THE CONGRESS: 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?