The Avery Problem

Sewell Avery might have been grateful. His appearance before a Congressional investigating committee came on Dday. This accidental circumstance kept his testimony off the nation's front pages, and this was just as well for Sewell Avery. For even his most sympathetic Congressional supporters discovered that the 69-year-old head of giant Montgomery Ward is no easy man to get along with. He blustered and stormed, made long speeches, evaded questions, interrupted committee members. D-day was field-day for Sewell Lee Avery. He said the War Labor Board "must be destroyed"; it was a mistake to think "that kind of trash can succeed in making a successful country." He was disgusted with WLB's industry members because they followed democratic procedure--when outvoted, they accepted the majority decision. He insisted that his $600-million-a-year business, employing upwards of 60,000 workers, had nothing to do with the war effort. And, retelling the story of his widely-pictured ouster by two soldiers from Ward's Chicago plant, he made it clear that he had deliberately forced the eviction in order to dramatize his case. ("Thank heaven I did that! Because the damned photograph resulted. . . .")

At the conclusion of Sewell Avery's testimony, the Congressmen were still in no mood to approve Attorney General Francis Biddle's bungling of the Ward seizure. But they had a new awareness of the problem named Sewell Avery.

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