Salt Lake Telegram | 1937-08-19 | Page 6 | Capital Figures

CAPITAL FIGURES By Rodney Dutcher The Te'leqrsm s Vahinstoa Scribe tekes You Inside. WASHINGTON Senator Hugo Black of Alabama is a loyal, unquestioning un-questioning follower of the administration ad-ministration and owes his supreme su-preme court appointment largely to his subservience to Roosevelt. So goes the patter. Ihs facts are something else again. And the big outstanding fact of which perhaps Roosevelt himself isn't aware is that in four years the president has swung completely complete-ly around from primary tenets of his original political-economic philosophy to the policies advo-. cated in 1933 by Black. Vital policies poli-cies which Roosevelt refused to accept when Black urged them then are now among the brightest jewels in the new deal store window. win-dow. Few are aware that Black first voted to knock out the NRAor code section of the national industrial indus-trial recovery act, then voted for N I R A when it carried the Borah ancimonopoly amendment, and finally voted against the finished fin-ished measure as it came from conference for reasons which Black explained in a long-forgotten speech In that speech, made June 13, 1933, you will find much of what) is sometimes called now "the new new deal." Black urged a flat wage-hour bill in which wage and hour atandards would be declared by congress, and enforced by the government, and in which there would be no trade practica provisions pro-visions or sops to industry. He predicted collapse of N R A. Today Roosevelt stands behind Black's bill, which strictly concerns con-cerns itself with wages and hours. Black argued againsv an act which would permit price fix ing and restraint of production. Roosevelt approved the measure. Today Roosevelt has declared against price fixing, has taken several steps toward lowering prices and is searching for a method of obtaining the highest possible level of production with the lowest feasible level of prices. In general. Black declared years in advance many of the general principles of the Hopkins-Eccles-Henderson - Coyle political - economic eco-nomic theory, among whose points are selective excess profit taxation, taxa-tion, payment of social security costs by income taxes, "drawing off surplus income and giving it back to the poor," raising mass purchasing power, antitrust? prosecutions. prose-cutions. The theory also proposes action against monopoly and collusive col-lusive bidding and volume production produc-tion at low prices. It is this general gen-eral theory which Roosevelt privately pri-vately espouses today. "I am not personally vitally Interested In-terested in a bill which does not narrow the gap between the profits prof-its that go into the pockets of labor la-bor and the profits that go into the pockets of capital," aaid Black. "I had an amendment which I really Intended to offer to this bill at the outset, but I found that I had no chance of securing se-curing its adoption, and therefore did no offer it. It would have added to the part of the bill giving giv-ing the right to fix the maximum houra of labor and the minimum wages the words "maximum profits.' " N R A is long since dead. Black