In a virtuous recital of the trials and triumphs of Congressional investigating committees published in the February issue of Harper's Magazine, Alabama's Senator Hugo La Fayette Black, who has made his reputation chiefly by heading Senate investigations of air mail contracts and of lobbying against the Public Utilities Bill, observed:
"Whenever a Congressional committee inspects the so-called private papers of a corporation official, the cry goes up that this is an outrageous invasion of the rights of private citizens. . . . Slowly business executives have built up the fiction that they have a right to enjoy some special privilege of secrecy."
Last week as the Black Committee resumed its scratching in the Power lobby's backyard, after a six-month layoff, discovery of the Committee's interim activities roused a mighty howl throughout the land, which showed that many & many a citizen still regarded his privacy as something more than a "fiction." Backed up by court action, it promised to result in a showdown on the headline-making power of Congress to probe the affairs of private citizens at will.
Silas Hardy Strawn, onetime president of the American Bar Association and of the U. S. Chamber of Commerce, and a hard-bitten Republican critic of the New Deal, is senior partner of the Chicago law firm of Winston, Strawn & Shaw. Short time ago Lawyer Strawn learned that the Black Committee had subpoenaed from Western Union copies of all telegrams sent or received by his firm between Feb. 1 and Dec. 1, 1935. Outraged, he promptly hired one of Washington's smartest lawyers, Frank J. Hogan, defender of Albert B. Fall, Edward L. Doheny, William P. MacCracken Jr. and Andrew W. Mellon (TIME, March 11, 1935). Last week Lawyer Hogan marched into District of Columbia Supreme Court, charged that the Black Committee had instituted an unconstitutional "inquisitorial investigation and fishing expedition" into his client's private affairs, got a temporary injunction restraining Western Union from handing over the Strawn telegrams.
With the Strawn action as a lead, newshawks investigated, soon turned up a surprising set of facts. The Black Committee, it developed, had seized the Feb. 1-Dec. 1 telegrams of some 1,000 firms, organizations and individuals. Some of this booty had been obtained by the Committee's own subpoenas, of which it had issued more than 2,000 to Western Union and Postal Telegraph offices throughout the land. Others, it was reported, had been secured for it by the Federal Communications Commission, whose clerks were said to have copied off more than 13,000 messages in Western Union's Washington offices alone. Newshawks estimated the total of telegrams seized at 5,000,000.
Asked for an explanation, Senator Black replied: "We've subpoenaed all telegrams of these gentlemen who conceal themselves behind organizations and groups in order to determine the policies of the nation behind a mask."