Word: griffin
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...huge, semicircular conference room in the U.S. Capitol, seven Senators and seven Representatives last week sat down to what may be the most important job of their legislative lives: hammering out a labor reform bill. Between the hard-fisted Landrum-Griffin bill passed by the House (TIME, Aug. 24) and the milder Kennedy-Ervin bill approved by the Senate, there was ample room for compromise, though the rigid-and almost equally divided-positions of the conferees typified a general bitterness rarely before equaled on Capitol Hill...
...House chamber when another labor leader decided to get into the act. Trigger-tempered James Carey, president of the International Union of Electrical Workers and a vice president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., wrote a threatening letter to each of the 229 Representatives who had voted for the Landrum-Griffin bill. "We wish to assure you." wrote Carey, "that we shall do all in our power to prove to the working men and women in your district that you have cast your lot against them and they should therefore take appropriate action at the ballot...
...when 92 Southerners jumped the party line to vote for the Landrum-Griffin bill, many a Northern liberal felt betrayed, determined to end the era of cooperation. From a spate of conferences of liberal leaders came a three-pronged plan for reprisal. Northerners said they would: 1) fight harder than ever for a strong civil rights plank at next year's Democratic national convention; 2) renew and increase their efforts to dilute the authority of Virginia's Representative Howard Smith, leader of the Southern bloc and chairman of the powerful House Rules Committee; and 3) refuse to back...
...other side of-the fight, Sam Rayburn's top lieutenant, Missouri's Richard Bolling, based his strategy on a civil-rights sleeper that had somehow slipped unnoticed into the Landrum-Griffin bill. The Southern conservatives would never vote for a bill containing such a clause. If Bolling could keep his civil-rights ploy undiscovered until past the parliamentary deadline for amendments, he could then reveal its presence and split the ranks of Southern conservatives. Craftily, Rayburn's strategists laid a booby trap for Southerners who were routinely hunting for civil-rights hookers by leaking a phony...
...been forewarned: ultra-liberal California Democrat James Roosevelt. While Bolling & Co. sat silent and shocked, Jimmy Roosevelt arose on the House floor and blurted the red word that Bolling had hoped to spring at the very last minute. Jimmy had found a "silver lining" in the Landrum-Griffin bill. And he told the Southerners just where to find the actual civil-rights sleeper, hidden in Section 609. The Southerners panicked just as Dick Bolling had predicted, but it was still 24 hours before the final vote-and it proved to be ample time to work out an amendment...