Civilizing Capitalism by Landon R. Y. Storrs

Author:Landon R. Y. Storrs [Storrs, Landon R. Y.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2000-04-17T04:00:00+00:00

Elinore Herrick, New York regional director of the NLRB. The original caption for this April 1937 photograph quotes Herrick as saying that labor organizations were better informed than employers on the procedure and technique of the NLRB. (AP/Wide World Photos, New York World-Telegram and Sun Collection, LC)

In 1940 the Smith Committee hearings highlighted this female presence in an attempt to discredit the NLRB’s competence. The first six Review Division attorneys summoned by the committee’s general counsel were women (when only 11 of 105 division attorneys were women). NLRB personnel were at a great disadvantage because the Smith Committee had all the board’s files. The witnesses did not know which cases they would be [Page 218] questioned on, and they had no opportunity to refresh their memories. Under General Counsel Edmund Toland’s aggressive questioning, the witnesses sometimes had trouble remembering details and contradicted themselves.41 The front page of the New York Times daily featured smiling portraits of the women lawyers, who like their male counterparts at the NLRB averaged about thirty years of age. Headlines included “Inexperience Laid to Aides of NLRB” and “Lawyer of NLRB Changed Her Mind.” The Smith Committee tried to turn public opinion against the NLRB by portraying it as staffed by young, attractive women who were ignorant of political and economic realities, enamored of idealistic social policies, and malleable enough to be controlled by Communists. The questions asked of these women emphasized their youth and their sex in an obvious attempt to challenge their qualifications. If the women were married, the Smith Committee implied they were earning salaries that should go to men or to women without male breadwinners. If single, they allegedly were subverting American gender roles. The female lawyers had backgrounds in social work and economics, and many of them came to the NLRB from other agencies with left-leaning reputations, such as the Resettlement Administration. None too subtly linking these women to radicalism, the committee asked Margaret Bennett Porter about her “leftism” and Hungarian-born Ann Landy Wolf about her accent and her date of naturalization.42

The Smith Committee’s tactics were calculated to generate titillating media coverage, but the more fundamental objective was to undermine the credibility of the NLRB. Toland bullied female witnesses differently than male witnesses, shouting at the women to speak up and to give more “responsive” answers. He interspersed personal questions (on marital status, husband’s salary, husband’s employer) with questions about intricate details of NLRB cases. This not only disrupted the witnesses’ concentration on the cases, it revealed that three of the lawyers had husbands who also worked for the federal government. The New York Times reported that “members of several women’s organizations” began attending the Smith hearings because they were concerned over reports of “sex discrimination by Mr. Toland.” These women no doubt worried that the hearings might reignite protests against married women’s employment.43

The Smith Committee succeeded in making the NLRB the subject of ridicule on the House floor and probably in many circles around the nation. Congressman Clare Hoffman (R.-Mich.)

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