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In a resplendent Senate committee room, marble-pillared and hung with crystal chandeliers, sat a group of bored Senators. Some studied the lofty ceiling, some doodled, some blinked at the witnesses who were still parading before them after four long weeks. Every once in a while, like snapping turtles at sight of a bug, they stretched out their necks to snap and gobble.
They were the Senate Labor and Public Welfare Committee, which had set itself the task of writing a whole new batch of labor legislation. They knew most of the testimony by heart; they had heard it over & over again. But it was an old American custom to give everyone his say. Industry had had its inning.
Last week Labor Leaders William Green, Philip Murray and Walter Reuther stamped across the turkey-red rug. Green refused to admit that there had been any abuses by labor of its power. Murray declaimed: "Rape is being perpetrated on the people." Reuther declared: "Free enterprise will survive only if it can be made to work."
Cup of Coffee. Innumerable plans for new laws had been proposed already. Senator Homer Ferguson had a plan. Senator Wayne Morse had a plan. Various witnesses had plans. On the other side of Congress, various Representatives had plans. New York's freshman Senator Irving Ives, a longtime student of labor relations, proposed that House and Senate set up a joint committee to confer with management and union leaders and "work out a program helpful to everyone." The legislative hopper began to look like Mrs. Peterkin's cup of coffee, into which she accidentally put salt (in Lucretia P. Hale's Peter kin Papers'). Family and friends added one ingredient after another, hoping to make Mrs. Peterkin's coffee taste better. A lady of wisdom finally suggested that Mrs. Peterkin just pour a fresh cup. That solution was not apt to occur to Congressmen—they usually prefer something more laborious.
The plan which aroused the most interest and provoked the hottest attack were the proposals of Minnesota's Senator Joseph Hurst Ball. One reason why Congress faced a long-drawn battle, to which the hearings were only a torpid preliminary, was because Joe Ball was launched on a crusade.
"In the past," one labor leader remarked bitterly, "Senator Ball has been on the side of the angels." Now labor leaders located him considerably nearer hellgate, somewhere away to the right of Senator Robert Taft. His proposals, they cried, were "reactionary" and "punitive." He was the very symbol of the anti-union threat which labor leaders fought and feared.
Ball's Bills. Ball had four bills before the committee. One of them, written in collaboration with Taft and New Jersey's H. Alexander Smith, was a scattershot charge aimed at various abuses like the secondary boycott (a boycott by union members of a company against which they have no specific grievance). It set up machinery for voluntary mediation and required 60-day cooling-off periods in industrial disputes. To labor leaders, its penalties (possible loss of job) seemed severe. The bill, by & large, was another version of the Case bill, passed by the 79th Congress, vetoed by President Harry Truman.