Word: gardners
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...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, always glad to investigate monopoly, quickly signed...
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...
This convention, attended by 850 dealers, was for the primary purpose of drawing up a fair trade practice code for submission to the FTC for approval and promulgation. FTCommissioner Charles H. March was on hand to help. But his place in the sun was definitely overshadowed by Gardner Withrow. With the FTC scheduled to begin its investigation of automobile monopoly five days after the N. A. D. A. convention ended, stocky, heavy-jawed Sponsor Withrow appeared in Detroit to explain it. What he had to say was the most vigorous tongue-lashing the automotive industry has had from a Congressman...
...thus hammering home the theme that "high-pressure salesmanship" of the manufacturers has contributed to the present automobile glut, Gardner Withrow several times used phrases direct from a 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...
Final excitement of the N. A. D. A. gathering was the annual banquet, graced this year by General Motors Chairman Alfred P. Sloan Jr. In a long speech he made only one oblique reference to Gardner Withrow's charges...