Chamber of Commerce
As a rising regional businessman, Johnston became active in the national Chamber of Commerce. He was appointed to its tax committee in 1933, elected a director in 1934, and elected vice president in 1941. Johnston became head of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce after a revolt by younger, moderate business executives pushed several older, conservative candidates aside. He refused to antagonize the American Federation of Labor or the Congress of Industrial Organizations, and advocated labor-management cooperation. Johnston persuaded the labor federations to make a no-strike pledge during World War II.
In 1940, Johnston ran in the Republican primary for Senator from Washington state, but placed a distant second place with only 18 percent of the vote.
Johnston served on several wartime commissions for President Franklin D. Roosevelt, including the Committee for Economic Development, the War Manpower Commission, and the War Mobilization and Reconversion Committee. In 1943, President Roosevelt named him chairman of the United States Commission on InterAmerican Development. He traveled widely in Latin America, reassuring heads of state that the United States intended to protect them in the event of war.
Soviet leader Joseph Stalin invited Johnston to tour Russia in 1944. Johnston agreed, and Roosevelt appointed Johnston an emissary of the United States. Johnston spent nearly a month in the Soviet Union, and was the first American diplomat to tour the Central Asian Republics of the Soviet Union. He met with Stalin for three hours at a time when Ambassador W. Averell Harriman had yet to present his credentials to the premier.
Johnston retired as Chamber of Commerce president in 1945. He was awarded the Presidential Medal for Merit in 1947.
Read more about this topic: Eric Johnston
Famous quotes containing the words chamber of commerce, chamber of, chamber and/or commerce:
“The hotel was once where things coalesced, where you could meet both townspeople and travelers. Not so in a motel. No matter how you build it, the motel remains the haunt of the quick and dirty, where the only locals are Chamber of Commerce boys every fourth Thursday. Who ever heard the returning traveler exclaim over one of the great motels of the world he stayed in? Motels can be big, but never grand.”
—William Least Heat Moon [William Trogdon] (b. 1939)
“Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue.”
—Henry James (1843–1916)
“Beautiful glooms, soft dusks in the noon-day fire,—
Wildwood privacies, closets of lone desire,
Chamber from chamber parted with wavering arras of leaves,—
Cells for the passionate pleasure of prayer to the soul that grieves,
Pure with a sense of the passing of saints through the wood,
Cool for the dutiful weighing of ill with good;—”
—Sidney Lanier (1842–1881)
“Friendship is a disinterested commerce between equals; love, an abject intercourse between tyrants and slaves.”
—Oliver Goldsmith (1728–1774)