National Affairs: Miss Perkins Accused

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Congressional growling at Madam Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins last week culminated in a sharp, open bark. Republican J. Parnell Thomas, of Allendale, N. J. offered a resolution in the House instructing the Judiciary Committee to inquire whether Miss Perkins should be impeached for failure to deport radical Labor Leader Harry Bridges, alleged Communist.

Not since 1932, when Representative Wright Patman attacked Andrew Mellon, has such a resolution been seen in Congress. Not since the Senate voted that President Coolidge should fire Secretary of the Navy Denby for his part in the oil scandals has one been adopted. Unlike Secretary Denby, who resigned, Miss Perkins, who knew she would not be impeached, welcomed a showdown. She repeated what she and her colleagues have said all along: that the only ground on which Harry Bridges might be deported is that he belongs to the Communist Party, which he denies and which has not been established as a fact; that even if it were established, the Department of Labor would still have to wait for the Supreme Court to pass on the case of Joseph Strecker, whose deportation was halted by the Fifth Circuit Court on the ground that being a Communist was not sufficient cause.

Quick to deny any part in this attack on Miss Perkins, was her loudest critic, Representative Martin Dies* of Texas. Said he: "I wouldn't go so far as to accuse the Secretary of high crimes and misdemeanors."