ALPHABETS IN THE SOUP

When Dean Landis speaks on administrative law in Langdell Hall of an evening, not only do young lawyers from Chelsea and East Cambridge tramp in to bear him, but the whole country knows that an expert, a former head of the SEC, is talking. Last night he tore into the Logan Bill, now in Congress, which would practically emasculate agencies like the AAA, NLRB, and SEC. It is a highly technical point--this question of what the powers of such special agencies should be--but it is fundamental to the whole philosophy of the New Deal; and the Logan Bill should be dynamite in an election year. So what Dean Landis, as a scholarly, scientific investigator, has to say about it should make an informative prelude to the politicians' blasts that are soon to come.

The authors of the Logan Bill, backed by the American Bar Association, are opposed to the agency principle of government, and would like to see Congress regain all its former legislative power, and the courts their judicial power. Seeing little or no usefulness in agencies, they have backed away right and left at their powers, until only a maimed carcass is left, which they would probably be only too glad to see thrown away also. But the New Dealers, including Dean Landis, are idealistic about agencies, and see in them an important tool in the hands of a government working on all fronts for the "general welfare." It seems to them pure atavism to scrap the idea that it is a fine thing to assemble a group of experts and give them fairly sweeping powers to regulate some phase of national life. But this does not mean that agencies are an invention of the New Deal. Since 1789 Congress has delegated power; successive wars, and the increasing complexity of our economic life that the Industrial Revolution brought, have developed the agency bit by bit to its present eminence. America would have been helpless in the World War without some experience in agency government. If the agencies are scrapped now we will be just as helpless in the war against unemployment, labor and farm problems, and crooked market practices.

So it is obvious that when Dean Landis defends the agencies he is doing more than merely justifying the record of the New Deal. It is equally clear that the Logan Bill, though inspired by an antipathy for the New Deal alphabet, is striking at something which under the American form of government has been found indispensable.