SECRET MEETINGS.

Star (Christchurch), Volume LXVI, Issue 20455, 7 November 1934, Page 5

SECRET MEETINGS.

Big Business Against New Deal. BANDING TO FIGHT. (By PAUL MALLON). WASHINGTON, September IS. There is more than meets the eye behind these stories cropping out from time to time about secret confabs of big business groups. So far, the public has. found out only about the industries gathering at the Virginia spa, and the American Management Association pow-wow at the Lido Country Club, Long Island. More will be heard later about a similar group of influential Chicago business men who have assembled there from time to time, t-he secret manufacturers’ meeting at Montauk Point. Long Island, and a half-dozen other similarly clandestine conventions of industrialists. These are not such incoherent and isolated gatherings as they appear. Each one has its own pet crowd of leaders, but those who have attended three of the gatherings have noted a certain duplication in the guest list. In other words, each meeting seems to send a few representatives to the ethers. Thus, each knows what the others are doing, and, while they are not officially tied together into a national industrial resurgent movement, that is what they amount to. Later, they will come out in the open, and then their co-operation will be even closer. This secrecy has encouraged popular suspicion that they are primarily out tc; stop the New Deal. That may be the unspoken hope of many of the delegates at the clandestine conventions, but those who have attended say that the meetings have not been run on that basis at all. Self-preservation. The real basis seems to be to band together in groups for self-preservation. They have an idea that the Administration is driving a wedge into their businesses. Only last week, one of the only three men competent to express the philosophy behind the New Deal

told a private gathering in his drawingroom : “ If you have to boil down the future Roosevelt programme to a single sentence, it would be the diffusion of big business and the encouragement of little business.” These business groups contend that their onlv plan is to bring pressure on the New‘Deal, to guide it for their own purposes, to get the best -deal possible out of it for themselves. They are not ambitious enough to think that they c&n block it, or defeat it politically, just yet. The American Liberty League is not supposed to be connected with these meetings, although one of its backers attended the Long Island convention. Incidentally, it has recently employed I an ace Washington newsman (William Murphy) as publicity adviser, and is I about to step out campaigning in a I bigger and broader way i Every insider agrees that these vari- | ous steps mean more intelligent and better organised opposition to the New Deal programme from here on. In ether words, big business is banding to fight.—N. A. N. A. Copyright.