Thorstein Veblen
"Congressional Sabotage"
Editorial
"DIAL. A Fortnightly", (New York: The Dial Publishing Company, Inc.)
Vol. LXVI (Dec., 28, 1918, to June, 28, 1919)
April 5, 1919, pp. 363
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IN CONGRESS. THE PRACTICE OF SABOTAGE HAS long enjoyed another imported and 
figurative name, also drawn from footgear "filibuster," the onomatopoetic 
equivalent of "freebooter." Respectable as familiarity has made this 
political device, it is by intent and effect sheer sabotage. Witness the 
present plight of the Railroad Administration and other bureaus, deprived of 
their necessary and in most cases unopposed appropriations because the late 
Congress, in order to force an extra session in which to protect its 
constitutional function in foreign affairs, deliberately refused to perform 
its domestic functions and adjourned without providing funds to keep the 
governmental machine running during its absence. With a touching solicitude 
the Congressmen provided for the salaries of their secretaries, but they made 
no provision for their wage-workers in the lobbies of the two chambers. And 
while they take the spring air in cities whose street-cleaning departments do 
not depend upon federal appropriation, the government clerks they have left 
behind in Washington walk to work that is, in many cases, temporarily unpaid, 
through streets that are unswept because Congress went on strike. Nobody 
believes, of course, that the governmental machine will stop for lack of the 
withheld fuel; and in most departments the results of the Congressional 
strike will be more ludicrous than .important. One bureau however has been 
throttled in its hour of utmost need. The Federal Employment Service suddenly 
finds itself with funds to operate less than sixty of its seven hundred 
placement agencies, and must appeal, to states and municipalities to keep 
open as many of these offices as possible. Its personnel, recently assembled 
at great pains, is again scattered, and its training school closed. Meanwhile 
demobilization continues and unemployment mounts. At best we have taken too 
little interest in finding jobs for our war workers and returned soldiers. 
And congressional tactics that slow down our all too inadequate machinery for 
returning these hands to productive industry is really no matter at whom it 
is directed nor how it is dignified in parliamentary parlance straight 
sabotage on business, on labor, and on the people at large, the form of 
sabotage known as striking on the job.
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