U. S. Terror

When he finished his career as a football and dramatics star at University of Dayton in 1932, big, boyish Richard Truman Frankensteen taught school for a year, then went to work for Chrysler Corp. as a body trimmer in the Dodge plant in Detroit. He had worked there before, during high school vacations and for two years while he studied law at night. Soon automobile unionism was burgeoning with NRA, and educated, articulate Dick Frankensteen was a natural leader. When an Automotive Industrial Workers Association was organized in 1934 he became its first secretary. Next year, at 28, he was elected president of its 26,000 members.

About the time he began distinguishing himself in the union's affairs, Dick Frankensteen made the acquaintance of another Dodge employe named John Andrews. The two were soon fast friends. Frankensteen had no automobile, so Andrews drove him to work and to union meetings. Many an hour they spent talking union business. Andrews was hotheaded, always complaining, wanting to call a strike and urging violence. Frankensteen had to cool him off, warning that too great militancy might wreck their young union.

Mrs. Andrews and Mrs. Frankensteen liked each other, too, and in the summer of 1935 the two families took a vacation cottage together at a lake. Andrews invited his elderly millionaire uncle, a retired play producer named Bath, to join them. The Frankensteens were glad of it. Andrews' uncle took them to roadhouses, bought them champagne, brought toys to their children. So generous was he that their vacation cost the two young friends hardly a cent except for rent and food.

As union affairs took up more & more of his time, Dick Frankensteen quit his Dodge job and he and Johnny Andrews naturally began drifting apart. When most of the independent automobile unions merged with United Automobile Workers last year, he led his A. I. W. A. locals into the fold, became U. A. W.'s chief organizer in the Detroit area. As such, he was in the front trenches when the great General Motors strike (see p. 14) began last December.

One day last week Unionist Frankensteen sat in a crowded Senate committee room in Washington, listening to testimony before the La Follette subcommittee investigating violations of civil liberties and labor rights. Suddenly he heard something that jerked him up with a funny feeling in his stomach's pit. In the witness chair sat a hard-faced, scar-lipped onetime Pinkerton detective named Daniel G. Ross, sales manager of an organization called Corporations Auxiliary Co. He was talking about Richard Frankensteen's 1935 vacation, and about his friend and his friend's "millionaire uncle." But he did not refer to them as "Johnny Andrews" and "Mr. Bath." He called them Agents L-392 and F-B. They were Corporations Auxiliary Co. operatives, hired by Chrysler to spy on the new union by gaining the confidence of its young leader. The bill for champagne, toys and other favors, paid by Chrysler, had been $1,512. Dick Frankensteen understood now why his friend Johnny had been so anxious to push the union into dangerous violence, premature strikes. He wondered if he would ever be able to trust any man again.

Taking the witness chair himself, Unionist Frankensteen told the whole story. When he had finished, he turned to Vice President Herman L. Weckler of Chrysler's De Soto Motor Corp., lashed out at him and Chrysler's President Kaufman Thuma Keller, an officer of another spying organization called National Metal Trades Association. "I think," cried angry Dick Frankensteen, "that men of the type of Mr. Weckler and Mr. Keller are worse than a dope peddler who sells narcotics to addicts. They go on and pretend to be decent citizens and hire men for spy jobs--the lowest criminals in the world."

More coherently, the young labor leader threatened: "I want to tell Mr. Weckler that we won't work in the same plants with labor spies. I say that, and I represent a majority of the Chrysler employes. Mr. Weckler knows it and I can prove it."

Unpleasantly suggesting Russia's Ogpu and Germany's Gestapo, Richard Frankensteen's double-crossing dramatized and typified the system of U. S. labor spying described by witnesses before the La Follette committee in recent weeks. Tech nique of the system was shown to be simple, standardized. A union member is bribed to betray his fellows, or an agent is hired to join the union, report on its members and activities, stir up trouble. National Metal Trades Association, it was testified last fortnight, maintains a $215,000 fund to supply spies and strikebreakers to its 952 members, including Fisher Body, Wright Aeronautical, Continental

Can, Otis Elevator, Revere Copper & Brass, Yale & Towne, Pratt & Whitney Aircraft. President Homer Martin of United Automobile Workers made affidavit that a recent officer of his Toledo local had been a Corporations Auxiliary agent who had done his worst to wreck the union.

Founded 29 years ago with headquarters in Cleveland, Corporations Auxiliary Co. had six affiliates, principal branch offices in Detroit, Buffalo, Toronto, New York and Chicago. In 1935 its 499 clients paid it $518,215. It regularly employs some 200 operatives, known not by names but by code numbers. Its founder-president, who owns 98% of the stock and pays himself a $75,000 salary, is a suave, erect, distinguished-looking oldster named James H. Smith. Last week he was accompanied to the Senate committee hearings by a glamorous young blonde. President Smith blandly tut-tutted designation of his service as "spying," declared that his function consisted of "promoting efficiency and happiness among employes, looking for leaks and violations, and improving employe morale." After Chrysler, which paid him $72,611 in 1935, his best customers were General Motors, Toledo's Electric Auto-Lite Co. (which had one of 1934's most violent strikes), Detroit's Kelsey-Hayes Wheel Co. and Midland Steel Products Co., both closed by sit-down strikes last December. Others were Great Lakes Steel, Wheeling Steel, International Shoe, Crane, Kelvinator, Firestone Tire & Rubber, New York Edison, Postal Telegraph, RCA, Texas Corp.

When Chrysler draughtsmen organized a Society of Designing Engineers, C. A. C. furnished a draughtsman-agent to join the union, report on its meetings. Twenty members were shortly discharged. Remaining members, a Society official testified last week, were so terrorized that they had stopped attending meetings, were mailing their dues.

Vice President Weckler stoutly defended the use of spies. "It has long been a common practice," said he. "We must do it to obtain the information we require in dealing with our employes."

"What," asked Senator La Follette, "would be your judgment on a Chrysler executive who sat in at meetings and then revealed secrets to a competitor?"

"I think it would be terrible, reprehensible," cried Mr. Weckler.

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