Chamber Rebellion

Thrice has U. S. Business assembled in Congress to deliberate upon the New Deal. Two years ago the delegates to the annual convention of the U. S. Chamber of Commerce converged on Washington with quaking hearts and fearful step, plumped for President Roosevelt's proposed partnership of Government & Business and departed with only the vaguest notion of the New Deal's implications. Last year, somewhat wiser and more cheerful, the convening Chambermen undertook to criticize the New Deal--only to have the President tell them sharply to stop crying ''Wolf!" By last week business profits had recovered enough to send the Chambermen to Washington with eyes ablaze. For three days they proceeded to blast the New Deal and all its works.

High Chambermen, who had maintained a semblance of co-operation with the White House, pattered up & down the Chamber's corridors trying to still the storm of abuse. Henry Ingraham Harriman, outgoing president, keynoted moderately: "The chief objection is not to the basic principles underlying many of these measures but to the extremes to which they are carried." Secretary of Commerce Roper rode a herd on the impatient Chambermen, trying to prevent a stampede.

But the rank & filers were in open revolt. "We have floundered along for two years without knowing whether we were going to be locked up or not," trumpeted Chicago's Silas Hardy Strawn, the Chamber's head under Herbert Hoover. "I think we have the right to know where we are going. Businessmen are tired of hearing promises to do constructive things, which turn out to be only attempts to Sovietize America. We are tired of dawdling and boondoggling."

Chairman Charles Bismark Ames of Texas Corp. grumbled about the "bungling efforts of Washington bureaucracy to regiment American industry."

Most acid Chamberman was Forney Johnston, slender, sharp-nosed Birmingham lawyer who has led the power fight against Tennessee Valley Authority. Calling the New Deal "a witch's dance of uncoordinated legislation" and referring to "the house-top Allah shoutings of Mr. Ickes and other impeccables," he snapped: "If business is vicious, it has required a century and a half to discover it. . . ."

Snub. Last year President Roosevelt sent greetings to the Chamber. Year before he addressed it in person. This year he cut it dead. Chamber officials and White House secretaries denied an intentional snub, explaining that the President was too busy to speak and had not been asked for a message. Nevertheless, the Chamber rebels trembled in defiant delight, convinced that they had thoroughly riled the President.

Meanwhile President Harriman and his moderate followers still thought they could avert an open break with the Administration by tempering the Chamber's resolutions -- traditionally the planks in the U. S. Business platform. But the 1,500 delegates gathered in the Chamber's building across Lafayette Park from the White House determined to put on record once & for all their various New Deal grudges. In the most uproarious session in the Chamber's history, with the proposals of the resolutions committee often rewritten on the floor, the Chamber declared its opposition to 1) the Social Security Bill. 2) the Public Utility Bill to abolish holding companies, 3) the section of the Banking Bill which proposes Government domination of the Federal Reserve System, 4) extension of the NRA except temporarily, 5) the AAA amendments (see p. 15), 6) all pending labor legislation. Only on such minor policies as transportation, reciprocal trade pacts, retirement of submarginal land and direct subsidies for shipping did the Chamber support the President. For good measure it tossed in a resolution demanding that any & all subversive Red activities be made Federal crimes.

The duty of informing the Administration of the Chamber's will fell upon smiling, long-nosed Harper Sibley, the Chamber's new head and a personal friend of President Roosevelt since student days at Groton and Harvard. An affable Rochester (N. Y.) capitalist with his family's traditional interest in that city's Security Trust Co., President Sibley is a miner, a lumberman and a grand-scale farmer. He likes to work with the laborers on his 4,000-acre ranch at Santa Rita. Calif., or on his 350-acre farm at Sibleyville, near Rochester. In Illinois, where he is the State's largest individual land owner, he owns the biggest corn farm in the world, and his AAA checks for crop reductions run to fat figures.

"Constructive criticism does not necessarily imply opposition to the President's program," explained Mr. Sibley last week. "There is no reason why we have to follow the wishes of the President. I will seek conferences with the President with a view to co-operative effort toward recovery, and I hope to do so in a friendly spirit--but on the basis of a clear difference of opinion."

The Chamber had differed too much for Harper Sibley's "friendly spirit" to impress the White House. By one swift maneuver President Roosevelt stripped the Chamber of its right to speak for U. S. Business. Before the Chambermen had time to pack their grips, safely seated in the Executive Offices was another body of businessmen, pledging almost unqualified support to the New Deal. That body was the Department of Commerce's Business Advisory & Planning Council, which has lately emerged as one of the most potent business lobbies in Washington. Composed of much bigger business wigs than the rank & file of Chambermen--men like U. S. Steel's Myron Taylor, American Telephone & Telegraph's Walter Gifford, Chase National Bank's Winthrop Aldrich, General Electric's Gerard Swope--the so-called Roper Council drops into the White House for frequent Sunday evening chats. Radicals regard it suspiciously as a hotbed of Fascism.

Having received the Roper Council's protestations of allegiance, President Roosevelt briskly dismissed the Chamber's criticism as something to be expected when social reforms were taking shape. He said he had run into the same thing when pushing social legislation as a Senator in the New York Legislature. As then, he now believes that the majority of businessmen actually favor his measures. Trade organizations seldom voice the real opinion of the businessmen they are supposed to represent, he declared, and he was sure that by & large Business is with him. What interested him about the Chamber speeches was that none considered the human side of current conditions, notably old age and unemployment factors.

As a final dig at the U. S. Chamber of Commerce, the President warmly welcomed a group of his oldtime bad boys, the bankers. At its annual convention last autumn the American Bankers Association kept its rebellious members under iron control, with the result that an official peace treaty was signed with the President. Last week, although the ABA officials served notice that they intended to fight the Banking Bill, endorsed in his fireside broadcast only last fortnight, President Roosevelt cheerfully told them that his mind was still open.

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