The Nome Nugget

Preparing For The Main Event
(By Palmer Hoyt)

BOTH THE CIO and the American Federation of Labor are preparing what they describe as all-out battles to defeat in 1948 those Congressmen who voted to override the President's veto of the Taft-Hartley bill and those Senators who voted the same way and must stand for re-election in 1948.

That means there are 331 Congressmen and twenty-eight Senators on labor's purge list by virtue of their votes on the Taft-Hartley bill alone, although others may be added, we suppose, because of their votes on other measures which labor supported or opposed.

That's quite a large order for even the 16 million members of organized labor to fill.

The nonpartisan Congressional Quarterly of Washington, D. C., has discovered that 213 of the 331 Congressmen who voted for the Taft-Hartley act were elected in 1946 by 60 per cent or more of the votes in their respective districts and, therefore, are considered by professional politicians to be fairly safe for re-election if they run, provided there is no general landslide or unusual situation to upset normal voting.

Of the remaining 118 Congressmen, about half are from districts where labor votes are not numerous enough to be the determining factor except in a very close election.

Of the twenty-eight Senators on the purge list, only nine are from states in which labor is politically important. The Quarterly's conclusion is that labor has a reasonable chance to defeat only about one-fifth of the Congressmen it considers as enemies and only a handful of Senators.

Labor leaders, of course, do not need anyone to tell them what the chances are for defeating any considerable number of the members of Congress who voted for the Taft-Hartley bill. It seems reasonable to assume, therefore, that their 1948 election campaign will be based not so much on the expectation of electing friends and defeating "enemies," as on the policy of keeping the rank and file of labor "sold" on the idea that the Taft-Hartley law is a "slave labor measure."

Meanwhile, certain business leaders, including James H. McGraw, Jr., president of the McGraw-Hill Publishing company, are urging employers to educate workers on what the Taft-Hartley act really contains, on the theory that the rank and file of labor would be for the bill if they knew what is in it.

An ideological war seems to be shaping up aimed at capturing the minds of labor union members, and the Congressional campaign, instead of being the main event, may be merely a side engagement.