Business: Oratorical Year-End

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Last week hundreds of U. S. industrialists and the heads of their trade organizations assembled in Manhattan for what they were pleased to call the annual Congress of American Industry. Upper chamber in this congress is the potent National Association of Manufacturers, at whose two-day session the books arc closed for the business oratorical year. If an intelligent Tasmanian recluse had dropped into the Grand Ball Room of the Hotel Commodore where the NAM meetings were held last week he might have gathered that: 1) The U. S. is currently a subject nation under alien rule. 2) This rule is administered by a cabal of capricious tyrants whose sole purpose is to reduce the natives to a state of regimented slavery. 3) These irresponsible foreigners, having debased the currency, are now wilfully bankrupting the country. 4) The burden of debt and taxes is intolerable. 5) Local laws and customs are being flouted, ancient moral standards ridiculed, the pristine character of the working classes deliberately undermined. 6) Civil liberties, personal freedom, individual initiative and enterprise have virtually disappeared. 7) The U. S. would once more be a happy prosperous land if the misled people would only harken to their oldtime leaders, cast out those in power.

What was said in the cascade of oratory at the Congress of Industry had been said a thousand times at a thousand businessmen's conventions since the spring of 1933. For such convention orators Recovery had served only to bolster their spunk, sharpen their tongues. Their speeches were still awash with the same ponderous complaints, the same doleful predictions, the same solemn warnings.

"This gathering represents every state," rumbled NAM President Clinton L. Bardo. On hand was American Cyanamid's bewhiskered William Brown Bell, who is currently dunning his friends for Republican campaign funds (TIME, Dec. 2). Bonged Mr. Bell, after dissecting the Townsend Plan: "Are we all crazy?" President S. Wells Utley of Detroit Steel Casting Co. urged his fellow industrialists to turn the heat on local Republican committeemen to keep the G.O.P. "from becoming more liberal; meaning more radical." Conspicuous at the banquet board as he passed the olives was the handsome, flowing stock of Mohawk Carpet Mills Chairman George W. McNeir (see cut). Other business Congressmen were du Pont's President Lammot du Pont; Atwater Kent's A. At water Kent; W. A. Sheaffer Pen's W. A. Sheaffer; Kohler Co.'s Walter J. Kohler; Publisher Bernarr ("Body Love") Macfadden; Adman Bruce Barton; Camelman S. Clay Williams; Kodakman William G. Stuber; Soapman Richard R. Deupree: Woolman Lionel J. Noah; President Robert E. Wood of Sears, Roebuck & Co.; President Ray Wantz of Rockford (Ill.) Fibre Container Co. About the only notable business figures absent were Brooklyn's poultry-dealing Brothers Schechter, who upset NRA, and that embattled Manhattan jeweler, Norman C. Norman, who carried his "Gold Clause" case to the Supreme Court.