Organization v. Rights

"With stupid judges on the bench, the same as there are stupid employers of labor who refuse to give the workers what the law states they shall have, it is up to the workers to organize to such an extent that their economic strength will make it unhealthy for a judge to defy you! Don't lose faith because a couple of judges have handed down decisions on questions of vital importance which seem to defeat all you are aiming for. We are to appeal these decisions to the highest courts in the land and will have these decisions reversed!"

Speaker of these fighting words in Boston last week was no underfed Communist on a soap box in the Common, no overfed American Federation of Labor official from State headquarters, but First Assistant Secretary of Labor Edward Francis McGrady, addressing a rally of unionized telephone operators. What stung this strong language from Labor's dandified McGrady was the double punch which Federal courts had just handed NRA's collective bargaining clause in Delaware (see p. 15), its wage fixing provisions in Kentucky.

U. S. District Judge Charles Irvin Dawson at Louisville, like Judge Nields at Wilmington, belongs to that huge company of Federal jurists which the Harding-Coolidge-Hoover regime left behind to plague its successors. Not only is Judge Dawson a "Block" Southern Republican but also a Businessman who resigned some years ago as board chairman of Kentucky Home Life Insurance Co. No friend, to the New Deal, he recently ruled that condemnation of private property for PWA slum clearance was beyond the Federal Government's authority. And for the second time he declared last week that the NRA Coal Code was illegal.

Granting again a temporary injunction to 35 western Kentucky soft coal operators against the code authority's enforcement of its minimum wage scale, Judge Dawson ruled: "Whenever the Government unconstitutionally interferes with the right of a citizen to do business in his own way, that interference constitutes an injury to the property rights of the citizen; and that interference takes the form of exacting payment of wages in excess of what the citizen is willing to pay. To the extent of the increased wages, this citizen has been injured in his property rights. Surely, in such a situation, the Government cannot justify its action by demonstrating that the increased wages are more than absorbed by increased profits flowing to the citizen as the result of operating his business under the illegal regulation thereof by the Government. If such is the law, then a benevolent despotism at Washington, D. C. can take charge of all business in this country. . . ."

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