Oratorical Year-End

Last week hundreds of U. S. industrialists and the heads of their trade organizations assembled in Manhattan for what they were pleased to call the annual Congress of American Industry. Upper chamber in this congress is the potent National Association of Manufacturers, at whose two-day session the books arc closed for the business oratorical year. If an intelligent Tasmanian recluse had dropped into the Grand Ball Room of the Hotel Commodore where the NAM meetings were held last week he might have gathered that: 1) The U. S. is currently a subject nation under alien rule. 2) This rule is administered by a cabal of capricious tyrants whose sole purpose is to reduce the natives to a state of regimented slavery. 3) These irresponsible foreigners, having debased the currency, are now wilfully bankrupting the country. 4) The burden of debt and taxes is intolerable. 5) Local laws and customs are being flouted, ancient moral standards ridiculed, the pristine character of the working classes deliberately undermined. 6) Civil liberties, personal freedom, individual initiative and enterprise have virtually disappeared. 7) The U. S. would once more be a happy prosperous land if the misled people would only harken to their oldtime leaders, cast out those in power.

What was said in the cascade of oratory at the Congress of Industry had been said a thousand times at a thousand businessmen's conventions since the spring of 1933. For such convention orators Recovery had served only to bolster their spunk, sharpen their tongues. Their speeches were still awash with the same ponderous complaints, the same doleful predictions, the same solemn warnings.

"This gathering represents every state," rumbled NAM President Clinton L. Bardo. On hand was American Cyanamid's bewhiskered William Brown Bell, who is currently dunning his friends for Republican campaign funds (TIME, Dec. 2). Bonged Mr. Bell, after dissecting the Townsend Plan: "Are we all crazy?" President S. Wells Utley of Detroit Steel Casting Co. urged his fellow industrialists to turn the heat on local Republican committeemen to keep the G.O.P. "from becoming more liberal; meaning more radical." Conspicuous at the banquet board as he passed the olives was the handsome, flowing stock of Mohawk Carpet Mills Chairman George W. McNeir (see cut). Other business Congressmen were du Pont's President Lammot du Pont; Atwater Kent's A. At water Kent; W. A. Sheaffer Pen's W. A. Sheaffer; Kohler Co.'s Walter J. Kohler; Publisher Bernarr ("Body Love") Macfadden; Adman Bruce Barton; Camelman S. Clay Williams; Kodakman William G. Stuber; Soapman Richard R. Deupree: Woolman Lionel J. Noah; President Robert E. Wood of Sears, Roebuck & Co.; President Ray Wantz of Rockford (Ill.) Fibre Container Co. About the only notable business figures absent were Brooklyn's poultry-dealing Brothers Schechter, who upset NRA, and that embattled Manhattan jeweler, Norman C. Norman, who carried his "Gold Clause" case to the Supreme Court.

Economist Harold G. Moulton of the Brookings Institution tried to impress the assembled industrialists with the idea that the best way for them to save their capitalist hides was to reduce prices.* And Mr. Moulton was seconded by General Motors' Alfred P. Sloan Jr. But the rest of the congressional record was such a name-calling contest that the New York Times suggested: "The spokesmen for business organizations ought not to sound like the chairman of the Republican National Committee."

Only discordant note in this symphony of reaction was played by Chairman Joseph Warren Madden of the National Labor Relations Board. Indeed, some of the business congressmen gruffed for publication that Laborman Madden had abused their hospitality, that he had not been invited "to come here and make a union speech."

Laborman Madden bluntly declared that industrial management "can and does effectively destroy the right of self-organization among workmen." When writing the Wagner Act another Congress had been well aware that in fighting labor, business did not hesitate to use intimidation, coercion, discharges, stool-pigeons, company unions. Moreover, Laborman Madden could cite a Supreme Court decision upholding the right to organize written by no less eminent a Republican than the late Chief Justice William Howard Taft, who once opined from the bench: "[Labor unions] were organized out of the necessities of the situation. A single employe was helpless in dealing with an employer."

Referring to the question of responsible labor leadership, Mr. Madden added: "It is remarkable that there are so few hot heads and zealots as there are. Would you expect a conservative person, considerate of the welfare of his family and himself, to accept a position of leadership in a labor union with all of its obvious and very real perils to his job?"

This was so far off their reservation that the business congressmen fairly purpled. Up jumped the National Association of Manufacturers' General Counsel James A. Emery. Smoothing his morning coat and adjusting his Adam's apple to his wing collar, he cried in rebuttal:

"A great percentage of those present have served in the ranks, and they might be able to assure Mr. Madden that failure to organize was often due to the worker's inability to feel the distressing conditions attributed to him."

In their "Platform for American Industry," issued at the conclusion of the Congress, the industrialists rewrote the Declaration of Independence ("Certain inalienable rights of individuals are recognized and protected by written constitutions against encroachment by agencies of government"); plagiarized the Constitution ("The powers and functions delegated to the central Government are defined; those not so delegated are reserved to the States and to the people"); quoted George Washington (" 'If, in the opinion of the people (he distribution or modification of the constitutional powers be in any particular wrong, let it be corrected by an amendment in the way in which the Constitution designates' "); paraphrased Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover ("Individual achievement, self-reliance, and thrift are the foundations of progress and security" ); pledged, in effect, their best efforts to defeat Franklin D. Roosevelt for reelection.

* An endowed Washington research organization and supergraduate school for social sciences, the Brookings Institution lately completed a three-year inquiry into the state of U.S. capitalism. An able summary by President Moulton appeared in the November issue of FORTUNE under the title "The Trouble with Capitalism is the Capitalists." Dr. Moulton's point: in a competitive system each businessman naturally tries his best to improve productive efficiency, lower his costs. Theoretically, competitive pressure will force him to reduce prices proportionately as he reduces costs, thus providing the constantly widening market that capitalistic mass production requires. But, says Dr. Moulton, this fundamental capitalistic tenet has been flagrantly violated by modern capitalists with their monopolistic practices, their watchword "Stability." Even if businessmen give lip service to lower prices, the vast majority not only do not reduce them; they boost them whenever they believe they can get away with it. Moreover, price lowering has one tremendous advantage over other methods of increasing mass purchasing power: it benefits the entire population. Forcing up wages, a tedious, sometimes bloody, process of raising buying power, seldom improves the lot of farming, professional or white-collar classes, may, when accompanied by higher prices, actually lower their living standard. Leftish economists say that the trouble with Dr. Moulton is that he has just discovered capitalistic troubles which Karl Marx predicted nearly a century ago.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.