Word: laborers
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...caucus room of the Old House Office Building, there opened a Congressional investigation as suave, sophisticated, polite and cynical as a Somerset Maugham comedy. It was the beginning of the Smith Committee hearings of the Wagner Act-that most crucial piece of New Deal legislation, passed to safeguard labor's historic right to bargain collectively through unions of its own choosing...
Last July Congress authorized the Smith Committee to investigate the Wagner Act, to find out whether the Labor Board had been fair, to see what amendments, if any, were needed, and gave it $50,000 as a starter. To tall, solemn, silent Representative Howard Smith of Broad Run, Va., who has hated the New Deal ever since it tried to purge him last year, it gave the delicate job of chairman. With wealthy Lawyer Edmund Toland and 22 attorneys assisting (called brilliant legal lights by the Right, called tools of reaction by the Left), it checked on the work...
First witness was pipe-smoking Dr. William Leiserson, 56, appointed to the Board eight months ago, with a reputation as a labor mediator. Dr. Leiserson stated the case for NLRB about as well as it has been stated. He denied that the Act needed amendment. He reminded the Committee of the conditions that brought about the Act-the use of labor spies, the discrimination against good union men, the tragedies of violence in labor disputes, the old hostility against labor legislation...
...Smith Committee adroitly dodged challenging labor's rights or employers' wrongs. With its tongue in its cheek and its eye on the record, it examined the labor relations of the experts on labor relations, asked the old Roman Juvenal's question: "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes" or Who will guard the "SG-&-SO" guardians...
Witt. One of labor's safeguardians was Nathan Witt, 36, Secretary of the Board, an old employe, hardworking, father of two, conscientious. Artfully into the record Counsel Toland introduced a series of memos from Board Member Leiserson to Board Chairman J. Warren Madden. In them, Dr. Leiserson: 1) accused Mr. Witt of giving oral reports of cases differing from the record, complaining about "the usual irregularities in procedure characteristic of the Secretary's office"; 2) agreeing with Chairman Madden that the Universal Pictures case in which Mr. Witt was involved "smelled"; 3) protesting about Mr. Witt...