LABOR: Houde to Court

Like a pair of braying bullyboys, Industry and Government have made terrifying fists at each other over the collective bargaining provisions of the Recovery Act ever since it became law. Week after week for 17 months, each opponent shouted to the onlooking nation that as soon as a clear-cut issue on Section 7a was presented, the fur would fly in a fight to the finish.

Inconspicuously last March, Houde Engineering Corp. of Buffalo, N. Y., whose 2,000 employes make automobile parts, was directed by the old National Labor Board to hold an election of employe representatives to bargain collectively with the company. The American Federation of Labor’s automobile workers’ union candidates got 1,105 votes. The company union polled 647. Houde agreed to treat with both unions on alternate Saturdays. The new National Labor Relations Board picked up the case, and, in a significant decision that launched the Government on a brand new labor policy, ordered the company to negotiate only with the majority of its workers. Houde refused. NRA took away Houde’s Blue Eagle. In September the Houde case made even more headlines when the National Manufacturers Association notified its membership to ignore NLRB’s decision on majority rule. The board’s retort was to prepare a complaint against the Houde company and send it to the Department of Justice for action.

No man in Washington was more reluctant to entangle himself and his department in the legal complexities of collective bargaining than Attorney General Homer Stille Cummings. In his opinion, NLRB had no case. So the matter remained at a standstill for two months until, fortnight ago, President Roosevelt sent Francis Beverley Biddle of Philadelphia in to succeed Lloyd Kirkham Garrison as the board’s chairman.

Mr. Biddle had been in office one day when, at his first press conference, he announced that his initial act would be to accept the Houde challenge. “I am sure,” declared the small, freckled-browed chairman in a clipped Harvard accent, “we have enough to go on. . . .” He said he had been to see the Attorney General day before.

Last week, on the twelfth day of headlong Chairman Biddle’s term, a bill of complaint in equity was filed in Attorney General Cummings’ name against the Houde Corp. in Federal Court in Buffalo. In three different ways the Government asked that the firm be judicially directed to deal with the A. F. of L. union alone. Houde was given 20 days to answer. Thus was the stage set for the first round of the first legal test of the Labor Relations Board’s collective bargaining creed, a test the final round of which would undoubtedly end in the U. S. Supreme Court.

The man who breezed into Washington and in less than a fortnight egged the Administration into the labor fight of its life is an authentic member of the Philadelphia Biddle family which settled in Pennsylvania not long after William Penn. Francis Biddle is the latest recruit to that small but enthusiastic band of Philadelphia socialites which has rallied to the New Deal. His co-workers in this exclusive group are William Christian Bullitt, U. S. Ambassador to Russia,* and George Howard Earle, governor-elect of Pennsylvania.

Son of the late Law Professor Algernon Sidney Biddle of the University of Pennsylvania, Francis Biddle, like Franklin D. Roosevelt, trained for the battle of the New Deal on the playing fields of Groton. Harvard College sent him to Harvard Law School which graduated him in 1911. To him fell the prized cachet of being chosen as the man in his class to serve Oliver Wendell Holmes for a year as that Supreme Court Justice’s secretary. But Francis Biddle has not confined his activities since school days exclusively to the law. He has written a novel about Philadelphia (The Lanfear Pattern), book reviews, short stories. He has also busied himself in the interests of international amity and social justice for minorities. A member of the law firm of Barnes, Biddle & Myers, he even went so far as to undertake a case in behalf of some Pennsylvania dairy farmers against AAA.

*Last week Ambassador Bullitt sailed from Japan for the U. S. after a seven-week diplomatic junket from Moscow across Siberia and through China and Japan.