National Affairs: Sponsored Patman

Many strange things bobbed up last week when investigators probed in the affairs of McKesson & Robbins, the great drug firm which had been defrauded by an expert crook. Among the strangest were old copies of Drug Topics found in the company's files which declared that McKesson & Robbins had "sponsored" a nationwide lecture tour in 1936 and 1937 "to consolidate the sentiment of retailers, manufacturers and businessmen generally behind the Robinson-Patman Law." The lecturer was Congressman Wright Patman of Texarkana, Tex.

When the advertisements appeared in Drug Topics two years ago, Congressman Patman did not bother to deny publicly the company's claim. Last week he denied it with heat: "McKesson & Robbins has never paid me in connection with anti-chain store legislation or anything else." Mr. Patman said he got his money from the Brady Speakers Bureau in Manhattan.

That the archfoe of the chain stores should team up with wholesalers did not strike anyone as particularly strange. Mr. Patman's bill to tax chain stores out of existence ($50 to $1,000 per store times the number of stores in a chain, times the number of States in which the chain operates) is due to come up in the next Congress, and chain store merchants have been worried for months.