Little Men, Chapter Two

One of the largest small businessmen invited by Secretary of Commerce Daniel Calhoun Roper to a Conference of Little Business in Washington last February was DeWitt McKinley Emery--6 ft. 6 in. When that conference became a circus it made red-headed Mr. Emery very angry. Two months previously he had conceived on his own idea of a national conference of small businessmen, had sent out from his Akron, Ohio stationery plant a form letter to other little men which began: "The sheriff is about to get my business. How's yours?" He attended the Washington shenanigans, was disgusted, decided to go ahead with his own plans. Last week as Mr. Emery's National Small Business Men's Association finally met in Pittsburgh for its first convention, he promised there would be no fisticuffs, poli tics, or laughs like those at Washington.

But the conference opened inauspiciously. Expecting a fine turnout, the association hired Pittsburgh's biggest hall, Syria Mosque. At the first session, attend ance was to the mosque's capacity as Mr. Emery's $50,000 business is to U. S. Steel Corp. A Philadelphia cloak & suit man named Charles Bloome offered a resolution to move the convention downtown so that he could save 75-c- cab fare each way. Mr. Emery: "Why can't five delegates ride in the same cab?" Mr. Bloome: "No five small businessmen could ride 75-c- worth together without getting in a fight." Thereupon the delegates began to fight about the definition of a small business man. A resolution to exclude all bankers from the definition was opposed on the ground that "they will have our business pretty soon anyway." Before long, however, the 150 delegates settled down to the sober, if small, business at hand. They listened to anti-New Deal speeches by Vice President Matthew Woll of the A. F. of L., Senator H. Styles Bridges of New Hampshire, Representative Samuel B. Pettengill of Indiana. By week's end they had drawn up a series of resolutions which opposed virtually everything except: 1) "the American system of free enterprise"; 2) "active and immediate cooperation of labor, business, agriculture, and Government"; 3) "fundamental principles of anti-trust laws"; 4) "immediate nonpolitical solution of the present deplorable railroad situation."

Various speakers pointed out that small businessmen numerically represent 90% of U. S. business, that they control over 18,000,000 votes, that the association is represented in 60% of the country's Congressional districts. No one would say how big the association is, except to place it kittenishly between 1,000 and 100,000. Probable size: 5,000 to 10,000. "If the membership is secret," said Mr. Emery, "no one knows how big a club you're swinging." He was not at all discouraged, he added, at the convention's small attendance. "After all," he said, "only 30 small businessmen attended the Boston Tea Party, and they played a pretty big role in history."

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