Old-timers in Congress will tell you about the dame lobbyist who represented some milk producers. She was a handsome woman, so voluptuously built that they referred to her as “Elsie the Cow.” Her lobbying career ended in 1937, when she was caught in a hotel room with a Congressman.
For all practical purposes, lobbyists representing unions and minority groups do not often buttonhole Congressmen directly. Dave Niles handles all labor and left-wing angles, and arranges for the votes and rewards or punishments.
Anna Rosenberg, friend of Niles, former New Dealer, practiced industrial relations successfully until her appointment as Assistant Secretary of Defense.
Lobbyists for government bureaus often double as unpaid fixers for pressure groups, using government funds. Entertainments of Congressmen by State Department officials at cocktail parties are referred to as “smokers.”
Sometimes pressure group lobbyists receive government favors and privileges denied the less favored. An intensive lobby was conducted against the Mundt-Ferguson anti-Communist bill by a former senatorial employe who was not registered as a lobbyist.
He is Palmer Webber, who was staff director in 1943 for Sen. Pepper (D) of Florida, and chief economic adviser in 1944 to Sen. Kilgore (D) of West Virginia. Webber bore down on his Senate contacts from a rent-free office in the Library of Congress. How he got it free nobody knows.
For two years Webber held a job as “legislative correspondent” on Capitol Hill for the Federation for World Government. Records in the office of the secretary of the Senate show Webber was not registered as a lobbyist for the federation and the organization is not registered to conduct a lobby. In addition to his arduous efforts to defeat the anti-Communist measure and his work for the federation, Webber was a demon, worked for votes for passage of the fair employment practices bill.
Webber was transferred by the World Government Federation from Washington to New York “to do research.” The shift was for “political reasons.”
He is an errand boy for the Lawyers Guild, which the House Un-American Activities Committee cited as a “front” organization. It has also been active in another “cause” sponsored by Webber--the drive for an investigation of the F.B.I.
In 1947, Webber, a Ph.D., conducted a class in political philosophy at the King Smith school, where the democratic form of government was smeared to GI and other students.
A reporter attended Webber’s class on May 27, 1947, when Senator Pepper was a guest. A woman student referred to J. Edgar Hoover as the American Gestapo head and declared the Catholic church was leading a crusade for war.
A woman in the audience, a secretary to a Republican Senator from the Midwest, jumped up and shouted, “Thank God for the F.B.I.”
Webber was arrested in Charlottesville, Va., for distributing Communist Party literature. Police records show he paid a forfeit rather than fight the case.
He was at one time a research director for the CIO Political Action Committee in Washington and in 1948 was a paid director in charge of activities of the leftist Progressive party in 11 southern states.
Another who lobbies against anti-Communist bills, and is openly so registered, is former Democratic Congressman Jerry J. O’Connell, of Montana.
Utilizing his privileges of the floor, as an ex-Representative, O’Connell strides into the House and Senate while they are in session, and delivers advice, orders and inspiration to left-wing Congressmen, and threats to others.
When the Senate was debating the Communist control bill in an all night session last September, O’Connell took up a station at the Senate door with a reporter from the Daily Worker, and without any pretense of disguise, dictated the unsuccessful opposition’s floor strategy.
But listen to the hue and cry when a manufacturer’s lobbyist buys a Coca Cola for a Congressman.
Being a government lobbyist can produce desirable advantages, especially for a Marshall Plan press agent.
A survey reveals that the Economic Cooperation Administration information office has been giving several of its employes free visits to Europe and the Middle East. Robert Mullen, director of ECA information, toured Europe. He mapped a $7,500 ’round-the-world trip, but postponed a visit to the Orient when the bullets began to fly.
Mullen sent an heiress to the J. P. Morgan banking fortune to London for a convention of clubwomen--to get new propaganda material on the Marshall plan to influence American clubwomen. He sent an inexperienced youth, hired as a “picture expert,” to Paris and London, to see the sights and get new pictures for propaganda purposes here.
Though ECA has 73 American press employes in Paris alone, and 56 in 16 other Marshall Plan missions in Europe, plus 222 Europeans on these staffs, ECA sent a former woman reporter to Paris to get “human interest” stories for a clubwoman propaganda pamphlet.
The ECA press information office in Paris has a chief who gets about $20,000 a year in salary and expense money, has highly paid former reporters on his staff, but the ECA here sent a man from Washington to show a group of editors about Europe. Several others went to Europe on similar assignments.
Mullen has 48 on his Washington staff, drawing a total of $280,000 a year. Among these are the Morgan heiress, an ex-bullfighter, the daughter of a symphony conductor and a score of graduates from defunct war agencies. He separated a noted Negro Air Force pilot, who achieved some success as an author, from his Washington staff and dispatched him to Formosa at $15,000 a year to direct Marshall plan press information there.
The American press agents for ECA will draw $673,000 in salaries this year.
Congress gets around sporadically to investigating the lobbying “evil.” The latest “crusade” was conducted by leftish Congressman Frank Buchanan, who muddled the issue so much, no one knows what happened, except that the National Association of Manufacturers emerged the villain. Congressmen don’t hanker to expose lobbies, even if they’re on the other side. When the investigation was first voted by the House, Buchanan wanted to give the appropriation back, an unprecedented departure where committee chairmen always yell for more. Buchanan tried to handcuff the lawyers engaged to conduct the investigation, though both were good Democrats and good Fair Dealers. But they were also honest. Lou Little, of Pittsburgh, a co-counsel, quit broken-hearted. Counsel Benedict Fitzgerald, of Greenfield, Mass., a whiz of a prober, was not even allowed to write the report. Buchanan refused to swear in some witnesses; if they lied it would not constitute perjury. When counsel called attention to that, he angrily shut them up.
The real brains of the investigation into lobbying was Lucien Hilmer, committee staff director. He is regarded as a left-wing lawyer. When George Shaw Wheeler was fired from the government for consorting with Communists, Hilmer appeared as his lawyer and beat the case. Two years later, as an economist with the U. S. Army in Czechoslovakia, Wheeler vindicated the Civil Service Commission when he moved in on Berlin Red headquarters. He announced he was a Communist and always had been one. Hilmer shares a law office with John F. Davis, who represented Alger Hiss before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Hilmer had worked under Max Lowenthal on the old Wheeler Committee.
And did we remember to tell you that the Kansas City Chamber of Commerce has an office on 16th St., across the road from the Russian Embassy? Both pressure groups have displayed amazing influence in Washington.
_INSIDE STUFF_: The law requiring lobbyists to register is used as a racket by some. They advertise in trade papers: “Lobbyist, registered with the Congress of the United States,” then sell prospective chumps the idea they are “licensed” to lobby. Anybody may file his name and set up his own “cause.”
24. RACKETS BY REMOTE CONTROL
Our newspaper confreres, in the main, were willing to be hospitable and helpful when we galloped in and made no secret of our aims. We don’t expect them to write our books. But they often give us tips, which saves work.
The first question we asked was, “Who is the Washington Mafia boss?”
The invariable answer was that the local underworld was unaffiliated with the national setup, free and independent, self-contained.
All our experience made us reject that picture. We had traced and charted organized crime through the gang wars of Prohibition to this day. We had charged and it was being substantiated that no city of importance was left out of the clutches of the Mafia, with its brains in New York and its powerhouse in Chicago. It was inconceivable that a rich, large center on the Atlantic seaboard, almost a suburb of Manhattan, could be bypassed. So we found out for ourselves. This is the situation in Washington:
The National Syndicate, for reasons of prudence, has avoided first-hand operations in the District. You find few important Sicilian names in the police files. Vice, crime, gambling, narcotics and, to a smaller extent, contraband liquor, are farmed out by franchise to a cohesive local mob which deals with and pays tribute to national headquarters.