MAGIC MIRRORS AND A SACRED FORMULA

...As it now appears, Dr...

...It is to the ever-lasting credit of Martin Gerber and Charles H. Kerrigan, eastern regional directors of the United Automobile Workers, that they denounced the action of the CIO Greater New York Council in throwing down the miners...

...But how does Lewis get into the picture this time...

...It sprang full-armored from the brain of a University of Pennsylvania professor...

...John L.'s Fight For Labor John L. is still plotting for this same nefarious purpose, as you can see by the papers, "liberal" and reactionary alike...

...It is George W. Taylor, Ph.B., economist from the University of Pennsylvania...

...You can be sure as shooting that the newly streamlined War Labor Board will be again in the picture waving the Little Steel Formula, with its ineffable author marching up ahead...

...You don't have to snuggle into the Lewis eyebrows to support the wage demands of his 500,000 coal^diggers...

...The miners should not be sabotaged by any organization and when they are sabotaged by a CIO council as was done by the New York Council, I feel ashamed...

...The negotiators had come to within a few cents agreement when the War Labor Board called them off and foiled the Lewis plot to get a decent raise for his men...

...Whose Cost Of Living...

...he doesn't look like that at all...

...I've got the Formula, and it says, 'No!' " But...

...He may justly point out that all his present demands, including the 10 cent royalty on coal, are within the multitudes of laws, regulations, fiats, and pronu.ncia-mentos laid down by all the Government boards, bureaus, committees, departments, and panels with which he is forced to deal before he can sign a contract with the coal operators...

...Precisely...

...Lewis as fervently as Harry Hopkins and the Mellon-controlled Koppers Company and the House of Morgan, currently headed by Fellow Traveller Thomas Lamont...

...He forgot to say in whose cost of living...

...That was a part of the Lewis plot which Jimmy Wechs-ler and I. F. Stone of PM and other "fringe" liberals have been writing about ever since...

...Nevertheless the Doctor had spoken, and the Great Quarterback shouted sternly from the White House, "Hold the line...

...Or so we have been told...

...and to the clattering of workers' stomachs against their backbones, the bogey-man of inflation was exorcised...

...Taylor in there as boss of the War Labor Board, sending Will Davis, former chairman, to take over the Office of Economic Stabilization which Fred Vinson is quitting to be Federal Loan Administrator, one of the several jobs which Jesse Jones was holding down until Henry Wallace came down the field and tried to get the ball away from him...

...Makes no difference...

...Simply because he will have to tangle up again with the War Labor Board now headed by the very author of the Little Steel formula...

...How come these fateful dates and percentages...

...Of course John L. Lewis would have to come along and tell a Senate investigating committee that he was interested in inflating the bellies of his miners a bit...

...Labor sympathizers, who are really that, are more interested in a man's philosophy than his personality...

...His name is not Moses either...

...He turns out to be just another college professor, with spectacles and a round, chubby face...

...By a quick-shift of the back-field, the Great Quarterback has put Dr...

...There ain't going to be any collective bargaining...

...I had always thought, in a rather desultory fashion, that he would have a long, white beard and-a staff and some stone tablets and be coming out of a cloud on a mountain-top holding up the tablets and shouting: "Call it off, boys...

...We hope you are following these substitutions carefully on your score-card, because without a scorecard, you can't know the names or the salaries of the players...

...That plot began back in 1948 when Lewis announced that he would have no truck with the War Labor Board, headed by "a rapacious, predatory, Park Avenue patent attorney"—-that would be Will Davis—tried to bargain with the coal bosses...

...At any rate at last it can be told where that Little Steel Formula came from...

...It may have been the increase in the cost of living for a professor of economics at the University of Pennsylvania, but you can bet your ration books that it didn't come anywhere near representing the increase in the cost of living of a steel puddler or a coal digger...

...Great grief, if I had had to accept the politics, predilections, and personal habits of all the labor leaders I've supported at one time or another, I would be better bait for the psychiatrists than I am even now...

...I mean a picture of the man who wrote the Little Steel Formula...

...Said Gerber: "I am not a follower of John L. Lewis, but I support the legitimate wage demands of any group of American workers...

...For this antiquarian notion, the Communists in the CIO are now damning Mr...

...Taylor, in the case of the request of the workers for some dough from the great-hearted "Little" Steel bosses (and you know what a good bunch they are), had got himself some mirrors, and after gazing long and earnestly into them, had come out with the answer that this 15 per cent represented the increase in the cost of living for that period...

...And in case you have forgotten, the sacred Formula was to the effect that collective bargaining or no collective bargaining, no sons of toil could get a" raise in wages above 15 per cent of the wages paid from January, 1941, to May, 1942...

...Lewis stands out conspicuously in this regard as he is one of the few labor leaders who clings to the old-fashioned idea that -the function of a labor official is not primarily to go to war-movies, attend Boy Scout receptions at the W'ltite House, or endorse Dumbarton Oaks, but rather to get a little more jack into the pay-envelopes of the rank and file...