Evening Star Newspaper, January 26, 1937, Page 9

Flood Control Steps Held Certain Disaster ~ Aggravating New Deal Trouble in Second Term. BY DAVID LAWRENCE. HAT with the strikes and the floods, the picture here of an administration start- ing on its second term is Dot as happy as most people would like. The floods will require congressional action and appropriations to prevent a recurrence of disaster. Whatever funds are necessary for rescue work will doubtless be pro- provided prompt- ly, but the larger problem of a flood s control plan for the Nation is something which will require much debate and study. For years the Army engineers have been laying plans for flood control, which, of course, necessi- tates co-operation of State and local authorities. Some of the States which have been alert to the dangers of floods have been active in getting the appropriations through. Each year as floods have destroyed property there has been ad- ditional stimulus to action. It would not be surprising if the current dis- aster really launched flood control plans on a truly national basis. But apart from the floods, the dis- turbance to the recovery program be- ing caused by sit-down strikes is something which is not so readily solved. The fight between capital and labor used to be one that caused Gov- ernment to be cautious about enter- ing, but nowadays, it is a three-cor- nered fight with labor itself divided on the question of which method of collective bargaining is the most ef- fective—through crafts or whole in- dustries. U. 8. Catching Up Rapidly. ‘What may eventuate is some nation- al legislation relating to the legality or illegality of strikes. Many New Dealers in the last two or three years have pointed with pride to the fact that legislation, under the Roosevelt administration, has been patterned after the British model. In fact, it is . quite often insisted in administration * circles that the United States is merely catching up with her sister na- tion, Great Britain, on the matter of social legislation. But in strike legislation the United States is really far behind and if the British statutes should be taken as a pattern there will be some radical changes in the whole strike problem in America. For one thing, the Brit- ish define strikes as legal or illegal, and they declare that it is unlawful for any group of men to intimidate or coerce fellow workmen or prevent the use of property by overt acts. Judging by a reading of the British laws, a sit-down strike would be illegal, Likewise the RByitish are careful to require that all funds contributed by labor for political purposes shall be publicly accounted for and separated from all other assets of labor unions. In a sense there is a supervision of the whole accounting of funds in labor unions. It may be argued that in the United Btates, under the common law, ample protection is given to property rights and that the British law would be superfluous. Actually, prosecutions by States or counties can be instituted at present against sit-down strikers, but because the question is novel and has become entangled in what some local officials believe to be a social and economic rather than a legal question, enforcement has virtually broken down. Labor Disputes Act of 1927. In England the excesses of & gen- eral strike led to the British labor dis- putes act of 1927 and it was finally sanctioned by public opinion, includ- ing the Labor party, as the only way to deal with industrial disturbances. In the United States the situation is rapidly drifting into one which will inevitably require some form of gov- ernmental supervision of labor unions corresponding to the supervision which the Federal and State governments exercise over corporations. At present there is legislation pending which would require corporations to take out 8 Federal license if they do business in interstate commerce. It is difficult to see how the proposal could exclude labor unions from the necessity of tak- Ing out such licenses—a step toward Government control—if it is assumed that all industry is to be supervised by Government. Heretofore labor unions have been exempted from the operations of anti- trust laws and in the national labor relations act they were specifically exempted from prosecution for “unfair labor practices”—the latter being ap- plied to employers alone. Today's strike situation in Michigan shows that the men who want to work have no redress. This may lead to some- thing of the type of the British labor disputes act being passed but not until there 1s an aggravation of the whole strike situation, coupled with plain dis- approval by public opinion. (Copyright, 1937.) Babs* THAFING SOOTHED, COMFORTED w2 David Lawrence. | L SOAP and OINTMENT " INCLOSE YOUR PORCHES ’~:.'~4.,. FREE DELIVERY J. FRANK ELLY Lumber '.':d"'u.n"“mk 2121 Ga. Ave. NOrth 1341 News Behind the News Stalin Regime Believed Very Shaky Despite Purge of Conspirators. BY PAUL MALLON. CONF’ID!!N‘HAL information in the hands of impartial sources here indicates the current Moscow trial by fury is about half- founded on fact. The well informed here have reason to suspect there was a rather indefinite plot to overthrow the Stalin regime, from within, and that there still is one, indirectly involving Germany, Japan and anti- Stalinites. Likewise, there is a broad suspicion in high places here that Editor Radek, for one; was probably mixed up in it. The feeling exists also that the Stalin regime is still very shaky, that the trial spectacle may serve to delay, but probably not prevent, consummation of the original idea eventually. Knowing authorities laughed out- right at the first propaganda farce staged before the microphones in Moscow last August. The spec- tacle of ex-high Reds bleating the most abject confessions of their a infamies over the radio for peasant consumption was a little too obvloul. Every one knew the defendants would be killed anyway, and realized they had probably made a deal with the Stalin government to offer any fairy tale confessions desired, in order to save their wives and children. * ok k% Since the world choked on the first one, the Stalinites have had an opportunity to perfect their technique. They cut down.on the fantasy in this current production, and are trying to play it as a more or less straight drama. Allowing for this it is nevertheless true that the plot evidence de- veloped this time checks and double checks with certain unpublished facts in the possession of authorities here. ‘They are willing to believe Radek may have had a minor hand in it, because he had enough personal ambition for a dozen plotters. They suspect, however, that his own correspondents, whom he named as co- plotters, were merely mentioned by him to settle a personal score. There is trouble on the bridge in the Navy. President Roasevelt i8 taking the wheel. A reorganization is not improbable. What started it was a report of the Navy General Board, rec- ommending a readjustment of the promotion system. This report has not been made public, but it was presented to Secretary Swan- son some weeks ago. He passed it along to one of the junior admirals in charge of a bureau, who proceeded to tear it apart. The junior admiral sent back a counter report which is said to have defended the selective promotion system with 16-inch words. As the story goes, Secretary Swanson signed this report and passed 1t along for publication. However, a junior officer read it over and decided to inform the Navy Secretary that publication would publicly blow the ‘whole row wide open. Mr. Swanson reconsidered, kicked both reports into a back drawer of his desk and tried to lock the problem up with it. The news has reached Mr. Roosevelt, however, and it appears the trouble has just begun. L Mr. Roosevelt knows a little about the Navy from the inside himself. In fact, he testified 19 years ago as Assistant Navy Secretary before a con= gressional committee on the very point involved in this scrap. He said the bureau system of the Navy was then “antiquated,” which means it must now be 19 years over-antiquated. ‘What will come out of it will probably be a reorganization of the exist- ing Bureaus of Navigation, Yards and Docks, etc. It is quite possible the power of the General Board will be re-established or a general staff created to dominate the Navy as the general staff in the Army. ‘The Secretary of Navy has no real authority, and it is doubtful whether he will ever get any. The admirals will see to it that the cabinet post remains only a tea-pouring job. * ok Xk Xk ‘What happened in the kidnaping of Chiang Kai-shek by Chang Hsueh-liang may never be fath- omed officially, but authorities here finally have an explanation which sounds reasonable. They are will- ing to make apologies to Japan for suspecting she engineered the orig- inal coup. They believe now that the ex-opium smoker kidnaped Chiang Kai-shek because his own army was about one-half to two-thirds Com- munist. He seems to have made a trade with his Communists to capture Chiang Kai-shek, After capturing Chiang, he found the whole country arising against him. He saw that pursuit of his objective would lead to a greater slaughter than he anticipated, and he knew he could not win. ‘Therefore, he deserted his army and joined his kidnapee for a promise of immunity, thus selling out for the third consecutive time, and to his original purchaser. (Chiang Kai-shek had originally hired him to chase Communists.) ‘The result was a draw between the Nationalists and the Communists. Incidentally, there are supposed to be 500,000 Communists under arms in China and 125,000 to 175,000 in Chang Hsueh-liang’s former army. (Copyright, 1937.) D. C, TUESDAY, JANUARY 26, 1937 q'at opinions of the writers on this page are their own, not necessarily The Star’s. Such opinions are presented in The Star’s effort to give all sides of questions of interest to its readers, although such opinions may be contradictory among themselves and directly opposed to The Star’s. “Sit-Down” New Element Raises Questions Going to Heart of Government and Society. BY MARK SULLIVAN. F SECRETARY OF LABOR PER- KINS brings the strike leaders and General Motors officials to- gether it will be interesting to observe what happens about one point. The beginning of everything is the stipulation of General Motors that there must be evacuation of the “sit- down” strikers from the plants as a condition precedent to any negotiations. Whatever attie 3 tude Miss Per- kins takes on this § point will be in- ferred to be the attitude of the National Govern- ment. And the attitude of gov- ernment—nation= al, State and lo- cal—on this par- ticular point con- stitutes the most deep-reaching ele- ment in the whole situation. The strike has two aspects. In one, it is an ordinary industrial conflict. But the injection of the sit-down feature raises an additional question which goes to the heart of governe ment and the organization of society. This latter aspect, considering what is going on in the world, is most in- teresting to watch. Under the existing state of law and in the existing American conception of society, the sit-down strikers are trespassers on privately owned prop- erty. Some strike leaders claim the Michigan law contains a feature which exempts the sit-down strikers from the status of trespassers. They say that when a man goes on another’s prop- erty in response to invitation by the latter, the visitor does not become a trespasser when he remains. What- ever the Michigan law may be, the common state of law everywhere, and the common point of view of every- body familiar with American usage, would undoubtedly regard the sit- down strikers as trespassers. Ejectment Follows Appeal. In case of trespass the usual prac- tice is for the owner to appeal to the local law officers. In many cases the appeal is merely to the police, in other cases to the courts. In some cases there may be a hearing, in others not. In all cases, assuming the intruder is shown to be a trespasser in the legal sense, there is ejectment by the agen- cies of the law. If, after appeal by the owner to the law, and after show- ing that there is trespass in the legal sense—if in such a situation the agencies of law do not eject the tres- passers the condition is in effect a breakdown of the machinery of law. ‘To what extent this now exists in Michigan is not fully clear from the dispatches. Apparently, General Mo- tors applied to the courts for what amounted to a writ of ejectment. The writ was issued. At this point the strike leaders showed that the judge issuing the writ was a stockholder in General Motors. This was unfortu- nate. Practically every lawyer would say that the judge should have re- Mark Sullivan, “But; my dear Mis Herring—1I really can’t give up my beloved Wilkins Coffee.” membered his relation to one of the parties and should have declined to act. Thee same writ would have been. issued by any other court. Actions in trespass are & frequent part of the work of any court; they are almost routine. Apparently, in the present case, the sheriff read the writ to the sit-down strikers and they ignored it. Sub- sequently, according to dispatches, General Motors procured writs of ejectment from another court. Wheth- er these were actually served on the strikers is not clear. Court Next Resort. ‘When a sheriff or other officer of the court finds himself resisted, and when the resistance is beyond his power to overcome, he ordinarily re- ports the condition to the court. At that point the court would nominally appeal to the Governor of the State for assistance. If at any point, after application has been duly made, any official—court, sheriff, mayor, police, or Governor—refuses to act then the situation becomes one of breakdown of law. It the sit-down strikers, after re- sistance to ejectment by law, succeed in exacting a price before withdraw- ing, something new will be estab- lished. Apparently the strikers in the beginning succeeded in exacting a price. General Motors agreed to ne- gotiate the other issues if the strikers would first evacuate. Mere agreement to negotiate is, of course, & small con- cession. But the making of any con- cession is a price paid, and smaliness of the price does not reduce the breach of principle. Since the first gesture toward negotiation broke down, General Motors seems to have stood upon the principle. Apparently its recent position is that it will not negotiate, nor promise to negotiate, until after the strikers have ceased to remain illegally on its property. There are, in many situations cir- cumstances that condone trespass and resistance against ejection. Local pub- lic opinion often sympathizes with the hardship of tenants subjected to evic- tion by landlords, and owners of farms under foreclosure of mortgage, and farms or homes being sold for non- payment of taxes. Courts and legisla- tures often sympathize with such cases and exercise legal leniancy. Strikers’ Argument. In the present situation in Michigarf strikers and their sympathizers would like to bring the sit-down into the category of trespasser having a claim on public sympathy and official le- nience. Their argument runs some- what thus: That as modern industry is organized, workers have a kind of ownership right to their jobs, and that this right is analogous to the right of ownership of property. They argue that in a strike ownership of jobs may be lost if strikers leave the property, for thereby the property owner may either employ new men or transfer machinery to a distant point. (Copyrignt, 1937.) We, the People T. V. A. Chairman Morgan’s Airing of Views Benefit to Private Utilities. BY JAY FRANKLIN. R. ARTHUR E. MORGAN has written himself out of his chair- manship of the Tennessee Valley Authority, in the opinion of those most familiar with Roosevelt’s power policles and with the reasons why the President adopted them. Morgan's recent power “confession of faith,” timed for publication eve of F. D. R.’s second inaugural, in the highly conservative New York Times, whose associ- ated property, the Chattanooga Times, is generally regarded as the pro-utility organ in East- ern Tennessee, the T. V. A. chair- man took the peculiar step of pub- licly airing views dissenting from the policies of the Government agency which he heads, without prior consultation with his col- leagues. For & concededly honest man, Dr. Morgan could have done little more for the private utilities had he ‘been on the pay roll of Commonwealth & Southern. From the start, he opposed the primary purpose of a power “yard- stick” in the Tennessee Valley—that it be competitive—and fought to restrict the benefits of federally-produced electricity to the narrowest possible area. Consistently outvoted—2 to 1—by the board of which he is chairman, he carried his grudge against David E. Lilienthal, the Jellow-member whose point of view consistently represented Roose- velt’s power policies and the terms of the T. V. A. act, to the fantastic ertreme of lobbying at Washington against Lilienthal’s reappoint= ment last Spring. Now he has chosen the Sunday before inauguration to air views which those familiar with power problems describe—charitably—as “naive” and which, if representative of government policies, should be worth a million dollars to the Insulls, Hopsons, Willkies, Carlisles and Dohertys of an industry which operates on the basis of publicly-conferred monopolies. It is either a supreme gamble that Roosevelt's hand can be forced to ask Congress to modify the T. V. A. in favor of the power trust or it is the swan-song of an elderly and credulous college professor whose fur has been stroked the right way by experts in the art of blarney. ‘The reason why Progressives believe it may be the latter is because section 2, paragraph (h) of the act provides: “All members of the board shall be persons who profess a belief in the feasibility and wisdom of this act.” Dr. Morgan's published views are sharply critical, by inference, of the powers conferred upon T. V. A. by the law, which specifically pro- vides for the type of activities pushed by the hated David Lilienthal and opposed in a “fight to the death” by the private utilities and by their new and unpaid spokesman. In his “confession of faith,” Dr. Morgan even goes 8o far as to imply that the people of & community have not the right to adopt public owner- ship of power if thereby they interfere with “the economy and efficiency of well-integrated power systems.” The Commonwealth & Southern combine could ask nothing nicer than this dictum, which is on a moral par with Judge Gore’s recent injunction at Nashville, laying down the novel principle that a utility need not have ever served or planned to serve a community in order to claim damage if that community elects to buy cheap power from the Government. Judge Gore is just one of those judges. He was appointed by Presi- dent Harding in the high old days of the Ohio gang. Dr. Arthur E. Morgan is a self-made educator and hydraulic engineer whose intimacy with public utilities began in 1933 and is rated by experts as being about 35 years be- hind the course of events. He was appointed by Roosevelt as an expert in flood control, not utilities. Yet in all this there is no question of Morgan's artless sincerity. He believes what he says and it sounds convincing to those who don't realize that the sexagena- rian president of Antloch College, Yellow Springs, Ohio, is gulping down the phrases which had made public utility legal history, as though they were so many glasses of water, when they are capable of producing all the symptoms of intellectual intoxica- tion in the hands of the unwary. Dr. Arthur E. Morgan was selected in the hope that he would become the Moses of the Tennessee Valley experiment in regional planning on the basis of cheap and abundant electric power. Instead, he has chosen to provide the power trust, in its attempt to find a moral “front” for its control of the more abundant kilowatt hours at the switchboard, with a sorely needed Dr. Wirt. (Capyright, 1937, by Register and Tribune Syndicate.) In on the Headline Folk and What They Do Research Worker Car- ries His Laboratory Into Stratosphere. BY LEMUEL F. PARTON. EW YORK, January 26.—The book isn't at hand, but, if I remember rightly, Kipling's ‘Tomlinson got on a dead- center somewhere up in the strato- sphere and couldn't get one way or the other. Our own Tomlinson does better. He comes down through a cold pea-soup fog at Princeton, N. J., after 1,200 miles of blind flying at an altitude of 35,000 feet, in & tempera- ture of 75 degrees below zero. Tommy (D. W.) Tomlinson’s regu- lar work-a-day job is to tease the grim reaper and see how much he will stand for. That’s routine as he mans the “flying tube” for T. W. A. Last September T. W. A. started to spend $350,000 in feeling out the stratosphere as a possible express highway for planes. «This meant that their research worker must keep his laboratory in the sky. This he has been doing, testing transport speed, control, take-off and, above all, fudg- ing higher and higher up into the stratosphere—carrying on where Wiley Post left off. Lieut. Tomlinson was one of the Navy's sea hawk trio, a rollicking crew of fair acrobats. In those days, avia- tors’ stunts had to be something spe- cial to be noticed. Lieut. Tomlinson's attention-getter was three downward outside loops at San Diego in 1928, This was a hair-raising exploit. Big headlines pried him into the offices of the commercial magnates, looking for test pilots. In May, 1935, he and his co-pilot, Joseph Bartels, broke eight world records, involving various details of speed and performance, in partly blind flight from Kansas City to New= ark, the route he covers again, just as demonstration that “this is the kind of weather we shouldn't fly in.” He is the Simon Legree of the robot plane, now assistant to the president of T. W. A Copyright. 1837.) ADVERTISEMENT. Don’t Sleep ‘ | When Gas Presses Heart | _ It you want to really GET RID OF GAS and terrible bloating, don't expect | t0 do it by just doctoring your stomach with harsh, irritating alkalies and “gas tablets.” Most GAS is lodged in the stomach and upper intestine and is due 1o old poisonous matter in the constipated bowels that are loaded with ill-causing bacteria. If your constipation is of long standing. enormous quantities of dan- serous bacteria accumulate, en | your digestion is upset. GAS often Dresses heart and lunss. meking Life miserable. 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