Half Way Post

Last week NRA finished the first of its two legal years of life. Proudly the Blue Eagle screamed achievements: "An absolute minimum" of 3,000,000 jobless workers had been returned to industry. Child labor had been abolished. Four hundred and fifty codes covering 95% of U. S. industry had been promulgated. All this had been voluntarily accomplished, boasted NRA, without the President's once having been forced to use his drastic power to license recalcitrants out of business--a power which last week was allowed to lapse at the halfway post. While admitting that it could not claim all the credit for them, NRA listed the following industrial gains during the past twelvemonth: electric power production, 15%; car loadings, 15%; magazine advertising linage, 23%; newspaper linage, 36%; department store sales. 46%; general manufacturing, 50%; bituminous coal production, 62%; rural store sales, 66%; automobile production, 185% ; iron & steel, 200%. From an original staff of 85, NRA's administrative corps had risen to 1,800: For these General Johnson declared a picnic and holiday, complimenting them on their "unprecedented achievements," hoping that "the dead cats aimed at me have not glanced off and hurt any of you." While he resented the "yapping and hullabaloo of die-hard critics," the General admitted in his birthday greeting to the country at large: "Throughout the year we have experimented. There were no rules to this game when we started in. ... We have made mistakes. We have learned that some things will not work; that others do not serve or protect the interest of the consuming public as every code under this program must do." Within the last month NRA has been forced to beat two strategic retreats along the code-making front. The first withdrawal on a large scale occurred when the "fair trade practice" provisions of the "service" codes were abandoned at the insistence of small businessmen harassed by orders of minute detail from Washington. Last fortnight General Johnson announced that minimum price-fixing would be abandoned in all future codes. Congress had laid a hot fire on price fixing under NRA which the Darrow Review Board kindled into a scorching flame with its first report. Before the Blue Eagle's birthday party last week, the Darrow Board sent its second report on NRA monopolies and oppression of "the little fellow" to the President. When the first report reached the White House it was vigilantly guarded until General Johnson & aides could frame a counterblast to be simultaneously released. This procedure was about to be duplicated in the case of the second report when unofficially, prematurely and mysteriously the document found its way into Washington news bureaus. When the President's secretariat asked Clarence Darrow what he knew about the leak, the sly old gallows-cheater blandly replied he knew nothing. "But if I can find the man who dug it up," he volunteered, "I'll certainly pat him on the back." The second Darrow report was orchestrated like the first. Repeated was the tune that codes in the 14 industries investigated were administered for the benefit of monopolists by the device of transferring the old trade association hierarchy into the code authority "as a kind of steering committee . . . whereby the greater units can manage, dominate and have their will over the weaker." Some specific accusations of code evils: Most hotels and many contractors use Grade B, slightly damaged plumbing fixtures, a large part of small manufacturers' output. Under the plumbing fixture code, dominated by three leading companies. Grade B products can now be sold only for export. Smalltime lead-pencil makers generally retail their product under 5-c-. Most popular color for lead-pencils is yellow. Big pencil manufacturers inserted in their code a provision prohibiting the manufacture of yellow pencils to be sold below 5-c-. All coffee roasters insert "filler" into their packaged products. Big producers use chicory. Little producers use roasted cereals. The coffee code specifies that when cereal is used for filler the package must be so labeled. No such notice is required for chicory fillers. The use of "that common abomination, the basing-point trick" works to the advantage of big lumber millers. In one case a New England contractor was required to pay mill costs plus a "phantom" rail carrying charge on a 400-mi. haul, although the mill was only 72 mi. away. Same practice was prevalent in the cement industry. Biggest Darrow blast was directed against the retail code. Originally containing specific provisions against "loss-leaders" and unfair advertising of consistently lowered prices, the code was "stealthily" emasculated, said the Darrow Board, between its adoption and final promulgation. Responsible, hinted the report, was the influence of one potent "socially and politically" figure in the industry (i. e. Ambassador to France Jesse Isidor Straus of R. H. Macy & Co.). That General Johnson had openly admitted making a change was taken by the report to be the last straw. "In our judgment," the retail trade report concluded, "the rule of the military commander is totally unsuited to the genius, habits, traditions or psychology of the American people, and wholly ineffectual in meeting the present national crisis."

In setting off its charges against NRA the Darrow Board had not escaped personal losses. Of the six original Board members, only four were left. John F. Sinclair, New York financial writer, had resigned because the first report was too radical. William Ormonde Thompson, old-time labor mediator and onetime law partner of Clarence Darrow, resigned because the second report was not radical enough. He had expected the Board to flay NRA for its failure to make famed Section 7 (a) the infallible collective bargaining weapon for which it was intended. "Step by step," said he, in a long denunciatory message to President Roosevelt, "that section has been transformed into its opposite --a vehicle for employers to force through compulsory arbitration and company unionism." Caught flatfooted, NRAdministrator Johnson's Johnsonese for once failed him. Merely snorting "Ridiculous!" to the Darrow charges, he set Counsel Donald Richberg to writing the organization's counterbarrage. Meantime, an eloquent defense came from a high and unexpected quarter. To an NRA birthday celebration at Charlestown, W. Va., President Roosevelt, who usually lets the Blue Eagle fight its own battles, sent this message: "People who cannot see the forests for the trees make much of controversy in various groups which meet in NRA--employers, consumers, employes. NRA was deliberately conceived in controversy. . . . Before the people of this country accept either preconceived conjectures of ill-informed commentators or the fulminations of minorities which still seek special and selfish privileges, we shall consider the results already achieved and look forward to greater gains on behalf of orderly progress for honest labor and honest industry." Nevertheless it seemed likely that NRA would take seriously the objections raised against it, would give its organization a thoroughgoing overhauling during the summer when Congress would no longer be in Washington to peer over the mechanics' shoulders. Reported, but denied by General Johnson as "pure fabrications" which "might as well have been written in a padded cell,"were insistent predictions that all but some 25 basic codes for big industries would be junked.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.