page_title: Nathan Witt
section_title: National Labor Relations Board (NLRB)
hierarchical_section_title: Nathan Witt / Career / National Labor Relations Board (NLRB)
caption_attribution_description: English: Howard W. Smith, member of the United States House of Representatives.
context_page_description: Nathan Witt, born Nathan Wittowsky, was an American lawyer who is best known as being the Secretary of the National Labor Relations Board from 1937 to 1940. He resigned from the NLRB after his communist political beliefs were exposed and he was accused of manipulating the Board's policies to favor his own political leanings. He was also investigated several times in the late 1940s and 1950s for being a spy for the Soviet Union in the 1930s. No evidence of espionage was ever found.
context_section_description: Witt joined the legal staff of the "first" National Labor Relations Board in February 1934.  The National Labor Relations Act became law in June 1935, creating  the "second" (permanent) NLRB. Witt was named the NLRB's assistant chief counsel ("assistant general counsel") in December 1935. He exerted a great deal of influence in the Review Section, the division of the NLRB which reviewed transcripts of NLRB hearings in labor disputes, revised transcripts to emphasize points of law, reviewed draft decisions of examiners for adherence to NLRB policy and law, and made oral reports to the three members of the Board. He chose (with the approval of the Board) the attorneys who staffed the Review Section, assigned cases to attorneys, and checked the drafts of Board decisions for technical accuracy. Witt recommended Pressman for a job as a trial examiner at the NLRB in 1936.
  Witt was named Secretary (the highest non-appointed bureaucratic office—or "the top administrative officer") of the Board in October (or November) 1937. The enormous workload and tremendous expansion in the number of personnel at the NLRB made Witt the agency's most powerful individual. He attended Board meetings, took Board minutes, prepared and served Board decisions ordering union organizing elections, granted and denied requests for oral testimony from employers, oversaw each Board member's appointments and administered the office and oversaw the staff of 250.  He was the Board's chief liaison to Congress and oversaw preparation and submission of the Board's budget.  He was the sole supervisor of the Board's 22 regional offices, overseeing the roughly 225 personnel in the field. He alone exercised the authority to authorize a hearing in the case of unfair labor practice (ULP) or election cases, and he alone reported on these cases (in oral, not written) fashion to the Board. Almost all correspondence, telephone contact, and telegraph contact between the regional offices and the Board passed through his office first, and his office collected nearly all the information coming in from the field regarding elections, ULPs, settlements, strikes, enforcement issues, informational inquiries, and the development of new policies.
  Witt's communism was the cause of much dispute within the NLRB and eventually led to his resignation as Board Secretary. The NLRB was under intense legal, media, congressional, and public criticism in 1938 and 1939 for what many people saw as overreaching.
  In July 1939, the House of Representatives created the Special Committee to Investigate the National Labor Relations Board (popularly known as the "Smith Committee" after its chairman, conservative Democratic Rep. Howard W. Smith—a "powerful, arch-segregationist and anti-Communist".) to investigate the NLRB.  The Smith Committee received testimony from hundreds of witnesses, conducted a nationwide survey regarding the impact of the NLRB, and questioned NLRB officials at length about the agency's alleged anti-business and anti-American Federation of Labor/pro-Congress of Industrial Organizations biases.
  From December 1939 to February 1940, the committee "probed Witt's handling of labor cases, strikes, and controversies."  The committee weakened Witt in its accusation that he "hewed" to the Communist Party line.  In response, Witt wrote to the committee that "I am not now, nor have I ever been, a member of the Communist Party, a 'Communist sympathizer,' or one who 'hews to the Communist Party line'."
  In December 1939, Board Member Leiserson testified that he believed Witt held too much power at the NLRB, that Witt had influenced the NLRB's decisions in favor of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), and that Witt's far-left views were unacceptable. Leiserson testified that he had repeatedly voiced his concerns to Board Chairman J. Warren Madden, but that Madden and Board member Edwin S. Smith had allied to prevent any attempt to rein in or fire Witt. Later testimony revealed that an internal NLRB study had backed Leiseron and that Madden and Smith had suppressed it, and that Witt 
caption: US Representative Howard Worth Smith led investigations into Witt's activities at NRLB
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