Acid & Acrimony

In a huge, semicircular conference room in the U.S. Capitol, seven Senators and seven Representatives last week sat down to what may be the most important job of their legislative lives: hammering out a labor reform bill. Between the hard-fisted Landrum-Griffin bill passed by the House (TIME, Aug. 24) and the milder Kennedy-Ervin bill approved by the Senate, there was ample room for compromise, though the rigid--and almost equally divided--positions of the conferees typified a general bitterness rarely before equaled on Capitol Hill.

Labor itself, by its incredibly crude tactics, seemed determined to achieve precisely the tough reform bill it was fighting. Among the House conferees was New Jersey Democrat Frank Thompson, regarded as a close friend to labor--although not to Jimmy Hoffa's racket-riddled International Brotherhood of Teamsters. In working for a middle-road labor bill, Thompson had won the enmity of Hoffa's top lobbyist, blundering, blunderbussing Sidney Zagri. Soon after Zagri denounced Thompson as an enemy to labor, Thompson began getting threatening telephone calls, finally reported them to the FBI. Driving to the Capitol one morning last week. Thompson was stopped at a red light when a green Ford truck pulled up next to him. A man leaned out the window, pointed a rubber syringe at Thompson, squirted a stream of liquid. Only bad aim saved Frank Thompson from serious injury: the liquid was sulphuric acid, and the little that did hit Thompson burned a hole through his shirt, raised a blister on his arm.

"Class Hatred." The outraged shouts were still resounding in the House chamber when another labor leader decided to get into the act. Trigger-tempered James Carey, president of the International Union of Electrical Workers and a vice president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., wrote a threatening letter to each of the 229 Representatives who had voted for the Landrum-Griffin bill. "We wish to assure you." wrote Carey, "that we shall do all in our power to prove to the working men and women in your district that you have cast your lot against them and they should therefore take appropriate action at the ballot box."

The reaction to Carey's letter was--or should have been--entirely predictable. Replied Illinois' Republican Representative Edward Derwinski to Carey: "You and too many other autocratic union bosses are guilty of the un-American philosophy of class hatred." New York's Republican Representative Steven Derounian asked Carey for 10,000 copies of the letter "to distribute them to the residents of my district so they can see how you operate."

"Two Can Play." But the dispute between legislators and labor leaders was not the only--and perhaps not the most important--result of the House labor vote. In the wake of that vote came a split in House Democratic ranks that may well influence the whole legislative course for a long while to come. Although they fight each other on civil rights issues, Northern liberals and Southern conservatives have long scratched each others' backs in other areas: Northerners, for example, have supported such Southern-backed bills as price supports for peanuts, tobacco and cotton, while Southerners have helped put across Northern-sponsored programs for slum clearance, public works and other welfare legislation.

But when 92 Southerners jumped the party line to vote for the Landrum-Griffin bill, many a Northern liberal felt betrayed, determined to end the era of cooperation. From a spate of conferences of liberal leaders came a three-pronged plan for reprisal. Northerners said they would: 1) fight harder than ever for a strong civil rights plank at next year's Democratic national convention; 2) renew and increase their efforts to dilute the authority of Virginia's Representative Howard Smith, leader of the Southern bloc and chairman of the powerful House Rules Committee; and 3) refuse to back peanut, tobacco and cotton subsidies, along with other legislation dear to the South. "Cotton," snapped Iowa Democrat Neal Smith, "was hurt worse than labor in that vote."

The first Northern chance to hit back came last week, when North Carolina Democrat Howard Cooley offered an amendment to increase by $200 million the bartering provisions on farm-surplus shipments abroad. Northern Democrats joined Republicans in opposition and Cooley's amendment got slaughtered, 143 to 52. New Jersey's Frank Thompson expressed the feelings of most Northern Representatives when he told Cooley: "Harold, from now on I'm against anything that grows." On that basis, the House vote on the Landrum-Griffin bill may be remembered long for political results that have no apparent connection with labor reform.

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