Roosevelts & Recriminations

Last week Mrs. Sara Delano Roosevelt went to Texas to visit her grandson, Elliott Roosevelt, who lives with his second wife on a ranch near Fort Worth. Between trains in St. Louis she talked with newshawks about her son in the White House, declared: 'I can't see why anyone should criticize him. He is doing everything he possibly can for everyone." At Fort Worth one of her first queries to Grandson Elliott was: "Do you think your father gets his swims every day? I wish he wouldn't miss so many." Then to news hawks the President's 81-year-old mother announced: "I don't think my son should campaign this year. The people know whether they want him for another four years. If they don't, he'll get along well enough." While Mrs. Roosevelt was traveling to Texas, some 2,000 U. S. businessmen were assembled in Washington last week for the prime purpose of letting her son know that they detested virtually everything he has done.

The occasion was the fourth annual convention of the U. S. Chamber of Commerce under the New Deal. Most of the delegates devoutly hoped it would be the last. In 1933 the Chambermen meekly accepted the President's personal proffer of a "partnership" between Government and Business. A year later they were already so scared by the implications of that partnership that President Roosevelt wrote a testy note telling them to stop crying "Wolf!" Last year he not only failed to send his greetings to the assembled Chambermen but conspicuously publicized his opinion that they no longer voiced the real views of U. S. Business. This year Frank lin Roosevelt ignored the U. S. Chamber of Commerce entirely.

Most memorable achievement of the convention last week , was the ingenuity displayed by speakers in saying the same thing in different ways over & over again. Even the theme of most speeches was a repetition of last year's convention. If the Chamber really represented U. S. Business, it looked as if U. S. Business was, for once, in complete harmony.

Actually that harmony was an illusion. The national Chamber was founded in 1912 under the benevolent eye of William Howard Taft for the express purpose of answering the old question: "What does business think?" The answer is that business seldom agrees on any but the broadest and vaguest questions. The legislative interests of one company, of one industry, may directly conflict with those of a dozen others. Lately the Chamber has been criticized for representing only small commercial enterprises. Only last month it was learned that the Automobile Manufacturers Association had transferred its allegiance from the Chamber to the more congenial National Association of Manufacturers.

The bond that united the Chambermen last week was their common hatred of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Pitch of the Chamber tune was sounded by Philip J. Fay, a San Francisco insurance man and a Chamber vice president. At a preliminary session he orated: "Today the individual is no longer free to move as he pleases in the field of his lawful affairs. He must wait to get the 'go' sign from Washington before he can sow a field of wheat, plant a couple of rows of potatoes, fire a fellow who is stirring up trouble in the factory, get a few friends to buy stock in a new venture . . . or do any of a dozen other simple and ordinary things in which, a few years ago, the Federal Government had no concern whatsoever. . . . Too long have we remained silent while demagogs attack unfairly the integrity of our business institutions. . . . Too long have we introduced carelessly into the stream of our national life alien philosophies of Government control and foreign ideas of repression of the individual that have no place in this land of freedom."

Even Chamber President Harper Sibley, re-elected last week for another one-year term, thought that U. S. thinking has been "tainted with sophistries of foreign ori-gin." But the long-nosed, amiable Rochester, N. Y. capitalist, taking a little longer view than his fellows, continued: "If the American people have given ear to false prophecies, they are not to be herded back to the right path by denunciation and abuse. ... It is a task for both business management and political management."

Nevertheless, moderate Mr. Sibley could not prevent the convention from turning into a rousing Republican rally. The one successful effort on the part of the "constructive" minority to give the meeting a semblance of significance was a strategem concocted by Chicago's John William O'Leary, head of the Machinery & Allied Products Institute. He hastily released the Chamber's plan for a national survey to determine "our re-employment possibilities with a degree of accuracy which cannot be equaled in any other way." This was the first official reply of organized business to President Roosevelt's "challenge to industry" to put more men back to work. Few observers believed that the survey would be any more revealing than any other Chamber survey. Some cynics even doubted if indeed it would ever be made at all.

Meantime in full and special sessions the Chamber's anti-New Deal oratory flowed on. "Shall we cry out in despair, 'Oh Lord, how long and how much?' " wailed Frederick Harold Clausen, president of Wisconsin's Van Brunt Manufacturing Co., on the subject of taxes. "Business men who can remain sane and normal under the strain of the experimental and vote-fetching legislation . . . are gifted by nature with unusually strong mentalities," rumbled Chicago's Silas Hardy Strawn, a past Chamber president. Demanding a full return to "rugged, old-fashioned individualism," President Fitzgerald Hall of Nashville, Chattanooga & St. Louis Ry. thundered: "You know and I know the many serious defects among business men. But with all these defects, when we are fairly compared with the professional politician of the nation, we, individually and as a class, completely outstrip them in intelligence, ability, character and patriotism."

Trumpeted Johns-Manville's Lewis H. Brown: "Are we producing a bankrupt generation of hopeless, discouraged men and women who want work and self-respect but are denied it? And are we forging for those who have jobs a constantly heavier tax ball & chain with its shackles cutting to the bone? What are the mothers, whose boys become old enough to work, going to say when the only employment available is boondoggling under alphabetical follies? . . . And what about the girls of today--the mothers of tomorrow? Do you think they will be happy with 'love on the dole?' ' Occasionally a few dissenting voices were heard above the din of Roosevelt recriminations. Chairman Alexander Thomson of Champion Paper & Fibre Co., asked for business recognition of the fact that workers' "starkest fear is insecurity in their job." Eastman Kodak's Treasurer Marion B. Folsom urged business co-operation in improving the Social Security Act, adding: "Employers must realize that the country is facing an old age and an unemployment problem, and that legislation to meet these problems is inevitable." Harold Boynton Bergen, Procter & Gamble's industrial relations director, tartly observed: "I might mention that experienced personnel men have been appalled during the last few years at the way in which many labor difficulties have been handled, in some cases by prominent industrialists." Aside from Secretary of State Hull, who discoursed upon reciprocal trade pacts, the Administration's only accredited representative at the Chamber meeting was Secretary of Commerce Daniel Roper, who read a platitudinous plea for more employment which had been censored by the White House.

During the speechmaking the Chamber's halls resounded with uproarious applause at every phrase which might be interpreted as a crack at the Administration. During the final session, when resolutions supposedly embodying the Chamber's consensus were passed, attendance was trifling. The Chamber's platform opposed Government interference with business on a dozen counts, yet plumped wholeheartedly for Government promotion of forestry, domestic farm markets, foreign air service and U. S. shipping through direct subsidy.

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