Roast Chicken

Traveling a rocky road beset by amendments since hearings began last May, the Black-Connery Wages & Hours Bill, spurred on by Franklin Roosevelt, nevertheless leaped over barrier after barrier, seemed headed for enactment. Out of the Joint Congressional Committee chairmanned by Senator Black and the late Representative Connery, this "little NRA" jumped: 1) the Senate Education and Labor Committee. 2) passive resistance by the A. F. of L., later modified, 3) the Senate by 56 to 28, 4) Congresswoman Mary T. Norton's House Labor Committee.

Last week at the foot of barrier No. 5, the House Rules Committee, Wages & Hours lay as dead as a roast chicken. One of the most potent of Congressional Committees. Rules must say, in effect, "Pass on," before any bill can reach the floor of the House. If Rules refuses a rule, proponents of the bill can bring it to the floor by discharging the Committee through petition of half the membership, but only after an interval of 30 days. By its refusal to give Wages & Hours a rule last week the Committee had effectively bottled up the bill until 1938. The roll of the 14 members of the Rules Committee readily reveals why Franklin Roosevelt's No. 2 bill was as dead as No. 1 (the Court Plan): Four are Republicans naturally opposed, five are Democrats from the South, whose industrial ambitions hinge on attractively cheap labor which the Black-Connery Bill aims to end.

Loudest member of this conservative coalition with nine of 14 votes is bushy-haired Edward Eugene Cox of Camilla, Ga., whose most notable efforts during 12 years in Congress were confined to peanut growers' legislation until Labor got under his skin last winter. Congressman Cox recently proclaimed: "I warn John L. Lewis and his Communistic cohorts that no second 'carpetbag expedition' in the Southland, under the red banner of Soviet Russia . . . will be tolerated." He also accused Madam Perkins of treason. By last week Congressman Cox had slipped so far away from the New Deal that he was confusedly damning Supreme Court Nominee Hugo Black as an "anarchist."*

Not to be outdone in the slap-the-Administration game, 79-year-old Edward Thomas Taylor's Appropriations Committee presented to the House a third deficiency bill which: 1) knocked out the $20,000,000 Farm Tenancy program: 2) cut the Labor Relations Board's request for $1,800,000 in half; 3) denied the Agriculture Department $500,000 for the Great Plains shelterbelt tree plantings; 4) disapproved an additional $10,000.000 which Chairman Joseph P. Kennedy was seeking for his Maritime Commission. Total intended economies: about 30% of Budget Bureau estimates of $120,000,000.

*Senator Black advocates governmental regulation; anarchists believe in neither regulations nor government.

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