N.R.D.G.A. from U.S.C. of C.

To Atlantic City for a board meeting fortnight ago went the potent U. S. merchants who direct the policies of the National Retail Dry Goods Association. The decisions of these directors affect 5,600 N.R.D.G.A. members selling $5.000,000,000 worth of merchandise annually in the nation's department, dry goods and specialty stores. At Atlantic City the directors of the Dry Goods Association made two significant decisions, one announced immediately, one last week.

First was a proposal for a retailing "NRA" founded on state instead of Federal statutes. At the next Dry Goods convention in January the general membership will be asked to approve a program calling for support in state legislatures of model laws covering wages, hours, child labor, deceptive advertising, misleading labeling and price cutting. All this looked like a smart attempt to head off Federal legislation in the next Congress. Ground for this suspicion was broadened last week when the Dry Goods Association belatedly announced that it had quit the U. S. Chamber of Commerce".

Released by Channing Ellsworth Sweitzer, the association's large, able, 48-year-old managing director, was this explanation: "The board of directors has submitted the resignation . . . effective immediately because of inadequate representation for retailing in the council of the Chamber and a lack of recognition of the importance of retail trade, which has an annual volume of approximately $35,000,000,000." Applauded Publisher Julius David Stern's Philadelphia Record: "The C. of C. has misrepresented the businessmen of this country long enough. The C. of C. brought businessmen into unmerited disrepute by its short-sighted selfishness, its violent and irresponsible attacks on the New Deal and its hook-up with interests which the average American businessman fears--and has reason to fear. . . . Chamber of Commerce thinking has been dominated by men . . . who could not or would not understand that in our system it is just as important to have customers who can buy as it is to have goods to sell." The Dry Goods Association is the second big trade organization to pull out of the C. of C. this year, the National Automobile Manufacturers having quit last spring because the Chamber was not anti-New Deal enough. A little later Edward Albert Filene, one of the Chamber's founders, resigned in disgust over the Chamber's amateurish handling of national economic problems (TIME, June 8).

Among Chambermen the Dry Goods proposal for a little NRA would find little sympathy. Moreover, the Dry Goods Association has actually been on the Roosevelt bandwagon for a good part of the New Deal for the simple reason that the New Deal has been good for retail trade.

Social Security was one of N.R.D.G.A.'s prime legislative purposes long before that subject took form on the Congressional calendar. Social Security is, in effect, insurance on buying power. Retailers are close to the public, so self-interest dictates that retailing policy follow elections.

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