Anti-Building Boom

As dull and darkly melancholy as a three-volume peasant tragedy has been the story of U. S. housing. Many a good citizen, trying to keep awake through a synopsis of the preceding chapters, has found his spirit saddened, his eyes closing, his head nodding. To maintain even its present inadequate housing level, the U. S. needs 525,000 new housing units a year for ten years. Under present conditions, the nation has no chance whatever of reaching this total.

Last week a new author took over the old plot, streamlined it, added exciting new characters, put a punch in every scene. Author of this revised version was a bulky, mustached Yale professor, a Don but no Quixote, Assistant Attorney General Thurman Arnold. Since the construction industry protractedly has proved it cannot cure its own ills, Mr. Arnold sees only one alternative--action under the antitrust laws (which he enforces).

Weapon. For the first time in history, the antitrust division is ready, willing, able. In Theodore Roosevelt's trust-blustering days--13 years after the passage of the antitrust act--the U. S. had five lawyers and four stenographers to enforce action on the law. In 1933 there were 18 people in the antitrust division of the Justice Department. Their major problem was to keep awake in the warm Washington afternoons. Last week Mr. Arnold had behind him upwards of 160 lawyers, all of them loaded with shrapnel and ready to fire.

One-fourth of all antitrust complaints have been about the building industry, where restraints of trade are found from cellar to roof: producers of building materials, distributors, contractors, subcontractors, labor unions, and in local legislative restraints of trade, such as building "regulations" that only thinly veil protective tariffs set up for the benefit of local monopolies. (Arnold cites the fact that the plumbing in the magnificent $10,000,000 Department of Justice building is arbitrarily ruled not good enough for private homes in some cities.)

With building costs flexible up but not down, material-makers have priced themselves out of the market. More than half the U. S. citizenry cannot afford a home costing more than $4,000--last year only 15% of all homes built were in that price range, and that figure was attained only through substantial Government aid--Federal, State, municipal.

On the thesis that no other industry has so completely failed to run itself, that none other has so conspicuously burdened the nation with mass unemployment, Arnold trained his batteries on the building trades, last week gave the signal to fire.

Opening Guns. Indicted in St. Louis for conspiracy in restraint of trade were four American Federation of Labor leaders, headed by reactionary, hulking William L. Hutcheson of Indianapolis, president of the carpenters' union (300,000 members). Root of the indictment: a 25-year-old jurisdictional dispute between carpenters' and machinists' unions over equipment installations at the Anheuser-Busch brewery, forcing abandonment of plans to build additional aging and fermenting plants, etc., to cost from $750,000 to $2,000,000. The dispute, said an Arnold assistant, Roscoe Steffen, "could be settled in an hour if the leadership of the union [carpenters] had the interests of the public and the welfare of labor at heart."

> In Pittsburgh, indicted for conspiracy to defraud the Government were 13 corporations, 45 individuals, several of them officers of the A. F. of L.'s Electrical Workers Union.

> In Cleveland, indicted for restraint of trade were five businessmen, three corporations, one trade association, four A. F. of L. union officers in the Brotherhood of Painters, Decorators & Paperhangers.

> Other Federal grand juries sat in San Francisco, in Washington, D. C., in Connecticut and New Jersey, with others soon to be called in Los Angeles, Seattle, Chicago, Detroit, New York City.

In Washington, a mile away from the humming Justice Department arsenal, sat a burly, pale, bush-haired man who smiled a smile of utter content. None knew better than C.I.O.'s John L. Lewis how heavily this barrage of antitrust action must fall on his erstwhile chum, A. F. of L.'s William Green.

The question mark tiepin which Mr. Green always sticks in his flower-patterned neckties symbolized last week not only his personal anguish, but that of many a building-labor chief. Many a citizen still remembers the tie-ups between gangsters and building unions in the Roaring Twenties; that it was from such men as Jake the Bum, oldtime A. F. of L. criminal, that Chicago and New York gangsters learned numerous tricks of the trade.*

Frantic for fear that Mr. Arnold's bombardment would smash their unions, or break a way for C.I.O. raiders, for weeks the A. F. of L. leaders have been strengthening their defenses. Shouted A. F. of L. Counsel Joseph Padway six weeks ago: "God deliver us from college professors!" Serenely Mr. Arnold went about his business, confident that this time he had victory by the tail.

* Well-known devices: a tricky binding in which a victim's knees and hands were so entwined in wire that his struggles strangled him; insertion of matches under a victim's toenails, to be lit from time to time; laying a victim in a tub of cement until it hardened, then tossing him into any nearby body of water.

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