Sideshows

In this corner: Martin Dies of Texas, with his big cigar and $100,000. In that corner: Reds, Fascists, Bundsmen.

In a second ring: Howard Smith of Virginia, with his ribboned pince-nez and $50,000. Other corner: the National Labor Relations Board.

In a third ring: Robert La Follette of Wisconsin, with his ice-cold voice and $50,000. Other corner: the Associated Farmers of California.

Every year after Congress goes home, a few members remain to conduct Investigations, between-sessions sparring shows, in the big marble-pilastered caucus rooms of the House and Senate office buildings at Washington. The inquisitors are financed by their colleagues (out of the Treasury) to improve the public weal and make political capital. Above are the three main attractions scheduled for the dog days, the Dies show beginning this week.

Big stuff and hot revelations have already been promised by Mr. Dies and by Senator La Follette, the former now recovered from an appendectomy that temporarily affected his heart. Mr. Smith, the calm, unpurged Virginian, has promised only a "fair and impartial" scrutiny of NLRB, but New Dealers do not like the look in his eye (TIME, July 31).

Senator La Follette's show will be cast along the lines of Author John Steinbeck's best-selling novel, The Grapes of Wrath (TIME, April 17). The persecution of Westward-wandering "Okies"* by California cops, sheriffs, labor contractors and such organizations as the Associated Farmers will be staged by expert Directors La Follette, Elbert Thomas of Utah and a third Senator to be appointed.

To help laconic Mr. Smith dig into NLRB, Speaker Bankhead appointed two 100% New Dealers, Massachusetts' Arthur Healey and Utah's Abe Murdock; and two 100% Republicans, Ohio's Harry Rouzohn and Indiana's Charles Halleck.

With relief, outspoken Arthur Healey resigned his hot spot on the Dies committee, shifted to the Smith group. Prematurely grey Mr. Healey, long a stentorian New Dealer, had been working under wraps on the Dies group, with his strongly Catholic constituency clamoring for more vigorous Red-baiting. California's young Jerry Voorhis will step into Healey's lukewarm shoes as the New Deal's flatfoot assigned to watch Mr. Dies. New Dealers begged Speaker Bankhead to add Illinois' T. V. Smith to the committee as a further balance.

Other investigations--monopoly, petroleum, tax revision, banking, forestry, fisheries, wild animal life--will play to smaller houses. Biggest show of all would have been the proposed investigation into the alleged Mexican oil dealings of Pennsylvania's onetime oilman, Senator Joe Guffey. In announcing the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee's decision to quash the investigation, Senator Connally of Texas wisecracked: "We've just dry-cleaned Joe." == Call for this inquiry arose from stories written by top-flight Reporter Marquis Childs in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and by pretty Ruth Sheldon in the Saturday Evening Post. Mr. Guffey told the Senate he was "sure" Childs had "received other compensation for sending that story out than that which he receives from his regular employer," added that the same was "no doubt" true of Miss Sheldon. For these remarks Senator Guffey could not be sued, because of Congressional immunity for remarks on the floor. But seven days later Newshawk Childs sued Guffey for $100,000 slander, charging that the Senator had made similar statements "in the presence of others."

In far-off Oslo, New York's ham-handed Representative Ham Fish, four Senators and 24 Representatives were last week spending $10,000 in the only big Congressional junket of the year, the annual trip to the meeting of the Interparliamentary Union. Still happily present in Mr. Fish's memory was his coup of last January, when he and 50 Republicans outsmarted bumbling Leader Alben Barkley, ousted him from his plushy post as head junketeer to the Union sessions (TIME, Jan. 30). But Mr. Fish also found a little sour milk in his junket. Before he sailed for Oslo, he confidently left in the hands of the House Foreign Affairs Committee a bill proposing a $50,000 appropriation for a 1940 session of the Union in the U. S. In choosing his fellow junketeers, happy Mr. Fish overlooked Massachusetts' bush-bearded George Tinkham, a power on the House committee and inordinately fond of travel. As Congress adjourned, Mr. Tinkham was able to cable Mr. Fish: "We have thrown your invitation in the wastebasket."

*Poverty-stricken migrants, chiefly from Oklahoma (thus "Okies"), to California's promised land, where they worked as itinerant harvest hands, lived in filthy squatters' camps. The name is now applied to all refugee workers from the Southwest and Midwest dustbowls. For further information on California's migrant workers' woes and big land-grabbing agriculturists, see Factories in the Field by Carey McWilliams (Little, Brown, $2.50), out last month.

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