Summer Sideshows

When not making pictures, cinema stars make headlines by marrying and divorcing, wooing and suing. When not making laws, members of Congress keep their names and causes before the public by Investigations. This summer these extracurricular activities will be fewer than usual because, in an election year, Congressmen want to be home mending fences. Also because of elections, investigations will be specially designed to provide useful political color. By last week three investigations of 1938 loomed largest:

TVA and the maze of charges and countercharges made by Messrs. Morgan. Morgan & Lilienthal are being delved into by a joint committee headed by Ohio's industrious, gum-chewing Senator Vic Donahey, with $50,000 to spend (TIME, June 6). Because Vic Donahey knows he is not a born inquisitor like such famed Senators as Black, Wheeler, Nye, La Follette and the late Tom Walsh, his committee last week retained a paid inquisitor just as the Senate's Wall Street investigation in 1933-34 hired Lawyer Ferdinand Pecora. The TVA committee's choice: Francis Biddle, 52, a Philadelphia lawyer who followed Franklin Roosevelt through Groton and Harvard into the New Deal, served as chairman of NLRB in NRA days. Mr. Biddle, although once attorney for such great corporations as the Pennsylvania Railroad and A. & P. chain stores, is an ardent New Dealer, hardly likely to bring much comfort to the private utilities which TVA opposes. His portrait, as a champion of social justice under the New Deal, was painted into a labor scene in one of the Department of Justice's new murals by his brother, Artist George Biddle.

Reds & Nazis and any other "unAmerican activities" he may find in the land will be the quarry of loud, towering, ham-handed Representative Martin Dies (rhymes with "pies"') of Texas. With him will work six House colleagues on an appropriation of $25,000. To get his inquiry voted, Martin Dies (whose hatred of communists is his political stock-in-trade in Texas) enlisted the support of Representative Samuel Dickstein (whose hatred of Nazis is his political stock-in-trade on Manhattan's lower East Side). Publicity-wise Mr. Dickstein, anxious to revive the Nazi-hunting committee he headed in 1936, was glad to join Mr. Dies. They got their resolution passed--but when the committee was picked, angry Sam Dickstein was left off it.

Monopoly. By far the year's most significant inquiry will be that of a National Economic Committee, set up by the Senate last week in response to a special message from President Roosevelt in April. Subject to approval by the House, after being rammed through over some serious Senate criticism, the N. E. C. will be composed of three Senators, three Representatives, an expert each from the Treasury, Justice, Labor and Commerce Departments, one each from SEC and FTC. The committee's province as set forth in the resolution sponsored by Wyoming's Senator O'Mahoney:

"To make a full and complete study and investigation ... of the concentration of economic power in and financial control over production and distribution of goods and services.

"The causes of such concentration and control and their effect upon competition.

"The effect of the existing price system and the price policies of industry upon the general level of trade, upon employment, and upon long-term profits and upon consumption.

"The effect of existing tax, patent and other Governmental policies upon competition, price levels, unemployment, profits and consumption. . . ."

Extraordinary though such a legislative-executive hybrid committee would be. its financing as voted by the Senate was more extraordinary. Traditionally both houses of Congress jealously guard their power-of-the-purse. For N.E.C. the Senate voted a whopping $500,000--and then yielded to the President the power to allocate $400,000 of it.

Particular significance of the committee is that: 1) it represents the next move in a basic Administration policy to extend Government control, and perhaps "planning," further toward the roots of U. S. Business; 2) it gives SEC, FTC and other branches of the Administration the full inquisitorial power of Congress, otherwise denied them by law, plus control of the inquiry's rudder, the money; 3) it assures the New Deal an unlimited supply of raw political ore from which to coin votes for the November election; 4) it imposes upon Franklin Roosevelt heavy responsibility for the manner in which the broadest, deepest business Investigation ever voted by Congress shall be conducted.

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