Body Blow

The House rose in wrath last week, swung a roundhouse blow at a face that it had come to hate: the huge mug of John L. Lewis. The blow caromed off Lewis' massive chins, and smacked Labor with a jolt that shook its teeth. The Smith bill, passed by a whopping 252-10-136 vote, would deprive Labor, for the duration, of the lush privileges it has enjoyed since the New Deal came to power.

For the brain child of Virginia's wing-collared, flop-eared Howard Worth Smith would 1) freeze the present situation in regard to the closed shop; 2) require long cooling-off periods in labor disputes; 3) require a majority vote of the workers in a Government-held election in order to make a strike legal; 4) strip "illegal" strikers of the protection of labor laws; 5) forbid picketing of plants by others than their own workers. The bill would also bar from union office Bundists, Communists and felons, would require unions to file complete, honest and detailed organizational and financial reports--a form of publicity to which A.F. of L. and C.I.O. are alike bitterly opposed.

Lewis may have thought that the isolationist G.O.P. majority was his friend, but the Republicans voted 123-10-24 for the Smith bill.

The eventual fate of the legislation, now draped limply as a surrealist watch on the table of the Senate Labor Committee, hung on the attitude of the man in the White House.

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