporation and the quality of plates supplied for wartime use. Company executive Perry maintained that the substandard plates were still suitable for their intended purpose, and disputed that defective steel had caused the break-up of the SS Schenectady. He also rejected the language of cheating, preferring to characterize the conduct as misrepresentation. The testimony thus turned not only on what the company had supplied, but on how its representatives described the failures and the evidence behind them.

Brewster’s intervention shifted attention from the company’s characterization to an official finding. He read aloud from a Bureau of Ships report that attributed the Schenectady’s failure most directly to very poor-quality steel. The report described the plate as definitely inferior and so brittle that it resembled cast iron more than steel. By putting those findings directly to Perry, Brewster made the conflict between the executive’s defense and the government investigation difficult to evade.

Brewster then asked whether Perry had read the report. Perry said he had read parts of it. As Brewster’s anger became more apparent, he asked the executive to consider how he might feel if his own son were going overseas in a ship made with such steel. Perry replied that he did not condone defective steel in ships or elsewhere in the war effort, and told the senator not to worry about his feelings for the sons going overseas. The exchange brought the material stakes of the inquiry into the hearing room: the issue was not an abstract dispute over standards, but the reliability of ships carrying people into wartime danger.

Accountability and limits

Brewster’s questions pressed beyond whether the steel was defective to the credibility of the company’s management. At the hearing’s close, he told the company president how incredible it seemed that subordinates would risk their entire futures without any prospect of reward. His point exposed a problem the investigation had not settled: if the deception carried serious personal risks and no evident benefit, the responsibility and motive behind it remained difficult to explain.

The hearing did not establish how far up the company the knowledge of falsified tests and records extended, nor did it uncover a substantial motive for passing off inferior steel. The company promised to put matters right, but the larger questions remained. Brewster’s contribution was therefore significant and bounded: he made the contradiction between company testimony and the Bureau of Ships report explicit, and pressed a senior executive to account for it, without resolving who had directed the deception or why.

Narrative role

The book presents Brewster through acts of committee scrutiny rather than through a developed personal biography. His appearance is brief but concrete: first as a Republican member of a bipartisan investigative body, then as a persistent questioner who gives documentary evidence force in public testimony. His exchange with Perry shows the committee at work—formal reports tested against a witness’s answers, technical defects connected to human consequences, and management’s explanations examined without producing a complete account of responsibility. The unresolved answers matter as much as the force of the questioning: oversight could expose failures and demand explanations, yet still leave the chain of blame uncertain.