The Kohler Investigation

There is no point in denying it, and no one bothers to try any more: the Senate Rackets Committee’s investigation of the Kohler-UAW fracas is not an investigation at all but a political slugfest between men with different views about the social utility of Walter Reuther. With a few minor exceptions, the McClellan Committee has not discovered—nor is it going to—any “facts” about the four-year- old Kohler strike that it could not have picked up by reviewing the NLRB hearings on the subject, or, for that matter, the Sheboygan, Wisconsin, daily press. So what is it all about? Are the Republicans on the Committee out to “get Reuther,” as some Democrats say? Are the Democrats and their counsel “trying to protect Reuther,” as Senator Goldwater has suggested?

Both of these things are true—more or less; but they oughtn’t to be asserted without elaboration. The Republican Committee members (let us leave Senator Ives out of this, since his interests tend to run with the other side) are anxious to focus public attention on the major offenses of Big Labor. These, they insist, have little to do with Dave Beck’s running off with union funds or with Johnny Dio’s dealings with the underworld—the kind of thing the Committee has been devoting its time to so far. The evil, as they see it, is that a small number of labor bosses have an economic and political stranglehold on millions of workingmen throughout the country as the result of compulsory unionism and other techniques that tend to concentrate power at the top. Senators Mundt, Curtis and Goldwater are serious, conscientious legislators who understand the problem and who think that in the interests of the commonweal it should be solved. They are also, let us remember, Republicans who know that the very considerable resources of the labor monopoly are by and large at the disposal of Democrats.

LB

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L. Brent Bozell Jr.

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There is no point in denying it, and no one bothers to try any more: the Senate Rackets Committee’s investigation of the Kohler-UAW fracas is not an investigation at all but a political slugfest between men with different views about the social utility of Walter Reuther. With a few minor exceptions, the McClellan Committee has not discovered—nor is it going to—any “facts” about the four-year- old Kohler strike that it could not have picked up by reviewing the NLRB hearings on the subject, or, for that matter, the Sheboygan, Wisconsin, daily press. So what is it all about? Are the Republicans on the Committee out to “get Reuther,” as some Democrats say? Are the Democrats and their counsel “trying to protect Reuther,” as Senator Goldwater has suggested?

Both of these things are true—more or less; but they oughtn’t to be asserted without elaboration. The Republican Committee members (let us leave Senator Ives out of this, since his interests tend to run with the other side) are anxious to focus public attention on the major offenses of Big Labor. These, they insist, have little to do with Dave Beck’s running off with union funds or with Johnny Dio’s dealings with the underworld—the kind of thing the Committee has been devoting its time to so far. The evil, as they see it, is that a small number of labor bosses have an economic and political stranglehold on millions of workingmen throughout the country as the result of compulsory unionism and other techniques that tend to concentrate power at the top. Senators Mundt, Curtis and Goldwater are serious, conscientious legislators who understand the problem and who think that in the interests of the commonweal it should be solved. They are also, let us remember, Republicans who know that the very considerable resources of the labor monopoly are by and large at the disposal of Democrats.