Crucifixion?

One by one labor's lesser leaders had made their points before the House & Senate labor committees. Their testimony added up to a single doctrine: present laws should not be changed in any important detail. But at least three unions did little last week to encourage Congress to leave things as they are.

The United Electrical Workers' Albert Fitzgerald had hardly claimed that his locals were "autonomous" (and thus no part of a labor monopoly) when Senate Committee Chairman Robert Taft jumped in. Said he: "But you took away the charter of the Bridgeport local because it fired 27 Communists."

Fitzgerald had the standard answer for that charge. No one should be booted out of a union, he said blandly, whether "Communist, Socialist, Democrat or Republican . . . because of color, creed, religion or political belief." He hotly denied that he was a Communist himself. So did his top assistants, Party-Liners Julius Emspak and James Matles.

Shouted President Fitzgerald: "I have seen one of the finest examples of Red-baiting here this morning!" But committee members were also wise to that one. As well as most of labor, they knew that U.E.W. had long been the C.I.O.'s biggest Communist-dominated union.

Hod's Head. Meanwhile the House Education and Labor Committee got an odd lesson in semantics. The United Auto Workers' Robert Buse, leader of the ten-month-old Allis-Chalmers strike, admitted that he, and "everybody else on the picket line," had signed a nominating petition for a Communist candidate for governor of Wisconsin. But then he coolly denied that he was a Communist himself, or that his Local 248 was Communist-led.

Congressional tempers were not improved by another choice bit of double-talk before the Senate committee the day before. Squinting through a pair of dark glasses, the A.F.L. Hod Carriers' pious Joseph V. Moreschi listened while his lawyer read his plea:

"Laws which would restrict, yes, and even make criminals of labor representatives . . . are not the sound and logical answer. . . . The silencing of leaders of a just cause does not destroy that just cause. . . . Some 1,900 years ago, the leader of the greatest cause this world has ever known was crucified. That crucifixion stands today as the symbol and inspiration of that cause."

The committee paid small attention to that plea. It remembered that Joe Moreschi, whose union went 30 years without holding a convention, is under indictment for embezzling $500,000 of Hod Carriers' funds.

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