Lobby v. Lobby

"LAST CHANCE!" screamed advertisements by great utility companies in the Nation's Press last week. Last chance for investors to save their savings from destruction by President Roosevelt! Wire your Representatives!

By a one-vote margin last month the Senate had approved vital Section 11 of the Wheeler-Rayburn Public Utility Bill, providing that unessential holding companies more than one degree removed from operating companies should be dissolved by the Securities & Exchange Commission within seven years. This was precisely what President Roosevelt wanted. Then Power scored twice in quick succession. For drastic Section 11 the House Interstate Commerce Committee substituted a milder regulatory measure, directing SEC to limit each holding company's operations to one integrated public-utility system. When a poll of House Democrats showed the Administration upward of 30 votes shy of a majority to sustain the Senate's action, President Roosevelt demanded a record vote on the House floor so he could see which Democrats were with him and which were against him. The House Rules Committee turned his request down flat.

Last week in response to Power's frantic advertisements, leaflets, letters and personal canvassing, utilities investors were obediently showering telegrams and letters by the thousands on their Representatives. Under Philip H. Gadsdeh, chairman of the Committee of Public Utility Executives, Power had put a small army in the field at Washington. Scripps-Howard Correspondent Ruth Finney reported that the Power lobby (600) outnumbered Congress (527). Between holding companies battling for life and President Roosevelt battling for principle it was to be a finish fight.

In the House, Alabama's hollow-cheeked, hard-fisted George Huddleston got a howling ovation when, pleading for "regulation" instead of "vengeance," he ripped into both combatants. "I deplore these outside influences," barked Democrat Huddleston. ". . . Before we had the first hearing on this bill the chairman of our committee [Texas' Sam Rayburn] radioed from one end of the country to the other telling the people how bad the utilities were and how much this kind of legislation was needed.

"He was not alone in riding this wave. . . . The Chief Executive through his all-powerful influence had repeatedly done so. Let us have done with this talk of propaganda. Both sides are guilty. Both have interfered with a fair and just decision upon the part of Congress."

But at a White House press conference few minutes later President Roosevelt showed himself in no mood to abandon propaganda or talk of propaganda. Through the Press the country could hear him speaking about as follows to the Washington newshawks: Were people talking about a "death sentence" on holding companies? They had the timing wrong. The real death sentence was passed long ago by holding companies on utilities investors. For stockholders the bill's "death sentence" was actually an emancipation proclamation. The Administration was out to save their dollars and it proposed to succeed. It would give them a chance to live instead of being sent to the death house of poverty by parasitic holding companies which gobbled up all the profits.

As for the Power lobby, cried the President, it was the most powerful and dangerous in U. S. history. Talk about the Labor lobby! Beside the Power lobby it was a mere child, and the American Legion lobby only an infant in arms. In the past the Power lobby had swayed state legislatures, even Congress. Now it was trying to scare the people of the U. S. with deliberate falsifications. Despite the Presidential fight talk, Administration leaders in the House conceded that, "things still look pretty bad." Charles West, the President's Congressional contact man, and Emil Hurja, Boss Farley's No. 1 man at Democratic national headquarters, went to work in House cloakrooms & corridors. "Nothing," promptly protested President Hugh S. Magill of the American Federation of Utility Investors, "can compare with the lobby the President himself has set up, and every Congressman knows this is true. The implications contained in the $5,000,000,000 White House lobby constitute the most sinister peril to our Democratic form of government that has ever threatened our people."

Early this week the House was sitting as a Committee of the Whole House on the state of the Union for the consideration of Senate Bill No. 2796 when Iowa's Eicher moved to substitute the Senate's Section 11 for the House Committee's revision. No record roll-calls, under the rules, are made in committee of the whole. Instead, all Representatives in favor shuffled up the centre aisle to be counted like so many anonymous sheep by two tellers standing in the well. Those opposed repeated the performance.* Minutes before Speaker Byrns announced the vote, careful gallery spectators had foreseen Power's smashing victory over the President: 216 against the "death sentence" to 146 in favor. Next day, on a record roll-call, Power won even more decisively. Despite renewed Administration pressure, the House passed its emasculated bill, 323-to-81, sent it to conference, while a deadlock appeared likely.

*In the press gallery sat the Washington correspondents of 28 Scripps-Howard newspapers eagerly checking names, putting members on unofficial record.

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