Labor Board Belabored

THE CONGRESS Labor Board Belabored

Mapes Davidson of Orange, N. J., a trial examiner for NLRB, is no straw man, and doesn't pretend to be. He has plenty of dander and his dander is often up. Last week he got his dander up into national news.

Particular passions of choleric Mapes Davidson are: 1) freedom of speech, 2) Orange, N. J. Last January a collision of these passions during his work for NLRB brought him before the Smith investigating committee, which gravely noted his written impressions of Coquille, Ore. ("God forsaken hole No.1 . . . should be given back to the Indians if a tribe could be found dumb enough to take it"); of Texas ("Whoever christened Texas 'God's country' was drunk or crazy"); and of his work in one case ("Insofar as the merits go, if I have my way this respondent is going to be given the 'business' or 'the works' as others may call it").

Week ago Mapes Davidson attended a Washington meeting of NLRB trial examiners, said he heard NLRB Chief Economist David J. Saposs say that other things besides direct evidence should be put into board meeting records, "to show by inference that employers are fostering company-dominated unions."

To Mr. Davidson, the Saposs speech was plainly Communism. Heartsick at this revelation, homesick for Orange, he walked the streets for hours that night, next day. Third day, he resigned in a letter charging that NLRB's "entire record is replete with rotten radicalism." He added that Mr. Saposs' lecture "was quite in keeping with your smelly Fansteel decision in which you sought to bestow a paternal benediction on sit-down strikes." Board Secretary Nathan Witt forthwith fired Mr. Davidson for his "false and scurrilous letter." This made Mr. Davidson really mad. "How can they fire me? I quit first."

But bigger forces than Orangeman Davidson moved against NLRB last week. It developed that some people in NLRB had felt uneasy about its conduct long before the Smith investigation got under way, but had done nothing to reform it. Last August NLRB Trouble Shooter William Leiserson forced the Board to examine its own efficiency. Four NLRB regional directors studied the evidence for 60 days, in October severely indicted the Board's administrative methods, policies, machinery, recommended specific changes, many of them aimed at unpopular Secretary Witt. OverDr. Leiserson's protest, Boardmen Edwin S. Smith and J. Warren Madden pigeonholed the report.

While this revelation damaged Mr. Witt and his protectors, the House Appropriations Committee and Virginia's Representative Howard W. Smith got their heads together over a plan to strike NLRB at a more vital point: its purse. The committee slashed the 1941 Budget estimates for NLRB from $3,180,000 to $2,843,000, scratched out entirely a $45,900 appropriation for NLRB's research division, which Labor-Economist Saposs heads. Even this damage failed to satisfy Tory Smith, who served notice he would move to strike out $23,700 for clerical help in the research branch.

This sabotage really hurt; thus cut down, NLRB cannot function efficiently. Ludwell Denny, Scripps-Howard labor expert, noted that present delays, with their attendant evils, result directly from an overworked, understaffed NLRBoard. To abolish the research division on the ground that "no need exists" he called absurdity's height "at a time when both employers and unions are criticizing the board for knowing too little about the economic facts." Newshawk Denny knew, as did the House, that what NLRB foes really sought was abolition of Economist Saposs, that the bushy, rumpled little expert-- longtime Carnegie Institute and Rockefeller Foundation labor authority--though often denounced as a Communist, is neither Red nor useless, but a zealous watchdog of labor rights.

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