National Affairs: Espionage Exposed

Published last autumn by Bobbs-Merrill Co. was a $2.50 volume called Labor Spy, purporting to be the autobiography of a crack operative who spent 20 years at his trade. Apparently he found it healthy to retire to a Canadian farm to write under his old detective agency designation GT-99. The book was a hair-raising success story of how a good machinist broke into the spy business writing daily reports on his fellow workmen, advanced to union-busting, then settled down in a midwest industrial centre to bore into the local labor movement in behalf of the manufacturers. In time he got to be a cynical official of the city's Central Labor Union, an evil power in State A. F. of L. affairs, and served as a delegate to the historic 1935 A. F. of L. convention in Atlantic City where John L. Lewis bolted. . . .

Last week the background, if not the detail, of this horrendous story was confirmed by a report of Senator Robert M. La Follette's Civil Liberties Committee. From nine volumes of testimony on labor espionage elicited in the Committee's hearings last year, Senator La Follette concluded that it was a "common, almost universal practice in American industry. . . . Large corporations rely on spies. No firm is too small to employ them. The habit has even infected the labor relations of non-commercial philanthropic organizations [like hospitals]."

Intended as it was to be a primer on the profession, Senator La Follette appended to the report a glossary of such technical terms as "fink" (strikebreaker), "noble" (commander of a strikebreaking squad), "missionary" (spreader of anti-union propaganda, especially among workers' wives), "hooker" (spies who tempt workers to become spies). But the report's dynamite was a list of some 2,500 U. S. companies found as clients of detective agencies. "The list, as a whole," the report observed, "reads like a bluebook of American industry."

Promptly the protests started to pour in to Senator La Follette's office. In some cases at least the dapper little heir to the Wisconsin Progressive machine had apparently stuck his neck way out. The list had been compiled in large measure from questionnaires sent out to detective agencies. And some of their clients had used detectives, not for labor espionage, but for such humdrum matters as the discovery of petty pilferers.