LOBBYING IN POLITICS

Dominion, Volume 23, Issue 51, 23 November 1929, Page 31

LOBBYING IN POLITICS

A FINE ART IN GERMANY

By calling attention to the propagandist activities of William B. Shearer at the Geneva Naval Disarmament Conference of 1927, President Hoover has re-opened, the whole question of lobbying as it concerns the affairs of government. The lobby is a familiar attribute of pending legislation in Vjushington, but, until the President spoke, there was little suspicion that lobbying activities extended overseas, even to a conference involving the Unfed States and foreign naval powers. Tbe effort to defeat the purpose of the Geneva Conference will now be investigated by the Senate Committee on Naval Affairs. Whether the investigation will extend to the whole field of lobbying is uncertain, but it is certain that the lobbyist, whatever his character, has come back into the limelight. At the present time there are no laws on the statute books for the control or regulation of lobbying. There is an ancient law which forbids an American citizen from involving himself in the foreign relations of the country, but that is all. As matters now stand, a lobbyist can get away with almost any thing short of bribery or attempt to bribe. . Unless the Shearer case comes within the old foreign relations statute, the opinion is general that nothing can be done. It appears certain he violated no law so far as propaganda for domestic consumption is concerned. If at any time in the course of his propagandist activities Shearer approached a member of Congress and sought to influence him in the matter of naval legislation, that would be lobbying, but under American law no violation of any statute.

The lobbyist is now very active in Washington, for whenever tariff legislation is pending or contemplated he is always on the scene. Senators and Representatives, especially those opposing the Hawley-Smoot Bill, assert that probably never before in the history of Washington has so powerful, so smooth working, so well organised a movement for the influencing of legislation operated in the national capital as has been the case these last six months.

But it is not the same old lobby, official and private, that Washington has known in the past. The “Colonel”, whose way it was to slap Senators and Representatives on the. back and proceed to buttonhole them into submission, if possible, has just about disappeared. Also tbe ex-member of Congress—the lame duck—whose plan of battle was to invade even tbe floors of the two houses, has said good-bye so far as public appearances are concerned. Tbe lobbyist of tbe days of Grant and Cleveland would be like a fish out of water if he could come back to Washington now. A few years ago a certain ex-member of the Senate was so brazen in his efforts to get legislation passed in the form his clients wanted it that he was on the floor of the Senate two-thirds of the time while the Bill was being debated. Finally his activities became such that a Senator quietly hinted to him that if he did not make himself scarce he w’ould disclose from the floor the real reason for his presence. The lobbyist disappeared from the cloak rooms and the floor of the Senate. Thereafter his activities were carried bn from office buildings and from other places where he could make contact with Senators. This ex-Senator and also another prominent lobbyist, who had been in the House and who worked from the floor of that chamber, were about the last of the old lobby army.

The new lobby—the lobby maintaining fine offices, with large staffs of Press agents, also lawyers, secretaries and stenographers—is now in the saddle. No corporation could be better organised or more efficiently managed than some of these new-style lobbying organisations. They are interested in every conceivable form of legislation, from tbe movement to reduce naval armament to the decade-long battle to get power out of Muscle Shoals.

In recent years lobbies have played a commirnding part in the investigation of the Senatorial primary expenses, in the Newberry-Ford Senate contest in Michigan, tbe soldiers’ bonus legislation, farm legislation with all its various ramifications, the World Court protocol, the German War Claims Bill, the Boulder Canyon Dam project, the numberless legislative moves involving prohibition, the determined efforts to bring about the repeal of the inheritance and publicity clauses of the income-tax laws, the activities of the so-called power trust,' and finally the onslaught by all kinds and degrees of interests in the matter of increased or lower rates in the tariff bill now before the Senate. The transition of the lobbyist from the button-holing, gin-fizz drinking and joke-telling type to' the highly organised and specialised variety has been gradual. It is largely a development of the post-war period, although some of the best known and most powerful of lobbyists were in action long before that time, notably certain organisations which fought to put tbe Eighteenth Amendment into the Constitution.

The old-time lobbyist depended mainly on personal contact, on his ability to get the ear of a “sympathetic” Senator or Representative. HO did not, as a rule, have an office but walked the halls of the Capitol, the lobbies of hotels and, before the Volstead Act, the famous saloons of Pennsylvania Avenue and F Street, and even the Capitol itself, for there was a time when they sold drinks in the House and Senate wings of that great structure.

The pressure brought by the AntiSaloon League and the allied prohibition organisations to get the prohibition amendment through Congress aud ratified by two-thirds of the States is now history. To this day the AntiSaloon League continues a power to be reckoned with.» Its agents even sat with the committees when tbe liquor laws were drafted. The prohibition organisations have never -hesitated to assert themselves cither in the matter of legislation or in opposition to the election of members of Congress whose records on the question did not measure up to the Anti-Saloon League standard.

Again, there is the powerful organised opposition to the prohibition amendment. It has money and it has a perfect machine with one of the best manned publicity bureaus of any organisation in Washington. To date, however,'the anti-prohibition movement has not. made much headway. It is asserted that these wet and dry organisations are not lobbying machines. But members of Congress who have collided with them tell another story. They, are, they declare, among the

strongest and best directed lobbies ever to operate in the capital. Take a typical example—that of a great industrial organisation with offices in one of Washington’s newest buildings. This is the perfect lobby. A stranger approaching tbe offices might easily- mistake them for the headquarters of a law firm. A page is in the ante-room. A glass door leading into the end office b§ars the legend “Director.” There is a' publicity unit, and a legal unit. A do,en typists are grinding out propaganda by the bushel. To members of Congress, to newspaper writers and to other persons whose' “sympathetic” aid is needed the letters and pamphlets and other documents go. At least the Post Office Depart- 1 ment gets something out of it. Trained representatives of the lobby are “up on the hill,” watching Congress. If somebody introduces a Bill that concerns the lobby, even remotely, the fact is known to the “head lobbyist” in a few minutes. If a hearing is on before a committee involving, even indirectly, the lobby, every fact is carefully noted. Lawyers are at the call of those in charge. Every phase of pending or proposed legislation is gone over with a fine tooth comb, so to speak. If there is a weak spot, the lobby finds it. Then it gets busy. It can function so smoothly that even those members of Congress whose votes or activities are needed can sometimes be influenced, and they do not even know they are being reached.

“It’s a clever business and a man' must be clever to keep up with it,” said Senator Caraway of Arkansas, the leading advocate in the Senate of legislation for the regulation and control of the lobbyists. Senator Caraway is the author of the Bill requiring the registration of all lobbyists and lobbying organisations. This Bill passed the Senate at the last session. It is still in the pigeon-hole in the House. “There are a large number of people who pretend to represent ‘associations’ who are as a matter of fact ordinary lobbyists in the most offensive sense of that term,” said Senator Caraway. “They prey upon the credulity, of people who have an interest, or fancy they have, in legislation or other business pending in Congress. These lobbyists are utterly without influence. They obtain money, from those they pretend to represent, under false pretences. In the Washington telephone directory ihpre are somewhere between 300 and 400 of these alleged organisations, 90 per cent, of them organised for the sole purpose of profit. Outside of a dozen or more of these ‘associations’ it can be safely said that there is not a penny paid to them that is not worse than wasted.

“Included among these organisations are fake agricultural associations, fake scientifications organisations, fake dry and fake wet organisations—in fact there is hardly an activity of the human mind that is not represented in this category of useless ‘influences.’ If we can make, these -people put their names on record, it will go a long way toward purifying the atmosphere their presence now pollutes. It is an evil that should not be tolerated. It can be muzzled; and this time Congress did it.”

Senator MeKellar of Tennessee is another Senator who wants action now to curb the lobbyists. He said to the writer that this would be one of the first moves he would make when Congress convenes in regular session in December.

“There is, to my way of thinking,” said Senator MeKellar, “no doubt whatever but that the most hurtful influence to proper legislation in Washington is lobbying. It is insidious, illusive and, to a very large extent, secret At the same time it is destructive and deadly to clean,.upright, open-and-above-board law-making or investigation by committees of Congress or other agencies of our Federal Government.

“Like many other things, lobbying is now very different from lobbying as we knew it up to a few years ago. Those were the days, of the buttonholers. The lobbyists are now more diplomatic. The business of influencing, or rather seeking to influence, legislation has developed into a well Organised and, in most instances, highly paid profession. “To-day in Washington these ‘influences’ are on every hand, always at work. They never sleep. “Just glance over the Washington telephone directory, in the *A’s” for instance, under ‘American,’ and you will be surprised at the ‘American Association’ for this or that alleged patriotic service. They are all patriots, if you take them at their word. “There is not a Senator or a Representative in Congress who does not hear from the lobby six days out of seven, and he would hear ou the seventh also but for the fact that the post offices of Congress are closed that day. “These lobbies perform in great style. They are not out in the open, as was the case of a few years back. I should say that more often their attack is indirect rather than direct. They operate through friends who are more or less influential. “The framing of a tariff law is just about the next thing to heaven for the average lobbyist. There never has been a tariff fight in which the lobbyist did not play a big role. All that is necessary to prove this is to attend a meeting of the Finance Committee of the Senate or tbe Ways and Means Committee in the House, when a tariff law is being written. You will see the evidences on all sides. It will meet you coining and going. You simply cannot piisg it. “Lobbying is almost as old as the Republic itself. There is no man in Congress who remembers when the lobbyist first came to Washington. They were here long before tbe Civil War. They used to buys the wets a niint julep and the drys a lemonade. Now they write you a letter or have some friend drop in for a little chat. As I have said, they attack both along direct and indirect lines. Np member of Congress, so far as I know, would knowingly be influenced by these lobbyists, yet it is impossible to tell what effect their schemes and machinations may have. They often achieve their ends without leaving a sign of a trail behind.

“Of course, all lobbyists are not bad lobbyists. It is perfectly all right for a citizen or citizens to come to Washington and as individuals or as representatives of organisations, societies or groups to urge the enactment or the repeal of legislation. So in any discussion of Hie Washington lobby situation it must' always be borne in mind that there are, as in everything else, two sides to the question, although in this instance the evil side is by far the biggest side. There are representatives of associations in Washington

who are interested in the betterment of classes, and not' the putting of money into their own or other people’s pockets. They are men and women of character whose activities are always helpful. “However, it is the other kind we are interested in just now and before the next session of Congress ends I am going to insist that something be done to curb the activities of the lobbyists who prey on Congress. They should not only be regulated but controlled. Just how many there are in Washington no man knows. Numerous big interests and others not so great are represented. With the tariff battle now getting under way they are, of. course, very active. There are lobbyists for the sugar interests, for the steel interests, the power organisations, other kinds of public utilities, silk, cotton, leather, in fact almost every business or movement involved, direct l v or indirectly, in Federal legislation. It is a situation calling for vigorous action. It has got to be a stench in the nostrils of all decent legislators. “Tfiis is a big question. There is no denying that fact, and the regulation of the Washington lobby is no child's play. Personally, I would like to see the whole thing done away with if it were possible. However, that is too much to hope for, and the best thing now is to pass tbe Caraway Bill or one like it and require every man and woman who comes to Washington for , the purpose of urging the passage or defeat of legislation, the repeal or amendment Of existing laws, to register his or her name, the name of the person or organisation represented, the salary involved and in a general way the nature of the business that person or association has before Congress. In other words, make lobbying a public instead of practically a secret business as is now the case. “All departments of the Government should be conducted in the open. The greater the publicity the better for the Government and everybody concerned, and the most harmful of all secret activities is the lobby. Congress should rid itself of every vestage of secrecy in lobbying, and in the next session of Congress, I mean the regular session which convenes in December, I shall leave no stone unturned in my efforts to bring about the fullest publicity in reference to all lobby associations or individuals. The good lobbyist can have no objection to tbe proper kind of legislation. The bad one should be made to take it whether he wants it or not,” 1