National Affairs: Rip Tide

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Having salved their consciences by such objections, virtually the entire contingent of Administration Senators joined in killing the Byrnes' Rider by 48-10-36 — but only after Leader Robinson had promised that a separate Sit-Down resolution would get early consideration.

Blood or Sanctity. Conscientious citizens could sympathize with President Alfred P. Sloan Jr. of General Motors, who wrote to his stockholders last week: "The Sit-Down strike should be dealt with by those responsible for law and order just as aggressively as all other offenses in which the safety and welfare of the community are involved" (see p. 84).

But impartial observers could also sympathize with harassed Governor Murphy of Michigan, who pleaded by radio last week: "I have been urged to 'shoot the workers out of the factories and thus end sit-down strikes once and for all.' Put yourself in my place. If you were Governor of Michigan, would you authorize a plan which might very easily and almost certainly result in bloodshed, bitter and lasting animosities and a deplorable situation which it might very easily take years to correct?"

Reviewing his own strike, whose cost to the national economy he estimated at "many hundreds of millions of dollars," President Sloan asserted that it had represented not workers struggling toward better lives, but Labor bosses grasping for power. Yet the "unauthorized" General Motors sit-downs which were embarrassing union leaders last week showed that plain workers, awakened to a sense of their own power, were taking the new weapon in their own hands. Aghast at wholesale seizure of private property, some jittery souls were calling the Sit-Down a step upward communism. To calmer observers, the sit-downer's fierce assertion of a proprietary right in his own job seemed more like communism's antithesis, an uncalculated species of simple anarchy. In asserting that right, the sit-downer did not lack for articulate defenders. Even Son James Roosevelt took it up when, in a speech for his father's Supreme Court plan at Anderson, S. C. last week, he remarked: "When you talk about the sanctity of property rights, you must remember that all the property rights which many people have are their jobs."

Lewis to Chair? Accustomed to his loud oratory, Washington correspondents paid small attention when Texas' young Martin Dies uprose in the House to berate the President for failing to use his "insurrection" powers against the Sit-Down. Cried he: "There can be no human or personal rights without property rights." They paid even less attention to the resolution which Representative Dies introduced for a House investigation of the Sit-Down and its causes. Even under the Old Deal, no Congressional investigating committee ever dared poke its nose far into the affairs of Labor. Under the New Deal, which has missed few chances to turn the limelight on Capital's transgressions. Labor's inviolability has been unquestioned. The Dies resolution was quietly turned over to the potent Rules Committee, from which few bills unwelcome to the Administration ever return.