Congress of Industry

While another cinema version of Sinclair Lewis' Babbitt was opening throughout the land last week, U. S. businessmen were putting on a great show of their own in Manhattan. Claiming to represent 70,000 manufacturers throughout the land, they met, cocktailed, dined and elucidated their tenets of sound economics. Im-pressed by the resounding title of Congress of American Industry, metropolitan editors sent newshawks scurrying to the Waldorf-Astoria to record economic history in the making. When columns and columns of the news reports were printed one editor found enough meat in them to pad out a 120-word editorial.

Few were the famed voices of industry heard at the Congress of American Industry. Schwab of Bethlehem Steel, Atterbury of Pennsylvania Railroad, Swope of General Electric, Sloan of General Motors, Gifford of A. T. & T., Avery of Montgomery Ward were not even among those present. But genial, white-thatched Clinton Lloyd Bardo, who resigned month ago as president of New York Shipbuilding Corp., was there to uphold the position of tycoons.

Speech followed dull speech. The Congress adopted a platform consisting of all the familiar things that the men who go to such congresses favor: a balanced budget, the gold standard, a modified NRA, an end to government competition with business. But genuine economic articulation came not from the practicing-economists who were delegates to the Congress but from the practicing politicians of the New Deal--Daniel Roper, Raymond Moley; Donald Richberg.

Typical of the businessmen's uneasy rumblings was Tycoon Bardo's cry: "We must have an end of the era of suspicion and come into an era of confidence. . . . We must have some assurances that the [Government's] charted course leads to safe shores."

"Unless the businessmen of America have been shell-shocked into nervous impotence," cracked back Mr. Richberg, "there must come a time when they will respond to the fighting spirit of that old admiral who signaled: 'Damn the torpedoes. Go ahead.' "

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