Emptying Chamber

Edward Albert Filene is 75, rich, cantankerous, idealistic and a born agitator. He has agitated for nearly everything from co-operative credit unions to the Boston Chamber of Commerce. He even agitated for the formation of the U. S. Chamber of Commerce and the International Chamber of Commerce. But that was a long time ago, and the ideas of the aging Boston merchant have moved faster than the organizations he promoted. An ardent champion of the New Deal, Mr. Filene today stands, economically if not politically, far to the Left. Last week he withdrew from the U. S. Chamber of Commerce, releasing an open letter with his reasons why. Wrote old Mr. Filene: "I have at last been forced to the conclusion that the U. S. Chamber of Commerce ... is not an organization of business but rather an organization of businessmen -- meeting not to study business in a business way, nor even to find out what the needs of business in general may be, but either to promote the special views of certain prominent people in the business world, or at best to discover and express the fixed opinion of the membership concerning matters which, in the most successful modern business organizations, would be referred as a matter of course to fact-finding research. . . . Modern business problems, general or special, can not be solved by adding up the opinions either of the board members or the members generally and calling that the answer. . . . "

When business in general became sick ... the U. S. Chamber of Commerce had no independent, fact-finding body to which to refer the problem. It simply held meetings at which business leaders were asked to express their opinions. . . . They made no pretense of having studied economic evolution. . . . They were simply and solely successful businessmen. ... In the case of an epidemic, by the same logic, we would not consult doctors -- mere medical brain-trusters -- but call a mass meeting and have it addressed by those who enjoyed the best of health before the epidemic happened. . . . "

My studies, as you know, have forced me to conclude that there can never again be lasting, nationwide prosperity until business in general is organized to pay such higher wages that the masses of wage-earners will be able to buy enough of our industrial products to give industry an adequate market. ... If I am wrong in that conclusion, however, I want to know it, and if I am right I believe that businessmen generally will want to know it. It was not, therefore, because I found myself so hopelessly outnumbered in the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that I finally decided to withdraw my support but because the Chamber had neither the facilities nor the will to find the actual answer to such an all-important business question.

"I believe that this accounts not merely for my withdrawal but for the shrinking prestige of the Chamber in our business community. . . . The Chamber as at present organized may function as a successful club of businessmen when times are good, or as a potent centre of reaction when changing times make some great new forward step necessary; but in neither role can it furnish any real help to business."

Mr. Filene's reasons for quitting the Chamber are not the only ones which are putting that organization in a position like that of the League of Nations. A number of local Southern Chambers have withdrawn because of the central body's anti-New Deal tactics. On the other hand, certain trade associations, notably the National Automobile Manufacturers, have pulled out because the Chamber was not sufficiently anti-New Deal to suit them (TIME, May 11). The idea of NRA was knocking around the Chamber sometime before the Administration took it up, and both Harper Sibley, the Chamber's present head, and his predecessor, Henry Ingraham Harriman, are personal friends of Franklin D. Roosevelt, though neither is precisely a New Dealer. However, the President, like Mr. Filene, the motormakers and the Democratic Chambermen of the South, has long since ceased to pay any attention to what the U. S. Chamber of Commerce says or does.

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