Labor's Safeguardians

At 10 a.m. one morning last week, in the caucus room of the Old House Office Building, there opened a Congressional investigation as suave, sophisticated, polite and cynical as a Somerset Maugham comedy. It was the beginning of the Smith Committee hearings of the Wagner Act--that most crucial piece of New Deal legislation, passed to safeguard labor's historic right to bargain collectively through unions of its own choosing.

Last July Congress authorized the Smith Committee to investigate the Wagner Act, to find out whether the Labor Board had been fair, to see what amendments, if any, were needed, and gave it $50,000 as a starter. To tall, solemn, silent Representative Howard Smith of Broad Run, Va., who has hated the New Deal ever since it tried to purge him last year, it gave the delicate job of chairman. With wealthy Lawyer Edmund Toland and 22 attorneys assisting (called brilliant legal lights by the Right, called tools of reaction by the Left), it checked on the work of the three members of the National Labor Relations Board, the doings of its 22 regional offices, its 109 field examiners, its 10,000 cases a year. Last week, with a formal flourish, Mr. Smith pulled back the curtains on his show.

Comedy. The Dies Committee hearings made a rip-roaring Texas melodrama full of spies, plots, trap doors, enemy agents, hairbreadth escapes, made thunderous by howls of pain from the injured, cries of outrage from the accused--a breathless drama of pure Americanism versus nobody quite knew what, packed with sordid procedures, damnable outrages, cries of "Unhand--me--Martin--Dies!" from radicals, and "Let that poor girl go!" from liberals--and all galloping over the cliff at the end of each installment. The Smith Committee hearings were drawing-room comedy.

First witness was pipe-smoking Dr. William Leiserson, 56, appointed to the Board eight months ago, with a reputation as a labor mediator. Dr. Leiserson stated the case for NLRB about as well as it has been stated. He denied that the Act needed amendment. He reminded the Committee of the conditions that brought about the Act--the use of labor spies, the discrimination against good union men, the tragedies of violence in labor disputes, the old hostility against labor legislation.

He admitted faults and weaknesses in its administration. But, he said, "It seems strange to me that almost every day we should be reading of attacks on the Board and its personnel, but hardly anyone ever thinks of attacking those employers . . , who have flouted the law of Congress. . . ."

The Smith Committee adroitly dodged challenging labor's rights or employers' wrongs. With its tongue in its cheek and its eye on the record, it examined the labor relations of the experts on labor relations, asked the old Roman Juvenal's question: "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes" or Who will guard the "SG-&-SO" guardians?

Witt. One of labor's safeguardians was Nathan Witt, 36, Secretary of the Board, an old employe, hardworking, father of two, conscientious. Artfully into the record Counsel Toland introduced a series of memos from Board Member Leiserson to Board Chairman J. Warren Madden. In them, Dr. Leiserson: 1) accused Mr. Witt of giving oral reports of cases differing from the record, complaining about "the usual irregularities in procedure characteristic of the Secretary's office"; 2) agreeing with Chairman Madden that the Universal Pictures case in which Mr. Witt was involved "smelled"; 3) protesting about Mr. Witt "and his amateur detectives"; 4) moving that Mr. Witt be fired; 5) asserting that neither the Secretary nor his assistants could understand the facts of the cases they reported on.

Because the Wagner Act holds the use of labor spies an unfair labor practice, members were interested in a blistering telegram sent by New York Regional Director Elinore Herrick to Chairman Madden: "I protest the method of investigation which has been pursued in the New York regional office . . . behind locked doors, in secrecy and in a thoroughly objectionable manner . . . the procedure one might expect from the OGPU. . . ."

Former Labor Safeguardian James Miller, once director of the Cleveland regional office, testified that the official reason given for his removal was that he attended a Manhattan dinner given by an attorney who had cases pending before him. The real reason, said he: Because he exclaimed "Nuts!" when told by an investigator to make industry fear the Labor Board.

Whose Ox? In the first ten days the

Smith Committee heard Joe Ozanic, president of A. F. of L.'s Progressive Mine Workers, bitterly proclaim that the Wagner Act and NLRB decisions had put thousands of Progressive miners under the jurisdiction of John Lewis' United Mine null They read of Roosevelt Son-in-law John Boettiger, publisher of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, bitterly protesting an NLRB decision, but stating he would take no further action because he did not want to jeopardize his fine relations with the American Newspaper Guild. They heard talk of an NLRB "goon squad," of the Board having relations with a union of its own employes, which it forbade industry, office delays, annoyances, talebearing, favoritism. They heard read into the record a letter from the Cincinnati regional director to Mr. Witt, telling how a friendly city editor had killed a story unfavorable to the Board.

From the testimony emerged the picture of the Board's headaches with its own employes--one too zealous, another with a weakness for drink, good men in the wrong positions, some suspicious of their fellow employes, some mixed in obscure political doings, some incompetent but devoted, some clever but unreliable--the same tangled problems of personnel that industry has faced.

No major sensations or scandals came out of Representative Smith's cool and detached political comedy; the Smith Committee, like a weary old cynic, only cast a jaundiced eye at the labor relations of these idealistic experts on labor relations. Humorless Labor Board members, forgetting industry's long complaints that Labor Board inquiries hampered work, fretted and fidgeted at the Smith investigation. It was a nuisance, they said, as irritable as captains of industry; it delayed the Labor Board's work.

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