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Meanwhile President Harriman and his moderate followers still thought they could avert an open break with the Administration by tempering the Chamber's resolutions — traditionally the planks in the U. S. Business platform. But the 1,500 delegates gathered in the Chamber's building across Lafayette Park from the White House determined to put on record once & for all their various New Deal grudges. In the most uproarious session in the Chamber's history, with the proposals of the resolutions committee often rewritten on the floor, the Chamber declared its opposition to 1) the Social Security Bill. 2) the Public Utility Bill to abolish holding companies, 3) the section of the Banking Bill which proposes Government domination of the Federal Reserve System, 4) extension of the NRA except temporarily, 5) the AAA amendments (see p. 15), 6) all pending labor legislation. Only on such minor policies as transportation, reciprocal trade pacts, retirement of submarginal land and direct subsidies for shipping did the Chamber support the President. For good measure it tossed in a resolution demanding that any & all subversive Red activities be made Federal crimes.
The duty of informing the Administration of the Chamber's will fell upon smiling, long-nosed Harper Sibley, the Chamber's new head and a personal friend of President Roosevelt since student days at Groton and Harvard. An affable Rochester (N. Y.) capitalist with his family's traditional interest in that city's Security Trust Co., President Sibley is a miner, a lumberman and a grand-scale farmer. He likes to work with the laborers on his 4,000-acre ranch at Santa Rita. Calif., or on his 350-acre farm at Sibleyville, near Rochester. In Illinois, where he is the State's largest individual land owner, he owns the biggest corn farm in the world, and his AAA checks for crop reductions run to fat figures.
"Constructive criticism does not necessarily imply opposition to the President's program," explained Mr. Sibley last week. "There is no reason why we have to follow the wishes of the President. I will seek conferences with the President with a view to co-operative effort toward recovery, and I hope to do so in a friendly spirit—but on the basis of a clear difference of opinion."
The Chamber had differed too much for Harper Sibley's "friendly spirit" to impress the White House. By one swift maneuver President Roosevelt stripped the Chamber of its right to speak for U. S. Business. Before the Chambermen had time to pack their grips, safely seated in the Executive Offices was another body of businessmen, pledging almost unqualified support to the New Deal. That body was the Department of Commerce's Business Advisory & Planning Council, which has lately emerged as one of the most potent business lobbies in Washington. Composed of much bigger business wigs than the rank & file of Chambermen—men like U. S. Steel's Myron Taylor, American Telephone & Telegraph's Walter Gifford, Chase National Bank's Winthrop Aldrich, General Electric's Gerard Swope—the so-called Roper Council drops into the White House for frequent Sunday evening chats. Radicals regard it suspiciously as a hotbed of Fascism.