Chapter Eight

Abortive Reform: The Wilson Administration And Organized Labor, 1913–1920

Melvyn Dubofsky

Fashions in history sometimes seem as fashionable as those in dress. In the 1950s and early 1960s the Progressive era was an exciting intellectual frontier for scholars, and was still largely interpreted as the “age of reform.” More recently, however, a growing number of historians have perceived Progressive reforms as the limited triumphs of a group of emerging professionals and bureaucrats who were seeking to rationalize and stabilize a turbulent society. For such scholars, Frederick Winslow Taylor and John B. Watson serve as the chief surrogates for the age. In a somewhat similar, if partially divergent, interpretive vein, the “new left” historians of the late 1960s and 1970s portrayed the Progressive era as the moment when “monopoly capital” (to use the term that they were usually loath to apply) used the national state to solidify its dominance in the marketplace. For them, corporatism emerges as the central reform motif, and George W. Perkins (J. P. Morgan’s “right-hand man”), Ralph Easley (secretary of the National Civic Federation), and ultimately the National Industrial Conference Board appear as the era’s “brain trusts.” In all these interpretations, however, labor-capital conflict at best lurks in the background.¹

To slight the centrality of labor-capital conflict in Progressive America and the role of the labor movement in the era’s history seems to me a mistake. We would do better to recall the contemporary judgment of an ardent Wilsonian, Ray Stannard Baker, who in a series of magazine articles published in 1904–1905 described labor-capital relations as the central national political issue of his time. For of all the questions that embroiled politics in the early twentieth century, the labor question was the most sensitive and divisive and the least amenable to compromise. Indeed, the issue was so contentious that most politicians preferred to evade it. Nevertheless, as Bruno Ramirez has observed, the battle between labor and capital, workers and employers, dominated the hidden agenda of progressivism. At no time was this more true than during the presidency of Woodrow Wilson, the subject of this essay.

Many aspects of the political struggle among trade unionists, employers, and Democrats in the Wilson years presaged comparable events during the turbulent 1930s.² Let me try to explain briefly why this was so. First, the labor movement challenged fundamental American traditions from two directions. Radicalism, whether of socialist or syndicalist variety, was a vital presence among organized workers during the Progressive years. Either form of working-class radicalism threatened the established order. Yet, however threatening labor radicals may have been, they represented only a minority of organized workers. But it is a grave mistake to see the nonradical majority as domesticated citizens in an emerging corporate-liberal system. If Samuel Gompers, John Mitchell, and the workers they represented rhetorically defended private property and free enterprise, their actual practices conflicted with established principles of property rights and circumscribed entrepreneurial freedoms. As David Brody has written, “. . . power and interest can be issues of deadly conflict even in a system in which men agree on the fundamentals.”³ American business never willingly conceded any of its prerogatives to workers and unions.

Second, in the early twentieth century organized labor for the first time in American history represented a durable mass movement. Between 1897 and 1903 the unions affiliated with the American Federation of Labor (AFL) grew more than sixfold, from 400,000 members to almost 3 million, as also did many independent unions. An aggressive employer counterattack as well as the business contraction of 1907–1909 thwarted the advance of unionism but failed, unlike similar conjunctures in the nineteenth century, to paralyze it. Then, in the years 1910–13, unions grew again and succeeded in organizing workers hitherto thought unorganizable, setting the foundation for the remarkable growth in membership during World War I. This increase was linked directly to a rising intensity in industrial warfare.⁴

Third, what was happening in the United States must be understood in the context of the entire Atlantic economy, if not the globe. Similar forces and events were sweeping Italy, France, Germany, the Lowlands, Britain, Scandinavia, and even eastern Europe and Russia. This was indeed the age of the mass strike. It was also the golden age of working-class internationalism and its institution, the Second International. The rise of the European working classes and the waxing power of socialist parties did not pass unnoticed in the United States.⁵

Fourth, American unions and workers became more active in national politics than ever before. As unions grew in size and industrial conflicts spread over a larger arena, federal policies and actions often proved decisive to the success or failure of the labor cause. John Mitchell, one of the nation’s more moderate labor leaders, put the case well when he wrote in 1903: “The trade union movement in this country can make progress only by identifying itself with the state.”⁶ In fact, his union, the United Mine Workers (UMWA) had just benefited from the actions of Theodore Roosevelt.

But it was not until the presidency of Woodrow Wilson that the labor question became a persistent, inescapable national issue. Wilson’s predecessors, Roosevelt and Taft, occasionally grappled with the problem of labor. Yet their administrations lacked well-defined labor policies, built and maintained no regular, systematic relationship with the labor movement, and, in the case of Taft especially, opposed labor’s primary political goal: relief from legal injunctions and exemption from the Sherman Act. All this changed with Wilson’s election. From 1913 through 1920, labor had direct access to the White House and the cabinet, achieved its most desired legislative goals, and gained a share, however small, in national political power.

Before analyzing Wilsonian labor policy in detail, we should consider briefly what might be defined as its general dynamics. It is essential to keep in mind that at no point between 1913 and 1920 was there a clear, consistent federal policy toward workers and trade unions. The structural separation of power at times resulted in conflicting policies adopted by the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government. Even within the executive branch, bureaucratic competition proved the rule, as different cabinet officers and their departments contended for supremacy—especially during World War I. Despite the confusion and conflicts among Democrats in Washington over policy, however, by the midpoint of the Wilson presidency a firm political alliance had been built between the AFL, most of its affiliated unions, and the Democratic party. Wilsonian labor policy divided into three quite distinct stages. The first ran from the creation of the Department of Labor through the publication of the Final Report of the United States Commission on Industrial Relations. It included the enactment of several laws dear to the hearts of labor lobbyists. The second stage occurred during the World War I years when the government provided organized labor with opportunities for growth hitherto unimaginable to most labor leaders. In the last stage, the federal government retreated from its advanced position on the labor-capital front and policymakers diluted their previous solicitude for independent trade unionism.

The political alliance between labor and the Democrats did not emerge suddenly with the election of Woodrow Wilson. Despite conventional notions concerning the AFL’s apolitical traditions, the Federation had in fact originated to defend and advance labor’s political interests. That was why when unions expanded so rapidly between 1897 and 1903 the AFL moved its headquarters from Indianapolis, a center of trade unionism, to Washington, the locus of national politics. The issue for such labor leaders as Gompers and the chiefs of the independent railroad brotherhoods was never whether or not labor should be active politically. Rather, it was to find a mode of political action that would produce the fewest divisions among the rank and file. Labor leaders had to maintain loyalty and solidarity among a membership split three ways: the Federation comprised traditional Republicans and Democrats plus a growing number of independents and socialists. It is difficult to estimate in what proportions organized workers split among the three, but it would seem that the great majority of workers (70 to 80 percent) preferred either Democratic or some form of independent labor/socialist politics and that the remainder, mostly American-born Protestant workers whose allegiances derived from a political culture formed during the Civil War and Reconstruction, leaned toward Republicanism.⁷

Whatever the political inclinations of the rank and file, leaders realized that federal policies and actions vitally affected the security of trade unions. Railroad union leaders had learned that lesson by 1900 after almost three decades of industrial warfare punctuated by federal intervention.⁸ As the economy continued to nationalize, many unions found their actions coming under federal scrutiny. The boycott, the secondary strike, and the sympathetic strike—essential weapons in labor’s arsenal—were all at one time or another declared illegal by federal courts. Sections of the Sherman Antitrust Act, the Interstate Commerce Act, and federal proscription of common law conspiracies in restraint of trade combined to imperil the future of trade unionism.⁹

A comparable situation in Britain had pushed workers and their unions toward more independent forms of political action and ultimately to the founding of the Labour Party. American union leaders were aware of British developments and were made more so by pressure from their followers. Not only was socialism making substantial inroads among workers, especially in such core unions as the mine workers, the machinists, and the brewery workers, but city centrals and state federations of labor were also flooding headquarters with petitions and letters demanding the creation of an American labor party and often citing the British example.¹⁰

In response, Gompers and his associates devised a political strategy that would mollify their followers while causing the least political dissension. First, AFL officials in 1906 drew up Labor’s Bill of Grievances and presented it to leaders of both parties in Congress for action. They then established a Labor Representation Committee (patterned after the British model) to seek the election of trade unionists and union sympathizers to congress. They even targeted specific members of the House, all Republicans, for defeat. Finally, Gompers went to the 1908 conventions of both major parties demanding that they incorporate labor’s primary goals into their platforms.¹¹

The AFL’s political assertiveness served primarily to forge an alliance between labor and the Democrats. In Congress, Democrats responded more sympathetically to the Bill of Grievances. The trade unionists elected to the House were mostly Democrats (of fifteen elected in 1910, thirteen were Democrats). And in 1908, the Democratic party agreed to incorporate the AFL’s demands into its platform. As a consequence, Gompers and other labor leaders cooperated with the Democratic National Committee in campaigning for Bryan. For their part, the Democrats had good reason to seek union support. As a minority party nationally, they needed allies wherever they could be found. Moreover, as a party whose strength was concentrated in the South and West, Democrats shared labor’s antagonism to big capital. Thus political calculation and sentiment increasingly bound Democrats and labor together.¹²

Ironically, however, the emergence of Woodrow Wilson as a national political figure at first threatened the Democratic-labor alliance. Though Southern-born, Wilson was “discovered” and promoted politically by what remained of the old northern Democratic financial community, the “gold bugs.” Wilson brought to Democratic politics a distaste for organized labor and the principles it personified. A “Credo” written by the future president in 1907 defended the absolute right to freedom of contract from its union critics, whom he defined as men “who have neither the ideas nor the sentiments needed for the maintenance or the enjoyment of liberty.” Only two years later he declared to an antilabor banquet audience, “I am a fierce partizan [sic] of the Open Shop and of everything that makes for industrial liberty.” Not surprisingly then, when Wilson ran for governor of New Jersey in 1910, the state’s labor movement united against him. To quiet the voices of his trade union critics, Wilson in 1910 changed his line. “I have always been the warm friend of organized labor,” he assured trade unionists, and he defended their right to organize independent unions.¹³

Still, at the 1912 Democratic convention, labor held firm in the anti-Wilson camp, much preferring the candidacy of Missouri’s Champ Clark. Once the nomination was his, though, Wilson had little choice but to further his rapprochement with labor. Nor did Gompers have much choice other than to accept Wilson’s overtures, unless he preferred to see the labor vote move more swiftly toward Debs and the socialists or Roosevelt and the Progressives. For in 1912, the Democratic party once again incorporated the AFL’s primary demands into its platform. Although in his 1925 autobiography, Gompers asserted that he played no active role in the 1912 election and the public record in fact shows only circumspect labor support for Wilson and the Democrats, the AFL national office served as a clearing house for Democratic National Committee efforts to woo the labor vote. The Party Chairman contacted Gompers about sending AFL organizers to different parts of the country on behalf of the Wilson campaign. John L. Lewis, for example, campaigned for the Democrats in New Mexico and Arizona.¹⁴

AFL assistance surely did not harm Wilson’s prospects. Although it is impossible to apportion a labor vote among the parties and candidates, circumstantial evidence suggests that union endorsements brought Wilson a good many votes. He owed his victory primarily, of course, to the split within the Republican party; but the election returns proved how vital labor would be for future Democratic successes. The Taft Republicans, the only party among the four major ones contesting the election that offered nothing to workers and unions, received less than 25 percent of the popular vote. Wilson could interpret the results as well as anyone. It was not only the influence of Louis Brandeis that encouraged Wilson to show more sympathy for organized labor. What Brandeis did perhaps was to accelerate the speed at which Wilson was already moving owing to political realities and electoral calculus.¹⁵ In any event, after his election the new president worked to solidify the Democratic-labor alliance.

Unlike any previous chief executive, Wilson opened his administration wide to the leaders of trade unionism. Cabinet officials, especially the Secretary of Labor, conferred regularly with the AFL executive council. Gompers and other labor leaders corresponded often and at length with the President, who made them feel their counsel was sought. Wilson made sure to appear personally at the July 4, 1916, dedication of the new AFL headquarters building and to say the proper ceremonial words. He also sought the AFL’s advice of pending judicial appointments, up to and including the Supreme Court, a matter of no small importance to organized labor. Finally, a year after his reelection, in November 1917, Wilson became the first president to address an annual convention of the AFL. Surely, American labor now had a friend in the White House.¹⁶

Organized labor reciprocated Wilson’s attentions. At no time was this clearer than in the election of 1916. The reunification of the Republican party boded ill for Democratic chances that year. Thus Gompers called out the troops for Wilson and himself campaigned publicly for the Democrats. Such unions as the United Mine Workers (UMW) and the International Association of Machinists, which had leaned toward socialism before 1916, now fell in line behind Wilson. The railroad brotherhoods, special beneficiaries of Wilsonian largesse, were perfervid in their support for the President. In the western states, which were to prove so decisive in Wilson’s reelection, labor united behind the President, and its votes were probably critical to his victory. By November 1916, organized labor had become a core constituency of the Democratic party.¹⁷

That connection, however, was built on more than symbolism. The Department of Labor, which was established as a cabinet-level agency in Wilson’s first term, advocated trade unionism’s case within the administration. The Secretary, William B. Wilson, an ex-UMWA officer and former Democratic congressman from Pennsylvania, considered himself and acted as a partisan of trade unionism. As he wrote to Gompers after eight years of service as secretary, the most important of the Labor Department’s many duties was “. . . to have someone as its directing head who can carry the viewpoint of labor into the councils of the President.” That was a task to which Wilson dedicated himself. As he told the 1914 AFL convention, “If securing justice to those who earn their bread in the sweat of their faces constitutes partisanship, then count me as a partisan of labor.” A year earlier he had informed the same audience, much to the consternation of many conservatives, that absolute rights in private property did not exist. Society, he explained, has a perfect right to modify such rights “. . . whenever in its judgment it deems it for the welfare of society to do it.”¹⁸

In staffing the new department, Wilson acted on these principles. Whenever possible, he chose officials sympathetic to labor or drawn directly from trade unions. The newly established federal conciliation service selected many of its mediators from the UMWA. In their capacity as mediators/conciliators, these Labor Department agents not only sought to eliminate the sources of industrial conflict; they also promoted the recognition of AFL and other unions.¹⁹

Equally positive in its effects on the development of organized labor was the field work, public hearings, and final report of the United States Commission on Industrial Relations (CIR). Originally conceived in the waning days of the Taft administration as a federal response to labor-capital violence, the CIR functioned as an advocate for the poor, the oppressed, and the unorganized. That was primarily because of the person Wilson chose as chair, Frank P. Walsh, a Kansas City attorney and left-wing Democrat. Otherwise balanced among representatives of enlightened capital, responsible labor (the AFL and the railroad brotherhoods), and the public at large, the Commission was driven to the left by Walsh and his lieutenant, Basil Manly.²⁰

For more than two years, the CIR conducted public hearings across the nation at which witnesses from management, labor, and the community testified about industrial violence, labor relations, and exploitation. Almost invariably, the public hearings, whether concerned with the 1913 Paterson silk strike, labor policy in the Chicago packinghouses, or the shopmen’s strike on the Illinois Central Line, offered unions a friendly forum in which to state their case. In dealing with capitalists, however, Walsh played the prosecutor. He pilloried John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and held him personally responsible for the company policies that had resulted in the infamous Ludlow, Colorado, massacre. While castigating capital, Walsh publicly and more so privately extended a comradely hand to radicals—not only such “respectable” socialists as Morris Hillquit but also such notorious Wobblies as Vincent St. John and William D. Haywood. While the CIR held its public hearings, scores of field investigators filed unpublished reports. These, too, generally made the case for organized labor. Equally important, these unsung investigators later played prominent roles in implementing World War I and New Deal labor policies.²¹

Walsh’s radicalism ensured that the CIR would divide internally when the time came to issue a final report and recommendations, which was precisely what happened. The Commission split three ways. The representatives of capital essentially leaned to a middle way. They condemned equally irresponsible capital and radical labor, calling upon enlightened businessmen and responsible trade unionists to bargain reasonably. They also defended the open-shop principle and drew no distinction between independent and company unions. The public representatives, John R. Commons and Mrs. J. Borden Harriman, stood midway between the representatives of capital and the Walsh majority. More sympathetic to independent trade unions than the employers on the Commission, Commons and Harriman found the majority too condemnatory of business, too soft on labor radicals, and too favorably inclined to positive state action. They preferred to have “experts” chair impartial joint labor-management boards that would bring law and order to the anarchy of industrial relations. If “corporate liberalism” existed anywhere in Wilsonian America, it was among such people, whose recommendations were rejected by both capital and labor. The majority report, by contrast, prepared by Manly and signed by Walsh and the three labor commissioners, was perhaps the most radical document ever released by a federal commission. It blamed industrial violence and exploitation on the gross maldistribution of wealth and income, the ubiquity of unemployment, and corporate denial of workers’ human rights, especially the right to organize unions of their own choosing. “Relief from these grave evils cannot be secured by petty reforms,” declared the majority. “The action must be drastic.” Among the drastic reforms proposed were federal laws and agencies to protect the rights of workers to organize and bargain collectively. Independent unionism was to be made a central objective of federal policy, as was a panoply of measures aimed at securing working people against unemployment, illness, and indigent old age. As Walsh himself wrote to a UMWA leader after the CIR submitted its final report, it was “more radical than any report upon industrial subjects every made by any government agency.”²²

Trade unionists and radicals were much impressed. A railroad brotherhood journal proclaimed that the Report “will go down in history as the greatest contribution to labor literature of our time.” The socialist Appeal to Reason described it as peeling the hide off capitalism, and the Christian Socialist compared it to the Declaration of Independence and the Emancipation Proclamation. Finally, the Masses saw it as “. . . the beginning of an indigenous American revolutionary movement.”²³ Indeed so, for the Walsh-Manly recommendations of July 1915 incorporated a labor program that encompassed every reform of the New Deal and others that have never been enacted. In fact, the combination of a split Commission and a radical majority report ensured that nothing substantive would come immediately from the CIR’s work. But less than three years later Frank Walsh would serve as co-chair of the National War Labor Board (NWLB), a position from which he sought to implement many of his 1915 proposals.

Strangely enough for an administration that otherwise did so much for organized labor, the Wilsonians stocked the barest of legislative cupboards. On no issue was this truer than on the one closest to the heart of labor, relief from legal injunctions and antitrust legislation. Rather than describe in detail the complicated legislative politics and history of the Clayton Act controversy and its labor clauses, let me simply conclude that on the issue of injunctive relief, Wilson refused to defer to labor’s requests or even to compromise. In his view, any statute that exempted labor from judicial review was a form of class legislation alien to the American way.²⁴ Nevertheless, for exigent political reasons, Wilson did in the summer of 1916 endorse an effort to abolish child labor through federal legislation (the Keating-Owens Act) and recommended passage of the Adamson Act to award operating railroad workers the basic eight-hour day at their previous ten-hour wage. This legislation proved an essential element in Wilson’s 1916 political strategy and his electoral coalition.²⁵

What had been mostly tendencies or halfway measures toward a new labor policy became a reality during World War I. One part of that reality, the AFL’s cooperation in Wilsonian diplomacy, has been described and analyzed by Ronald Radosh and Frank L. Grubbs, Jr.²⁶ The other and far more important part—domestic labor policy—has received no comparable treatment. James Weinstein touches several vital aspects of the subject in his book The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State, as does David Kennedy in Over Here. But Weinstein forces Wilsonian labor policy into the Procrustean bed of his “corporate liberal” interpretation of American history, and Kennedy deals with it largely from the perspective of corporate planners and those members of the administration least sensitive to organized labor.²⁷

Wartime labor policy was shaped by two distinct factors: the new realities of social and economic power, and the absence of a uniform, central direction in administration policy. The demands of war magnified labor’s power. With unemployment eliminated, workers and unions felt free to press their claims against capital, whether through voluntary quits or collective action. Both labor turnover and the number of strikes reached unprecedented levels in 1917.²⁸ As for policy, what Robert D. Cuff has shown to be true for the War Industries Board—the existence of bureaucratic infighting and the absence of any accepted central plan—was also true for labor policy.²⁹ By and large, the president allowed subordinate officials, departments, and boards to make policy. Except for the heavy-handed repression of labor and political radicals, he rarely tried to coordinate actions on the labor front. The Labor Department under William B. Wilson and the war department under Newton D. Baker generally favored trade unionism, as did the NWLB and the War Labor Policies Board (WLPB). The Commerce, Agriculture, and Justice Departments as well as the separate military branches, the WIB, and corporate dollar-a-year men often equated unionism with radicalism (subversion) and sympathized with open-shop principles. Added to this confusion, the federal judiciary handed down several decisions that conflicted with vital aspects of Wilsonian policy. In February 1918, the journalist Robert Bruere succinctly noted these contradictions. “Here were three branches of the Federal Government,” he wrote,

pursuing three radically divergent and hopelessly conflicting policies towards the wageworkers at the very moment when the nation was making a patriotic appeal to the workers to get out a maximum production. . . . The United States Department of Justice was arresting them, the President’s Mediation Commission was telling them that they must organize into unions, and the United States Supreme Court was announcing that if they attempted to organize under certain conditions they would be guilty of contempt of court.³⁰

Despite the confusion in Washington, trade unionism clearly gained from the prevailing drift in federal policy. In this sense, David Kennedy is wrong to assert that federal labor policy did not alter the existing lines of power in society but instead scrupulously followed them and set them more rigidly in place. He is equally wrong in insisting that reformers and labor leaders had little success in winning federal support for trade unionism, or that Gompers himself perceived such a goal as unrealistic by agreeing to an unpublished Council of National Defense (CND) statement stipulating “that employers and employees in private industries should not attempt to take advantage of the existing abnormal conditions to change the standards which they were unable to change under normal conditions.”³¹

The evidence suggests a far different reality than the one limned by Kennedy. Of course, if one focuses primarily on the policies of Bernard Baruch, Walter S. Gifford, Louis B. Wehle, and Colonel Brice P. Disque, unions seemed to get short shrift in wartime.³² But if one examines the records of the labor department, the President’s Mediation Commission, the NWLB, the WLPB, and union leaders’ own role in setting wartime policies, a quite different picture emerges. For example, on the CND statement concerning the maintenance of standards during the war, Labor Secretary Wilson interpreted that as applying only to working conditions and not to the question of unionization. He defined the right to organize as the “burning issue” of the day, and asserted “. . . that capital has no right to interfere with working men organizing. . . . “And he convinced the President to write as follows to the director of the antiunion Alabama coal operators’ association: “It is generally acknowledged that our laws and the long established policy of our Government recognize the right of workingmen to organize unions if they so desire.”³³

Moreover, many officials in Washington found labor more amenable to federal policies and goals than capital. President Wilson told unionists publicly at the 1917 AFL convention, “you are reasonable in a larger number of cases than the capitalists.” More revealingly, War Secretary Baker confided to the President: “I confess I am more concerned to have industry and capital know what you think they ought to do in regard to labor than to have labor understand its duty. In my own dealings with the industrial problem here, I have found labor more willing to keep step than capital.”³⁴

As unrest swelled in the summer of 1917 and strikes disrupted war production, employers and patriots demanded they be suppressed. The administration, however, preferred a different prescription for quelling the eruption. As the Labor Department defined the situation, unrest was primarily an expression “of revolt at low wages and hard conditions in industry and impatience with the slow evolution of economic democracy through the organized labor movement.” The Labor Department seconded Gompers’s advice to the President that if employers recognized bona fide AFL unions, the labor unrest would diminish. The problem was that capital refused to keep step with federal labor policy. And capitalist resistance to unionism grew as employers increasingly expected assistance from their many friends in Washington, whose policies were seldom directly overruled by the President.³⁵

To overcome employer antiunionism and also to define more clearly a federal labor policy, Secretaries Wilson and Baker joined with Gompers in August 1917 to urge the president to appoint a special commission to investigate the wartime upheaval and make recommendations for its resolution. The result was the appointment in September of the President’s Mediation Commission. Chaired by Secretary Wilson and composed of two AFL representatives and two employers, the Commission was in fact dominated by Felix Frankfurter, who shared his friend Walter Lippmann’s conviction that the war provided an unsurpassed opportunity to reform American society.³⁶

Even before the Commission began its task, Frankfurter laid down its guiding principles. He agreed with the Wilson-Gompers diagnosis of the labor troubles, that is, that most strikes resulted from a combination of real material grievances and employer antiunion practices. Frankfurter thus proposed that the mediators conduct in-depth investigations of working conditions in the troubled industries, that they recommend the creation of formal conciliation machinery to ameliorate grievances, that they urge employers to deal responsibly with their employees, and that they convince American workers that the war was not only to defend democracy abroad but also to establish industrial justice at home. Like Gompers and Wilson, Frankfurter believed that these objectives could best be accomplished through peaceful bargaining between employers and AFL unions.³⁷

Guided by Frankfurter’s principles, the Commission investigated disputes in the southwestern copper industry, the Pacific northwest woods, the West Coast telephone business, and the Chicago packing houses. In January 1918, it recommended that (1) a form of collective relationship between management and men is essential and that the recognition of this principle by the government should form an accepted part of the national labor policy; (2) employers should immediately establish grievance machinery to handle real problems equitably before they precipitate strikes; (3) the eight-hour day be established as national policy; and (4) unified direction of wartime labor policy be established.³⁸

Acting on the Commission’s recommendations, President Wilson charged his Labor Secretary with directing labor policy. Secretary Wilson promptly invited representatives of capital, labor, and the public to meet as a War Labor Conference Board to devise a program to govern labor-management relations. In March 1918 the Board approved recommendations comparable to those of the Commission, defending the principle of workers’ right to form trade unions unimpeded by employers. But it still equivocated by also recommending that management be required to bargain with shop committees not with union representatives, and that unions coerce neither workers to join nor employers to grant the union shop.³⁹

In April 1918 the President created the NWLB, which was patterned after the composition of the War Labor Conference Board. As important as the policy principles enunciated and implemented by the NWLB were the practices of the co-chairs, William Howard Taft and Frank P. Walsh, especially the latter. Walsh convinced Taft that the right of workers to organize should be sacrosanct and free of all employer interference. The Board, as a matter of policy, ordered reinstatement and back pay for employees discharged for union activities. It also ruled that a whole host of traditional employer antiunion tactics were in violation of federal labor policy. Walsh, moreover, privately cooperated with labor leaders seeking to unionize the meatpacking and steel industries. Paradoxically, he also offered what assistance he could to labor radicals (mostly Wobblies) whom the federal government sought to put “out of business.”⁴⁰

The NWLB instituted a minor revolution by making the right to unionize real. Some of its specific orders introduced a whole new concept of property rights consonant with those William B. Wilson had enunciated before the 1913 AFL convention. As one business journal said of an NWLB order: “We know of no legislation authorizing the [NWLB] . . . to require private business concerns to revolutionize their business methods. We cannot see that the War Labor Board or the War Department has any more right to prescribe collective bargaining instead of individual bargaining than it has to prescribe red ink instead of black ink for the firm’s letterheads.”⁴¹

This legal revolution also was endorsed by another agency created in the spring of 1918 to implement labor policy: the War Labor Policies Board. And no wonder, for its head was Felix Frankfurter. Indeed, an unpublished document in the files of the WLPB proposed “. . . to create in industry a condition of collective bargaining between employer and employee. It contemplates, and is based upon the existence of unions of employees and unions of employers.”⁴² Together these agencies were responsible for transforming labor-management relations from a totally private arena to a semi-public one and, in the process, upsetting the historical balance of power in many industries between workers and bosses. As William Z. Foster, the leader of the meat-packing and steel organizing campaigns, observed about the spring-summer 1918, “. . . the Federal administration was friendly; the right to organize was freely conceded by the government and even insisted upon. . . . The gods were indeed fighting on the side of Labor. It was an opportunity to organize the [steel] industry such as might never again occur.”⁴³

Labor took full advantage of the opportunity. The growth in membership was truly remarkable, increasing by over 2 million between 1917 and 1920, a gain of almost 70 percent. For the first time total union membership approached 20 percent of the civilian nonagricultural labor force, a level more than twice as high as any previous peak. Along with this growth went steady rises in wage rates and the general achievement of the eight-hour day.⁴⁴

Union advances could be seen wherever the federal government intervened directly and regularly, and wherever effective labor organizations or aggressive organizers functioned. In the men’s clothing trade, which prospered on wartime federal contracts, Sidney Hillman, the president of the industry’s union, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, established excellent relations with federal contract administrators. As a result his union, barely two years old when the United States entered war, more than doubled its membership.⁴⁵ In two industries controlled by the federal government during the war (one, the railroads, directly and the other, coal, indirectly), unions also flourished. The United Mine Workers won equal participation with employers on the wartime Fuel Administration and used its influence there to advance the union into the previously nonunion Southern Appalachian coal fields. By war’s end, the UMWA claimed over 500,000 members, making it far and away the nation’s largest union.⁴⁶ The story was much the same on the railroads. William McAdoo, federal railroad czar, put out the welcome mat for labor leaders. Federal Railroad Administration orders increased wages, standardized work rules, and improved conditions. Unions grew rapidly, especially the previously smaller nonoperating unions. Between 1914 and 1920, for example, the Brotherhood of Railway Carmen expanded from 28,700 to 182,000 members. “A worker . . . with a union card in his pocket,” reported one carman, “will be looked after and has been assured by the government of this great country of ours that he will get a square deal.”⁴⁷

The most surprising gains occurred in industries with strong traditions of antiunionism: meat packing and steel. In both cases, the labor organizers (the same people, John Fitzpatrick and William Z. Foster, were primarily responsible for initiating both campaigns) looked to the federal government for support and received it. Between September 1917, when the Stockyards Labor Council was created in Chicago, and January 1918, organized labor succeeded in increasing dues-paying membership from about 8,000 to 28,229, and claimed between 25 and 50 percent of the industry’s workers. Unable to stop their employees from joining the union, the packers drew the line at recognition and collective bargaining. But federal pressure compelled the packers to negotiate with union representatives if not to recognize unionism. At the end of January 1918, the packers conceded union demands on employment and shop conditions, leaving other issues to be resolved by formal federal arbitration. In the arbitration hearings, Frank Walsh, soon to serve as co-chair of the NWLB, represented the unions. On March 30, 1918, the arbitrator, Judge Samuel Alschuler, handed down his award. He granted workers a basic eight-hour day with ten hours’ pay, substantial wage increases, and overtime premiums. The union took credit for the award and, in its wake, unionization swept across the meat-packing industry. Beginning in April, the NWLB delivered specific rulings and awards, which added impetus to the union drive. By November 1918, the Amalgamated Meat Cutters reported 62,857 dues-paying members, over twice as many as nine months earlier, and over ten times as many as three years earlier. “I think the foundations of unionism have been laid in the packing industry for a long time to come,” Foster informed Walsh. Although the companies still refused formally to recognize the unions, in David Brody’s words, “under the Alschuler administration, the unions assumed an important role both for the employees and management.”⁴⁸

A similar story repeated itself in steel. There too, as the journal of the Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel, and Tin Workers reported, “The Government stands firmly behind the organized labor movement in its right to organize, and that is why it [the union], is going to push its work of organization into the steel industries.” Foster transferred his attention from meat packing to steel and took command of an AFL-sponsored joint union organizing campaign (modeled after the multi-union Stockyards Labor Council). In the summer and fall of 1918, steelworkers joined the unions by the thousands. Foster claimed between 250,000 and 350,000 members. The balance of power in steel had surely shifted. Judge Elbert Gary of United States Steel recognized as much when he observed that the best that employers could hope for was that labor questions be evaded until the war was over.⁴⁹

To summarize the impact of the federal war labor policies, wherever unions had real strength or solid footholds before the war crisis, they made enormous membership advances and often won de facto recognition, bargaining rights, and even the union shop. Where able and dedicated organizers worked to spread the union gospel, as in meatpacking, steel, and the railroad shops, labor’s gains were equally substantial. Only where unions had been absent in the prewar period, fought among themselves, or lacked able organizers did the employers prevail. In those cases, war and federal intervention caused no fundamental alteration in relations between labor and capital. But even there, the war produced some changes. Nonunion workers won the eight-hour day, vastly improved working conditions, and formal grievance procedures. The New Republic was not far off when it observed at the war’s end: “We have already passed to a new era, the transition to a state in which labor will be the predominating element. . . . The character of the future democracy is largely at the mercy of the recognized leaders of organized labor.”⁵⁰

Federal wartime labor policies and Wilsonian democratic rhetoric had fired the imagination of labor leaders. “What labor is demanding all over the world today,” asserted Sidney Hillman, “is not a few material things like more dollars and fewer hours of work, but a right to a voice in the conduct of industry.” In January 1918, Hillman was moved to write to his young daughter: “Messiah is arriving. He may be with us any minute—one can hear the footsteps of the Deliverer—if only he listens intently. Labor will rule and the world will be free.”⁵¹ In more prosaic language, Harold Ickes described the postwar situation thus: “The chief issue is likely to be the relationship between capital and labor. . . . We sense disturbances way down underneath our social structure.”⁵²

Ickes was right; so was Hillman. In 1919 both labor and capital awaited “the Deliverer.” For radical trade unionists, Messiah appeared in the guise of the Bolshevik Revolution, or the British Labour Party’s plan for a New Social Order, or more simply as the triumph in America of trade unionism and industrial democracy. For employers, Messiah came as the armistice with its promise of the restoration of the status quo antebellum. Of such conflicting visions was industrial warfare made.

The year 1919 was one like none other in American history. Industrial conflict reached unprecedented levels as more than 3,000 strikes involved over 4 million workers. Even police walked out. Race riots and bomb scares proliferated. Not one but three American communist parties were formed. The world had been turned upside down. So thought Warren G. Harding, who wrote to a friend in the fall of 1919: “I really think we are facing a desperate situation. It looks to me as if we are coming to a crisis in the conflict between the radical labor leaders and the capitalistic system under which we have developed the republic. . . . I think the situation has to be met and met with exceptional [sic] courage.”⁵³ So, too, thought Joe Tumulty, President Wilson’s close and confidential adviser, who observed of the February 1919 Seattle general strike: “It is clear to me that it is the first appearance of the Soviet in this country.”⁵⁴

In this highly charged and tense situation, American labor faced a new set of economic and political realities. Fears abounded of labor-made surplus in a depressed economy. Yet wartime inflation continued unabated, sparking consumer resistance to union wage demands. Wilsonianism seemed discredited politically. The Republicans had swept into control of Congress in the 1918 election, and their triumph flowed as much from disenchantment with Wilson’s domestic policies, especially his alleged truckling to labor, as from his diplomacy. The 1920 election seemed destined to confirm Republican national political dominance, a dominance now more threatening than ever to organized labor. Small wonder then that during the spring and summer of 1919 all the federal agencies that had governed wartime labor policy were dismantled. Trade unionists could no longer look to a Frank Walsh or a Felix Frankfurter to defend their interests in Washington.⁵⁵

These new realities quickly made themselves felt in the Wilson administration. Tumulty, for one, advised that high wages were bad for consumers and hence for Democrats. As workers walked off their jobs by the millions, Tumulty suggested that “One way labor can help is to increase production.” The new Attorney General, A. Mitchell Palmer, sounded a similar note. During the autumn 1919 coal strike, he recommended against any concessions to the miners’ unlawful behavior because “. . . concessions . . . will insure unreasonably high prices in all commodities for at least three years to come.” And Tumulty spelled out the political implications lucidly for the President. Wilson had already assured the Democrats of labor’s political support through enactment of the Clayton and Adamson acts as well as wartime labor policies. If the administration continued to befriend unionists, advised Tumulty, “The country at large would think that we are making a special appeal to labor at this time. If there is any class in this country to which we have been overgenerous it has been labor. I think that this class owes us more than they have been willing to give.”⁵⁶

This is not to say that the Wilson administration completely deserted its friends in the labor movement. Quite the contrary. Administration officials still believed in the right of workers to organize unhindered by employer coercion and in basic trade union principles, and they still encouraged employers to recognize unions and bargain with them. But now they also feared labor radicalism, took the AFL’s support for granted, and declined to pressure or compel employers to deal with unions.⁵⁷

With the war over and Republicans in control of Congress, Judge Gary and other corporation leaders could now deal with the labor question—and on the terms they preferred. In the packinghouses and railroad shops employers refused to extend recognition or bargain collectively. In both places, the unions were unable to perfect the organization begun during the war. And they could no longer turn to Washington for support. If unions in the two industries did not collapse absolutely in 1919–20, they were much weakened by 1922.⁵⁸

Even more revealing was what happened in steel and coal. In the former, the union suffered a stillbirth; in the latter, the largest and most powerful union in the country bore the full brunt of a federal antistrike campaign. In steel, union leaders had believed, in the words of John Fitzpatrick that “. . . the Government would intervene and see to it that the steel barons be brought to time, even as the packers were. . . . President Wilson would never allow a great struggle to develop between the steelworkers and their employers.” Wilson indeed sympathized with the unions’ plight in steel and desired to avert a strike. But he would neither rebuke steel management publicly nor compel it to meet with labor. For with the war over the President lacked the law or precedent to do so. Thus, the strike came on September 22, 1919, federal troops helped break it, and the unionization of steel failed.⁵⁹

The situation in coal was both more complicated and less decisive in its outcome. Unlike in steel, unexpired wartime federal legislation still governed the industry and the UMWA had a friend in the Secretary of Labor. Also the UMWA, unlike the steel unions, had a large and loyal dues-paying membership with a long union tradition. Yet when the miners actually left the pits, the administration officials most involved in the situation, William B. Wilson excepted, defined the strike “as not only unjustifiable but unlawful.” They insisted that the walkout was directed against the government, not the mine owners. “I am sure,” wrote Tumulty, “that many of the miners would rather accept the peaceful process of settlement . . . than go to war against the Government of the United States.” But go to war the miners did. As a result, the administration sought and obtained a stringent antistrike injunction. It also readied troops for duty in the coal fields, tapped the phones of union leaders, sent federal agents to spy on the union, and threatened alien strikers with summary deportation. In the end, union leaders had no choice but to call off the strike. Because the UMWA was a large, stable union, it ultimately won a compromise wage award through the assistance of William B. Wilson. Yet as a result of the 1919 struggle, it lost most of its footholds in Southern Appalachia, a precondition for its subsequent national collapse in the 1920s.⁶⁰

The record of the immediate postwar years confirms David Brody’s observation that “depending on their own economic strength, American workers could not defeat the massed power of open-shop industry. Only public intervention might equalize the battle.” In two years the labor movement lost 1.5 million members and was forced to retreat to its prewar bastions. After 1919, the great mass-production industries again operated without unions.⁶¹

How great a distance remained in 1919 between the aspirations of organized labor and the desires of corporate capital was revealed by the Industrial Conference that President Wilson convened in October 1919. Conceived to resolve the postwar labor-capital upheaval and to avert the steel strike, Wilson’s First Industrial Conference did neither. It deadlocked over irreconciliable union-management positions. The AFL unionists in attendance sought an equal role with management and government in the control of industry. The business delegates, on the contrary, advocated the extirpation of unionism root and branch. It was the union movement, not the spectre of violent revolution, that frightened most businessmen. Hence they wanted the government to curb the unions’ drive for industrial power. And the essence of the open-shop principle, which remained their benchmark throughout the conference, was in Haggai Hurvitz’s words, “the ‘utmost freedom’ of management to act without outside interference and not labor’s freedom to be employed without discrimination.”⁶² In the absence of a countervailing government presence on behalf of labor, management’s principles and programs prevailed throughout the 1920s.

All in all, however, the Wilson years had provided a full dress rehearsal for the labor program of the New Deal. The political coalition between organized labor and the Democrats, constructed from 1912 to 1916, was perfected and strengthened in the Roosevelt years. The recommendations contained in the Walsh CIR report bore fruit in the advanced New Deal reforms of 1933–37. The labor policies the Wilson administration implemented during a war crisis the Roosevelt administration set in place in peacetime. Even the political dynamics of the two eras bore striking resemblances. By 1938, Roosevelt’s advisers were warning him that the labor question had become political dynamite, that the administration had already granted labor too much, and that the Democrats had the labor vote in their pocket. But 1938 was not 1919. War was yet to come, and when it came it lasted more than twice as long and necessitated many more elaborate and stringent domestic regulations. That, in many respects, was the fundamental difference in labor politics between the Wilson and Roosevelt years. The great labor reforms of the Wilson era occurred in the midst of war and collapsed in the disillusionment of peace. Roosevelt’s reforms were introduced in peacetime, were stabilized and routinized during the war, and then developed enough resiliency to enable organized labor to survive the postwar retrenchment.

Notes

1. For these themes see, among other works, the following: Robert Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York, 1967), chapters 5–8; Gabriel Kolko, The Triumph of American Conservatism (Glencoe, Ill., 1963); James Weinstein, The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State (Boston, 1968); Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital (New York, 1974), chapters 4 and 5; Daniel Nelson, Managers and Workers: Origins of the New Factory System in the United States, 1880–1920 (Madison, 1975), and Frederick W. Taylor and the Rise of Scientific Management (Madison, 1980); James B. Gilbert, Work without Salvation (Baltimore, 1977), passim; and Martin J. Sklar, “Woodrow Wilson and the Political Economy of Modern United States Liberalism,” in James Weinstein and David W. Eakins, eds., For a New America (New York, 1970), 46–100.

2. Ray Stannard Baker, “Parker and Theodore Roosevelt on Labor,” McClure’s 24 (Nov. 1904), 41; Bruno Ramirez, When Workers Fight: The Politics of Industrial Relations in the Progressive Era, 1898–1916 (Westport, Conn., 1978).

3. David Brody, Workers in Industrial America (New York, 1980), 127.

4. Graham Adams, Jr., Age of Industrial Violence, 1910–1915 (New York, 1966).

5. Cf. Georges Haupt, La Deuxième Internationale, 1889–1914 (Paris, 1964), and Socialism and the Great War: The Collapse of the Second International (Oxford, 1972).

6. Cited in Marc Karson, American Labor Unions and Politics, 1900–1918, (Boston, 1965 ed.), 90.

7. For the historical and cultural roots of working-class politics see Alan Dawley and Paul Faler, “Working-Class Culture and Politics in the Industrial Revolution: Sources of Loyalism and Rebellion,” Journal of Social History 9 (Summer 1976), 466–480; Richard Jensen, The Winning of the Midwest (Chicago, 1971), Paul Kleppner, The Cross of Culture (New York, 1970), and Samuel P. McSeveney, The Politics of Depression (New York, 1972).

8. Gerald Eggert, Railroad Labor Disputes (Ann Arbor, 1967).

9. Charles O. Gregory, Labor and the Law (New York, 1946), chapters 4–6, 8, 10; Karson, American Labor Unions, 29–41; Bernard Mandel, Samuel Gompers (Yellow Springs, Ohio, 1963), 263–283.

10. See AFL Papers, Office of the President, File A, State Historical Society of Wisconsin (hereafter cited as SHSW) for the many boxes of correspondence and petitions concerning political action. See also John H. M. Laslett, Labor and the Left (New York, 1970); and David Montgomery, Workers’ Control in America (New York, 1979), 48–90.

11. American Federationist 12 (May, 1906), 293–296; (Aug. 1906), 529–531; 15 (Aug. 1908), 589, 598–605; Karson, American Labor Unions, 42–70; Mandel, Gompers, 284–295.

12. Dallas Lee Jones, “The Wilson Administration and Organized Labor, 1912–1919,” Ph.D. Dissertation, Cornell University, 1954, 1–33.

13. Arthur S. Link, Wilson: The Road to the White House (Princeton, 1947), 112, 127, 158–159.

14. Ibid., 470–471; M. Karson, American Labor Unions, 70–73; Mandel, Gompers, 295–297; J.J. Keegan to Samuel Gompers, Oct. 11, 1912; Gompers to Keegan, Oct. 14, 1912, and Keegan to Gompers, Oct. 15, 1912, all in AFL Papers, Office of the President, File A, Box 17, SHSW; Samuel Gompers, Seventy Years of Life and Labor (New York, 1925), 2: 282–283.

15. Jones, “Wilson Administration,” 50.

16. Ibid., 312–320; John S. Smith, “Organized Labor and the Government in the Wilson Era, 1913–1921,” Labor History 3 (Fall, 1962), 267–268, 272; Memorandum, R. Lee Guard, July 14, 1916, AFL Papers, Office of the President, File A, Box 22; Gompers to John L. Lewis, Nov. 19, 1916, Lewis to Gompers, Nov. 20 and 21, 1916, and Gompers to William B. Wilson, Nov. 23, 1916, all in AFL Papers, Box 23.

17. This led Cyrus McCormick to criticize the President in a letter to his brother Harold: “. . . he has alienated almost the entire business community because of the way he openly espoused the cause of labor and yielded to the threats of labor leaders.” Cited in Robert Ozanne, A Century of Labor-Management Relations at McCormick and International Harvester (Madison, 1967), 114.

18. For the letter to Gompers see Jones, “Wilson Administration,” 88; for the two quotations, John Lombardi, Labor’s Voice in the Cabinet: A History of the Department of Labor from Its Origins to 1921 (New York, 1968 ed.), 104–107, and 75–95 on William B. Wilson.

19. The files of the United States Mediation and Conciliation Service, Record Group 280, National Archives, show how Wilson used former union colleagues; cf. J. S. Smith, “Organized Labor,” 276, and Jones, “Wilson Administration,” 85–90.

20. The best history of the Commission remains Adams, Age of Industrial Violence; a brief, more tendentious summary is in Weinstein, Corporate Ideal, chapter 7.

21. In 1916 the Commission Hearings and final report were published in eleven volumes as “Final Report and Testimony Submitted to Congress by the Commission on Industrial Relations,” Senate Document No. 415 (1st Session, 1916). More material can be found in the Frank P. Walsh Papers, New York Public Library, the reports of the investigators in the National Archives, Department of Labor Record Groups 1 and 174, and the CIR records at the SHSW, as well as twenty separate publications based on the field reports.

22. CIR, “Final Report,” 1–91; Adams, Age of Violence, 215–217; Weinstein, Corporate Ideal, 188, 190–191, 208–210; John R. Commons, Myself (Madison, 1964), 166–167, 172–173. Weinstein nevertheless concludes that Walsh had no intention of transforming social relations.

23. Adams, Age of Violence, 219–220.

24. Arthur S. Link, Wilson: The New Freedom (Princeton, 1956), 428–431; Link, Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Era, 1910–1917 (New York, 1954), 69–70; Mandel, Gompers, 297–300; Gompers, Seventy Years, 2: 298–299.

25. A. S. Link, Wilson and the Progressive Era, 235–237; Edward Berman, Labor Disputes and the President of the United States (New York, 1924), 106–125; K. Austin Kerr, American Railroad Politics, 1914–1920 (Pittsburgh, 1968), 33–34.

26. Ronald Radosh, American Labor and United States Foreign Policy (New York, 1969), Frank L. Grubbs, Jr., The Struggle for Labor Loyalty (Durham, N.C., 1968).

27. Weinstein, Corporate Ideal, chapter 8; David Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (New York, 1980).

28. Montgomery, Workers’ Control, 95–98.

29. Robert D. Cuff, The War Industries Board (Baltimore, 1973).

30. Robert Bruere, “Copper Camp Patriotism: An Interpretation,” Nation 106 (Feb. 1918), 236; Robert D. Cuff, “The Politics of Labor Administration in World War I,” Labor History 21 (Fall 1980), 546–569; E. Berman, Labor Disputes, 126–153; J. Lombardi, Labor’s Voice, 228–259.

31. Kennedy, Over Here, 266–267.

32. Kennedy’s interpretation seems drawn heavily from three articles by Louis B. Wehle: “The Adjustment of Labor Disputes,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 32 (1917), 122–141; “Labor Problems in the United States, ibid. (1918), 333–392; and “War Labor Policies,” ibid. 33 (1919), 321–343. Bernard Baruch succinctly stated Kennedy’s view: “While I am in favor of making every possible concession, at the same time we certainly should preserve the status quo and not permit anything to be used as a leverage to change conditions from the standpoint either of the employers or the employees.” Baruch to William B. Wilson, June 30, 1917, Department of Labor, Record Group 280, File 33/493.

33. Jones, “Wilson Administration,” 343; Mandel, Gompers, 366–368.

34. Lombardi, Labor’s Voice, 238; Jones, “Wilson Administration,” 350–351.

35. Gompers to Wilson, Aug. 10, 1917, Gompers Letterbooks, 5: 237, Library of Congress; Newton D. Baker to William B. Wilson, Aug. 1, 1917, and Wilson to Baker, Aug. 3, 1917, Department of Labor, Record Group 280, File 33/574; Survey 38 (Aug. 11, 1917), 429.

36. Gompers to Baker, Aug. 22, 1917, Gompers Letterbooks; Gompers to W. B. Wilson, Aug. 27, 1917, W. B. Wilson, memo to President Wilson, Aug. 31, 1917, Woodrow Wilson to N. Baker, Sept. 19, 1917, and Woodrow Wilson to W. B. Wilson, Sept. 19, 1917, Department of Labor, Record Group 174, File 20/473; cf. Meyer H. Fishbein, “The President’s Mediation Commission and the Arizona Copper Strike, 1917,” Southwestern Social Science Quarterly 30 (Dec. 1949), 176ff.; Weinstein, Corporate Ideal, 214; Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century (Boston, 1980), 112–115.

37. F. Frankfurter, memo to the Commission, Oct. 5, 1917, Department of Labor, Record Group 174, File 20/473.

38. Report of the President’s Mediation Commission to the President of the United States, January 9, 1918; the unpublished hearings and reports of the Commission can be found in Department of Labor, Record Group 280, File 33/517; for more on Frankfurter’s role, Harlan B. Phillips, Felix Frankfurter Reminisces (New York, 1960), 117–121.

39. David Brody, Labor in Crisis: The Steel Strike of 1919 (Philadelphia, 1965), 53; Jones, “Wilson Administration,” 363–370.

40. Jones, “Wilson Administration,” 372; Weinstein, Corporate Ideal, 248; H. F. Pringle, The Life and Times of William Howard Taft (New York, 1939),2: 916; see Walsh Papers, Box 18; Bureau of Labor Statistics Bulletin No. 287, “National War Labor Board” (Washington, 1922).

41. Jones, “Wilson Administration,” 381.

42. Brody, Labor in Crisis, 58; Lombardi, Labor’s Voice, 265–292.

43. Brody, Labor in Crisis, 61.

44. Historical Statistics of the United States (Washington, 1960), Series D 735–740, p. 97; Montgomery, Workers’ Control, 95–101; Brody, Labor in Crisis, 50–51, 60–61; Stanley Shapiro, “The Great War and Reform,” Labor History 12 (Summer 1971), 334–335.

45. Matthew Josephson, Sidney Hillman (New York, 1952), 162–176.

46. United Mine Workers Journal, June 21, 1917, 4, Aug. 30, 1917, 6; Melvyn Dubofsky and Warren W. Van Tine, John L. Lewis (New York, 1977), 35–37, 42.

47. Railway Carmen’s Journal 23 (June 1918), 347–348, cited in Stephen Freedman, “The Union Movement in Joliet, Illinois, 1870–1920: Organization and Protest in a Steel-Mill Town,” unpublished paper, p. 20; K. Austin Kerr, American Railroad Politics, 91–92.

48. David Brody, The Butcher Workmen: A Study of Unionization (Cambridge, Mass., 1964), 76–83.

49. Brody, Labor in Crisis, 60–61, 63–77.

50. Cited in Shapiro, “The Great War and Reform,” 340.

51. Josephson, Hillman, 190–193.

52. Cited in Kennedy, Over Here, 287.

53. Warren G. Harding to F. E. Scobey, Oct. 25 and Nov. 3, 1919, Harding Papers, Reel 21, Ohio Historical Society.

54. John Morton Blum, Joe Tumulty and the Wilson Era (Boston, 1951), 206.

55. Berman, Labor Disputes, 154–209; Lombardi, Labor’s Voice, 306–315; Jones, “Wilson Administration,” 436–440.

56. A. Mitchell Palmer to Chamber of Commerce, Moberly, Missouri, Dec. 1, 1919, Department of Labor, Record Group, 174, Box 207; Blum, Tumulty, 148–149.

57. On this point see Brody, Labor in Crisis, 103–104, 127–128.

58. Brody, Butcher Workmen, 85–91; Robert Zieger, Republicans and Labor, 1919–1929 (Lexington, Ky., 1969), 129 ff.

59. Brody, Labor in Crisis, 102–103, 147–178.

60. Dubofsky and Van Tine, Lewis, 53–61.

61. Brody, Workers in Industrial America, 45.

62. Haggai Hurvitz, “Ideology and Industrial Conflict: President Wilson’s First Industrial Conference of October, 1919,” Labor History 18 (Fall 1977), 516–517, 518–519, 521–522; for a more benign view of the conference, Brody, Labor in Crisis, 127–128; on a second Wilson Industrial Conference and its failure, see Gary Dean Best, “President Wilson’s Second Industrial Conference, 1919–1920,” Labor History 16 (Fall 1975), 505–520.