Word: dealer
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...officially listed a Progressive, member of the House Committee on Interstate & Foreign Commerce, he is the father of a resolution to investigate the automotive industry. This was inspired in March 1937 by the predominantly Progressive Wisconsin Legislature, as a result of a State licensing law for automobile dealers which brought out the fact that certain features of the dealer business were interstate in character and therefore outside State regulation. Gardner Withrow's proposal was that the Federal Trade Commission investigate monopolistic features of the relations between automobile manufacturers and dealers. Congress passed the resolution last month and Franklin Roosevelt...
Others besides Gardner Withrow had suggested prying into the dealer business. Year ago the National Automobile Dealers Association, to which belong 10,000 of the 45,000 U. S. dealers, petitioned FTC for a fair trade practice code. About six months before the American Finance Conference, a trade association of independent automobile finance companies, instigated a Department of Justice investigation of the trade practices of the four factory-affiliated finance companies which do 75% of the new car business. Charges of dealer coercion were presently brought against the "big four" in Milwaukee, but the case fizzled when the judge discovered...
...convinced that the manufacturers have been ruthless in pursuing their objective, which has been the selling of new automobiles regardless of the consequences and that the contract entered into by the manufacturer and the dealer is the most efficient weapon they have at their disposal in seeking their objective...
...firmly convinced that as long as . . . [the manufacturers] . . . retain in the form of a contract the power to threaten, the power to cancel the automobile dealer out, just that long will these gentlemen force upon their automobile dealers unreasonable quantities of new cars...
...press conference of Franklin Roosevelt's along those lines four months ago (TIME, Jan. 17). According to Mr. Withrow this forcing of the market amounts to more than 1,000,000 used cars a year and largely accounts for the annual mortality of from 17% to 25% of dealer establishments. His words brought cheers from the dealers, though a few of them voiced fear of "bureaucratic Government control...