On Whose Side, the Angels?

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In a resplendent Senate committee room, marble-pillared and hung with crystal chandeliers, sat a group of bored Senators. Some studied the lofty ceiling, some doodled, some blinked at the witnesses who were still parading before them after four long weeks. Every once in a while, like snapping turtles at sight of a bug, they stretched out their necks to snap and gobble.

They were the Senate Labor and Public Welfare Committee, which had set itself the task of writing a whole new batch of labor legislation. They knew most of the testimony by heart; they had heard it over & over again. But it was an old American custom to give everyone his say. Industry had had its inning.

Last week Labor Leaders William Green, Philip Murray and Walter Reuther stamped across the turkey-red rug. Green refused to admit that there had been any abuses by labor of its power. Murray declaimed: "Rape is being perpetrated on the people." Reuther declared: "Free enterprise will survive only if it can be made to work."

Cup of Coffee. Innumerable plans for new laws had been proposed already. Senator Homer Ferguson had a plan. Senator Wayne Morse had a plan. Various witnesses had plans. On the other side of Congress, various Representatives had plans. New York's freshman Senator Irving Ives, a longtime student of labor relations, proposed that House and Senate set up a joint committee to confer with management and union leaders and "work out a program helpful to everyone." The legislative hopper began to look like Mrs. Peterkin's cup of coffee, into which she accidentally put salt (in Lucretia P. Hale's Peter kin Papers'). Family and friends added one ingredient after another, hoping to make Mrs. Peterkin's coffee taste better. A lady of wisdom finally suggested that Mrs. Peterkin just pour a fresh cup. That solution was not apt to occur to Congressmen--they usually prefer something more laborious.

The plan which aroused the most interest and provoked the hottest attack were the proposals of Minnesota's Senator Joseph Hurst Ball. One reason why Congress faced a long-drawn battle, to which the hearings were only a torpid preliminary, was because Joe Ball was launched on a crusade.

"In the past," one labor leader remarked bitterly, "Senator Ball has been on the side of the angels." Now labor leaders located him considerably nearer hellgate, somewhere away to the right of Senator Robert Taft. His proposals, they cried, were "reactionary" and "punitive." He was the very symbol of the anti-union threat which labor leaders fought and feared.

Ball's Bills. Ball had four bills before the committee. One of them, written in collaboration with Taft and New Jersey's H. Alexander Smith, was a scattershot charge aimed at various abuses like the secondary boycott (a boycott by union members of a company against which they have no specific grievance). It set up machinery for voluntary mediation and required 60-day cooling-off periods in industrial disputes. To labor leaders, its penalties (possible loss of job) seemed severe. The bill, by & large, was another version of the Case bill, passed by the 79th Congress, vetoed by President Harry Truman.

A second bill would amend the National Labor Relations Act (Wagner act). It would guarantee employers the right to state their position in a labor dispute. It would protect craft unions and minorities from the past tendencies of NLRB, which often ruled in favor of big industrial unions. Thus the bill would "strengthen, not weaken, the rights of employees," said Ball. But it would not touch labor's right to organize, the cherished and long-fought-for right which the Wagner act insured.

The third bill aimed at such paralyzing stoppages as industry-wide strikes in coal and shipping, would end industry-wide bargaining by making it illegal for a labor organization to represent workers, or even advise or support workers in two or more companies more than 100 miles apart. Employers likewise would be enjoined from forming united fronts. The bill, said Ball, "will return the power to bargain to the local union where the individual employee can participate . . . and eliminate the monopoly situation where a handful of union leaders can shut off the nation's total supply of any product."

The fourth bill would outlaw any form of closed or union shop. To this one, above all, union leaders were wildly opposed. One goal of all union organizing is the closed shop. Outlawing the closed shop seemed to them like eliminating the baskets in a basketball game.

Ball had had some expert help in drafting his measures. Gerard Reilly, onetime member of the National Labor Relations Board, onetime Labor Department attorney and author of the minimum wage bill, now a Washington attorney and a good friend of Ball, had helped him write the Wagner act revisions. Donald Richberg, onetime labor lawyer and now a corporation lawyer, had helped Ball chiefly with the measure against industry-wide bargaining. Richberg was the man, say labor leaders, who led Ball "astray."

Taken all together, the Ball measures represented such a drastic rewriting of the ground rules passed by the New Deal (and by labor considered sacred) that the astute Bob Taft backed away. Harold Stassen, who came before the committee with a bland legislative pudding of his own, was solemnly aghast at the pungent recipe concocted by his old friend Ball. No more than half of Ball's measures would ever be accepted by the Senate committee. The industry-wide bargaining and closed-shop prohibitions would almost certainly be dumped. The bitter pill would be sugarcoated.

Reilly, a shrewd and skeptical observer, figured that the bill which would finally emerge from committee would contain no more than the following provisions:

A guarantee of free speech to employ--* With Jennifer, Peter and Sara. ers in labor disputes; a denial of the right of foremen to belong to rank & file unions; a measure against the secondary boycott; a federal board to arbitrate jurisdictional disputes; and some provision making it easier to sue a union in federal court for breach of contract.

But Ball was determined to take his fight to the Senate floor, particularly his fight to end the closed shop, which he considered an infringement of American liberties. "I want to hear some Senators argue that out on the floor," he said.

Minnesota Boy. The background of this crusader deserved some attention. Joe's father was a man who had studied for the ministry, gave it up after he read Robert Ingersoll, married a Kentuckian, studied law but never practiced, taught school, sold textbooks, became a Bull Mooser and a Woodrow Wilson internationalist. Joe, the sixth of seven children, was born in Crookston, Minn., in 1905. Joe played football at high school, worked as a farmhand and went to Antioch College. He topped off his education at the University of Minnesota and got a job on the Minneapolis Journal as a $15-a-week reporter.

Like most underpaid reporters, Joe was a revolutionist. Colleagues remember the time when they upended the assistant managing editor and spanked him. They especially remember Joe rushing up with one ham-hand raised, a revolutionist's look in his eye, to strike a blow against authority. He met and married bustling Betty Robbins, who was a $15-a-week librarian in the Journal morgue. They quit the paper and Joe went freelancing.

Joe's revolt from Minnesota convention then took the form of a thin mustache and drooping sideburns. He wrote adventure, mystery and confession stories for the pulps. But laws of nature and economy caught up with him. He went broke, and Betty became pregnant. Back he went to journalism, this time on the St. Paul Pioneer Press and Dispatch.

For a while Joe was an ardent proselytizer for the Newspaper Guild, until he decided that Communists had infiltrated the union. Also, as he began to gain a reputation as a long-winded but conscientious political writer, he began to feel uppity about being lumped with clerks, office boys and stenographers in one union. He quit. The individualist Ball emerged in full flower.

Minnesota Senator. It was about this time that he met a county attorney named Harold Stassen. Ball liked Stassen's views. They were two intellectual explorers in Midwest Minnesota and Joe helped elect Harold governor. So in 1940, when Minnesota's U.S. Senator Ernest Lundeen was killed in an airplane crash, the nation's youngest governor (Stassen was then 33) filled the vacancy with Joe Ball, who at 34 became the nation's youngest Senator.

Betty served as his secretary (at $6,000 a year), efficiently labeling folders, answering letters from constituents, expounding Joe's views, and, on the side, running her family of three children. Minnesotans liked his earnestness and in 1942 returned him to the Senate for another six years. Joe became a vociferous internationalist. In March 1943 he collaborated on the famed B2H2 resolution (with Ohio's Harold Burton, New Mexico's Carl Hatch and Alabama's Lister Hill) --the most specific statement of U.S. internationalism which had come out of Congress up to that time.

In 1944 Ball shocked Republicans by bolting Dewey for Roosevelt because the latter's foreign policy was more in accord with his own. But on domestic issues, he was far from being a New Dealer. He shared Bob Taft's concern over breakneck, "dogood" legislation which he thought might destroy certain American principles, like liberty.

Liberty became Joe Ball's watchword. He applied it like a touchstone to labor.

The Abuses of Power. Joe had become much concerned about the irresponsibility of organized labor. The way it looked to him, labor under the New Deal had been building up power which threatened to swallow up free enterprise.

He was aware of the background to New Deal labor legislation. He conceded that the abuses of power by employers had brought about the penalties which employers now suffered. He could recall the great Carnegie Steel battle at Homestead, the sweatshops of the Manhattan garment trade. He might have known something of the terror of workers in union-hating plants. But what he saw now was a counterrevolution and New Deal excesses.

The New Deal, he thought, had lined up on organized labor's side and had become an out-&-out partisan of a single segment of U.S. society. The Norris-LaGuardia Act had put labor pretty well beyond the reach of legal injunctions. The National Labor Relations Act insured labor the right to organize. The NLRA in itself was not pernicious. But various interpretations of it plunged boards and courts into a swamp of contradictions. Both acts disarmed management, a fact which labor leaders were able to exploit to the full.

Shocking Climax. The National Labor Relations Board decided cases against management because foremen had reportedly spoken about the union in unsympathetic tones. Jurisdictional fights between C.I.O. and A.F.L. tied boards and courts in knots and left companies paralyzed. Labor power grew so great that even Government could not cope with it.

There seemed to be no way to achieve industrial peace except by giving labor what Sam Gompers once set as labor's chief aim: "More and more." In the spring of 1946 a kind of climax occurred. The great Railway Labor Act, hailed as the model machinery for peaceful settlements, broke down. An anguished and embarrassed Harry Truman demanded, among other things, the authority to draft the striking engineers and trainmen into the U.S. Army. And in the hysteria of the moment, 306 Congressmen agreed to that authoritarian expedient. The Senate, led by Taft, gutted the President's bill and it died. The whole affair ended in a kind of shocked and shamefaced silence.

But something had to be done, most Americans agreed. There was no consolation to be drawn from the fact that unions, in exercising their power, might also destroy themselves, as in the case of the recent 87-day strike of the Newspaper Guild against J. David Stern's Camden Courier and Post and Philadelphia Record. A disgusted Stem sold his papers; 580 strikers were left high & dry.

"Mr. Screwball." In recent months labor had been lying low. But Joe was not fooled. It was with a very earnest intent to do something that Joe Ball wrote his labor laws. There were practical objections to some of them. Some industries, notably the garment trade, believed that industry-wide bargaining and the closed shop had brought peace and stability. In the once strife-torn garment industry there has not been an important strike in 14 years. Union leaders and even some employers predicted that Ball's bills would throw some industries into chaos. They referred to Ball as "Mr. Screwball."

As for the morals of the closed shop, unionists argued that every worker should be required to contribute to a union which presumably worked in his behalf.

Ball's bills might very well provoke labor into being even more belligerent.

Ball's bills were not politically expedient. Even if he did push them over on the Senate floor and get the House to go along, they would certainly face a presidential veto, in whole or in part. Then the fight would start all over again.

But Ball diligently applied his touchstone. He saw a growing labor monopoly driving employers to an even greater concentration of power, which would lead to more & more Government control. He concluded: "A free society cannot survive a labor monopoly."

Freedom & Equality. He placed his principles against such theories as those of the left-wing English scholar, Edward Hallett Carr, who wrote: "Equality in the abstract is purely formal... Even equality before the law may be a mockery when the law is framed by members of a privileged class. Freedom itself can be equally formal. Freedom to choose or refuse a job is unreal if freedom to refuse is merely tantamount to freedom to starve." It is a powerful and seductive line.

But Joe had an answer to this kind of dialectics--and he thought it was an important one for Americans to ponder. Whether he stood on the side of the angels depended upon where the angels stood. Let his decriers call him reactionary. Is Liberty reactionary? His philosophy embraced two objectives: I) the greatest political and economic freedom for the greatest number, consistent with the enjoyment of some freedom by all; 2) equality for all individuals--not absolute equality but equality of opportunity and before the law.

Said Joe Ball emphatically: "There is a real danger today that in our discussion of political issues we will place so much emphasis on achieving economic security for everyone that we may achieve it at the expense of freedom--both political and economic--for the individual. We have a tendency to confuse economic security with freedom. The most secure individual in our society today is a prisoner serving a life sentence."

No matter what the fate of his labor bills, that was a thought Joe Ball wanted to get across to the U.S. people.

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