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Struggles for the Public Interest: Organized Labor and State Mediation in Postwar America1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 November 2010

R. Todd Laugen
R. Todd Laugen
Affiliation:
University of Colorado at Boulder
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Extract

In his 1906 Annual Message to Congress, President Theodore Roosevelt urged support for a bill to mandate the government investigation of labor disputes before allowing workers to strike. In an “age of great corporate and labor combinations,” the president insisted “the public has itself an interest which can not wisely be disregarded; an interest not merely of general convenience, for the question of a just and proper public policy must also be considered.” Congress at the time was unmoved. Yet Roosevelt's proposal signaled a growing movement to compel the investigation and arbitration of major labor conflicts. This movement peaked in the years soon after World War I. Advocates for government mediation insisted that an impartial commission of experts could peacefully negotiate workplace disputes and spare the consuming public the contests of will and force associated with major strikes. The Progressive Era arbitration of railroad and mining conflicts established important precedents and have received significant attention from scholars. National mediation boards, however, rarely assumed the power to order participation. Such efforts were more prominent at die state level. In 1915 Colorado legislators largely implemented Roosevelt's proposal, creating the first government board with powers to ban strikes and lockouts pending an investigation in industries affected with a public interest. Soon after the war, Kansas expanded upon the Colorado precedent with a compulsory arbitration board to regulate a host of indus-tries deemed essential to the public. Programs for state mediation of labor conflicts in the postwar period were particularly bound up with questions of compulsion in the public interest.

Type
Essays: Graduate Research Forum
Information
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 4 , Issue 1 , January 2005 , pp. 69 - 82
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2005

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References

2 Roosevelt, Theodore, “Sixth Annual Message, Dec. 3, 1906,” in A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents (Washington, D.C., 1910), X: 7417Google Scholar. For an analysis of Roosevelt's call in terms of the effort by Carroll Wright at the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics to compile cost of living statistics, see Rauchway, Eric, “The High Cost of Living in the Progressives' Economy,” Journal of American History 88 (December 2001): 904CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Voluntary mediation boards were established for the railroads under the 1898 Erdman Act and made permanent under the 1913 Newlands Act. The Department of Labor also oversaw the U.S. Conciliation Service which sent voluntary mediators to address major disputes. President Roosevelt compelled mediation in the 1902 anthracite strike, but no lasting arbitration machinery for mining resulted. Witte, Edwin E., The Government in Labor Disputes (New York, 1932), 238–46Google Scholar;Dubofsky, Melvyn, The State and Labor in Modern America (Chapel Hill, 1994), 32, 40–44Google Scholar;Furner, Mary O., “Knowing Capitalism: Public Investigation and the Labor Question in the Long Progressive Era,” in The State and Economic Knowledge: The American and British Experiences, eds. Furner, Mary O. and Supple, Barry (Cambridge, 1990): 241–86Google Scholar;Wunderlin, Clarence E., Visions of a New Industrial Order: Social Science and Labor Theory in America's Progressive Era (New York, 1992)Google Scholar. On railroad arbitration, see especially, Kerr, Austin, American Railroad Politics, 1914–1920 (Pittsburgh, 1968)Google Scholar, and Waterhouse, David L., The Progressive Movement of 1924 and the Development of Interest Group Liberalism (New York, 1991): 17–23Google Scholar.

4 Though government officials in Kansas sought to give their board the trappings and title of a “court,” they actually created an arbitration board under the authority of the governor which did not specifically draw on legal precedent and was not tied to the judicial branch. See John Fitch's critique to this effect in The Survey (April 3, 1920): 7–8.

5 While the Colorado Industrial Commission and Kansas Industrial Court have received significant if rather dated scholarly attention, the fate of these experiments in terms of the politics of the public remains unexplored. See Warne, Colston E. and Gaddis, Merrill E., “Eleven Years of Compulsory Investigation of Industrial Disputes in Colorado,” Journal of Political Economy 35 (October 1927): 657–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar;Ko, Ting Tsz, Governmental Methods of Adjusting Labor Disputes in North America and Australasia (New York, 1926)Google Scholar;Bowers, John Hugh, The Kansas Court of Industrial Relations: The Philosophy and History of the Court (Chicago, 1922)Google Scholar;Johnsen, Julia E., comp., Kansas Court of Industrial Relations (New York, 1924)Google Scholar;Huggins, William L., Labor and Democracy (New York, 1922)Google Scholar;Feis, Herbert, “The Kansas Court of Industrial Relations, Its Spokesmen, Its Record,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 37 (August 1923): 705–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar;Gagliardo, Domenico, The Kansas Industrial Court: An Experiment in Compulsory Arbitration (Lawrence, 1941)Google Scholar;, Witte, The Government in Labor Disputes, 253–60Google Scholar.

6 Colorado Industrial Commissioner William Reilly, May 1924 Speech before the Association of Government Labor Officials, quoted in the Denver Labor Bulletin, May 24, 1924.

7 Montgomery, David, “Thinking about American Workers in the 1920s,” International Labor and Working-Class History 32 (Fall 1987): 7–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Typical was American Federation of Labor (AFL) president Samuel Gompers statement in 1888 that he believed in arbitration but not “between the lion and the lamb.…There can only be arbitration between equals. Let us organize.” The Samuel Gompers Papers, ed., Kaufman, Stuart B., 3 vols. (Urbana, 1986), 2:87Google Scholar; quoted in Furner, Mary O., “The Republican Tradition and the New Liberalism: Social Investigation, State Building, and Social Learning in the Gilded Age,” in The State and Social Investigation in Britain and the United States, eds., Lacey, Michael J. and Furner, Mary O. (Cambridge, 1993): 207, n. 70Google Scholar.

9 In recent years historians have begun to analyze postwar labor struggles to develop new political strategies to replace the loose partnership with the Democratic party. Though Gompers remained committed to what Julie Greene has insightfully termed “pure and simple politics,” city and state federations of labor challenged Gompers for political leadership of the AFL and increasingly turned to an independent party. Much work remains to be done, however, on cities outside of Chicago, New York, Minneapolis, and Seattle to understand how workers even within the AFL sought to mobilize along alternative lines in the political arena. Greene, Julie, Pure and Simple Politics: The American Federation of Tabor and Political Activism, 1881–1917 (Cambridge, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar;Strouthous, Andrew, US Labor and Political Action, 1918–24: A Comparison of Independent Political Action in New York, Chicago and Seattle (New York, 2000)Google Scholar;Valelly, Richard M., Radicalism in the States: The Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party and the American Political Economy (Chicago, 1989)Google Scholar;Montgomery, David, The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865–1925 (Cambridge, 1987)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 See the testimony of James Brewster and Thomas Patterson before the U.S. Commission on Industrial Relations in U.S. Senate, Industrial Relations: Final Report and Testimony Submitted to Congress by the Commission on Industrial Relations Created by the Act of August 23, 1912, Document No. 415, 64th Congress, 1st Session (1916) v. VII: 6668 and 6503–4. Hereafter Industrial Relations: Final Report. Denver unionist and state representative Harvey Garman particularly contested these efforts during the legislative session. United Labor Bulletin, May 23, 1914.

11 Commissioner Henry Weinstock, Industrial Relations: Final Report, 6506.

12 Industrial Relations: Final Report, 6459. Carlson consulted with Commons while the latter heard testimony in Denver in December 1914.

13 Colorado State Senator Helen Ring Robinson had made a personal study of the Canadian law in the preceding year and was an early advocate. See her testimony in Industrial Relations: Final Report, 7217. Legislators from the southern coal districts dominated by CFI were less enthusiastic about the compulsory aspects of the Colorado bill but were not able to halt its passage.

14 John Shaffer editorial, Rocky Mountain News, April 6, 1915. Organized labor opposed the compulsory powers of the CIC from the start. But because legislators joined the industrial commission measure to the workmen's compensation proposal, many labor leaders urged passage of the combined bill, hoping to repeal the compulsory provisions at a subsequent session of the legislature.

15 On Ludlow and its consequences see West, George P., United States Commission on Industrial Relations. Report on the Colorado Strike (Washington, DC, 1915)Google Scholar;, Montgomery, The Fall, 343–51Google Scholar;Adams, Graham, Age of Industrial Violence, 1910–15: The Activities and Findings of the United States Commission on Industrial Relations (New York, 1966), 146–75Google Scholar;McGovern, George S. and Guttridge, Leonard F., The Great Coalfield War (Boston, 1972)Google Scholar. While Montgomery captures the significant political influence exerted by CFI executives in the state, his analysis neglects state-level solutions like the CIC for a focus on the Rockefeller employee representation plan and the failed mediation efforts of the Wilson administration. McGovern's remains the most comprehensive account of the coal strike, massacre at Ludlow, and political fallout in the state. Yet he does not review the subsequent operations of the state Industrial Commission.

16 Quoted in Denver Labor Bulletin, November 9, 1915.

17 Denver Labor Bulletin, July 15, 1916; September 2, 1916.

18 Editorial, Denver Labor Bulletin, July 15, 1916. Though AFL members were the most vocal opponents of the CIC, Colorado affiliates had a tradition of reaching out to unorganized, white women workers, as repeated efforts to organize female laundry workers, bookbinders, and clothing makers suggest. Anti-Asian racism was prevalent among Colorado workers, of course, as in most of the West. But the state's AFL unions did not share the narrow focus on skilled male workers that characterized the national organization. Still, organized labor's campaign in Colorado to repeal the compulsory features of the Industrial Commission law relied on the laissez-faire, liberal-rights language that William Forbath and Karen Orren have perceptively analyzed. Forbath, William E., Law and the Shaping of the American Labor Movement (Cambridge, 1989)Google Scholar;Orren, Karen, Belated Feudalism: Labor, the Law, and Liberal Development in the United States (Cambridge, 1991)Google Scholar. Yet these scholars do not address the broad range of political efforts undertaken by organized labor in this period and particularly the effort to redefine the interests of the public in terms less hostile to unionism than those argued by the courts and industrial commissions. For a similar critique, see , Greene, Pure and Simple Politics, 9–10Google Scholar.

19 Denver Labor Bulletin, February 24, 1917; March 10, 1917; August 19, 1916; March 31, 1917.

20 McCartin, Joseph A., Labor's Great War. The Struggle for Industrial Democracy and the Origins of Modern American Labor Relations, 1912–1921 (Chapel Hill, 1997), 90Google Scholar. See in particular McCartin's analysis of Wilson's decision to nationalize telegraph lines when Western Union leaders ignored an NWLB ruling in the summer of 1918. Wilson also ordered union workers back to work, as in the case of the Bridgeport machinists (283).

21 On shifting expectations of the federal government, see , McCartin, Labor's Great War, ch. 8Google Scholar;, Montgomery, “Thinking about American Workers in the 1920s,” 14–15Google Scholar. Much scholarly work remains to be done on labor politics and war boards at the state level, however. For an revealing analysis of the rabidly anti-labor Minnesota Commission of Public Safety and its defiance of the NWLB, see Chrislock, Carl H., Watchdog of Loyalty: The Minnesota Commission of Public Safety During World War I (St. Paul, 1991)Google Scholar and Millikan, William, A Union Against Unions: The Minneapolis Citizens Alliance and Its Fight Against Organised Labor, 1903–1947 (St. Paul, 2001)Google Scholar.

22 State v. Howat et al. 109 Kansas 376 (1921); 198 Pacific Reporter 698.

23 Allen quoted in the New York Times, May 29, 1920. See also Frank Walsh, “Henry Allen's Industrial Court,' The Nation (June 5, 1920): 755–56.

24 Norwood, Stephen H., Strikebreaking and Intimidation: Mercenaries and Masculinity in Twentieth-Century America (Chapel Hill, 2002)Google Scholar.

25 The Survey (February 7, 1920): 552.

26 Current Opinion 68 (April 1920): 472–8; quoted in Johnsen, Kansas Court, 33, 36.

27 See New York Times, May 29, 1920.

28 Allen, Henry J., “How Kansas Broke a Strike and Would Solve the Labor Problem,” Current Opinion 68 (April 1920): 472–78Google Scholar, reprinted in Johnsen, Kansas Court, 33, 36; Fitch, John A., The Survey (April 3, 1920): 7Google Scholar.

29 New York Times, May 29, 1920 and June 7, 1920. For a similar debate about the “public interest” in labor disputes, see also the exchange of letters between former Secretary of War Newton Baker and Gompers reprinted in the American Federationist 30 (February 1923): 156–67.

30 Though not directly commenting on the state arbitration movement, AFL secretary Frank Morrison made a similar point in 1920. Morrison noted that labor was set apart in discussions of industrial relations from “the community” or “the public.” For Morrison, the interests of the community and organized labor were structurally antagonistic. He argued that the “community” and “public” were merely camouflage for the “well-to-do.” Quoted in Tomlins, Christopher L., The State and the Unions: Labor Relations, Law and the Organised Labor Movement in America, 1880–1960 (Cambridge, 1985), 4Google Scholar.

31 Manly, Basil, “Arbitration and Industrial Justice,” The Survey (April 8, 1922): 46Google Scholar;, Warne and , Gaddis, “Eleven Years,” 678–80Google Scholar; see also Clarence Williams's Letter to the Editor, The Survey (June 19, 1920): 418.

32 , Huggins, Labor and Democracy, 10, 93Google Scholar.

33 14th Census of the United States, v. 5 (Washington, DC, 1923)Google Scholar;, Adams, Age of Industrial Violence, 157Google Scholar. On the “Little Balkans” region of Kansas, see Schofield, Ann, “An ‘Army of Amazons’: The Language of Protest in a Kansas Mining Community, 1921–22,” American Quarterly 37 (Winter 1985): 686–701CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34 Morley quoted in Denver Labor Bulletin, July 7, 1922.

35 In his 1921 Annual Message to Congress, President Harding called for a federal industrial court to handle labor disputes “which menace the public welfare.…[T]he strike, lockout, and the boycott are as…disastrous in their results as war or armed revolution in the domain of politics.” Reprinted in , Bowers, Kansas Court, 121–22Google Scholar. Several U.S. Senators, especially Miles Poindexter, called for compulsory arbitration of railroad disputes in the postwar years. In 1922, Iowa Republican Senator William Kenyon introduced a bill to create a National Coal Mining Board which would have effectively introduced compulsory arbitration in the industry. See , Manly, “Arbitration and Industrial Justice,” 45Google Scholar.

36 , Wunderlin, Visions, 6Google Scholar;Scheiber, Harry N., “Public Economic Policy and the American Legal System: Historical Perspectives,” Wisconsin Law Review (1980): 1167–68Google Scholar. For a related argument about public interest cases which blurred the line dividing public from private activity, see Cott, Nancy F., “Giving Character to Our Whole Civil Polity: Marriage and the Public Order in the Late Nineteenth Century,” in U.S. History as Women's History: New Feminist Essays, eds., Kessler-Harris, Alice, Kerber, Linda, and Sklar, Kathryn Kish (Chapel Hill, 1995): 107–21Google Scholar.

37 , Huggins, Labor and Democracy, 52–53Google Scholar.

38 , Huggins, Labor and Democracy, 195–206Google Scholar;, Feis, “Kansas Court,” 715, 722Google Scholar; Court of Industrial Relations v. Chas. Wolff Packing Co. 109 Kansas 629; 201 Pacific Reporter 418; Court of Industrial Relations v. Chas. Wolff “Packing Co., Continuation 207 Pacific Reporter 806, quoted 809.

39 Chas. Wolff Packing Company v. Court of Industrial Relations of the State of Kansas 262 U.S. 522 (1925), quoted 523. In Dorchy v. State of Kansas 264 U.S. 286 (1924), the U.S. Supreme Court also held compulsory arbitration illegal in coal mining disputes.

40 The Nation (June 27, 1923): 737.

41 While in many ways this represented a continuation of national AFL policy during the Progressive Era–combining nonpartisan principles with a careful courtship of the Democratic Party–the new emphasis on primary elections did enable organized labor in Colorado to “capture” the Democratic Party. On AFL nonpartisanship and the Democrats, see , Greene, Pun and Simple Politics, esp. ch. 8Google Scholar.

42 See Denver Labor Bulletin reports of the AFL program, March 27, 1920 and May 1, 1920. On the Non-Partisan League see Valelly, Radicalism in the States. League organizers arrived in Colorado in 1918 and generated considerable support among the state's AFL members by the summer of 1920.

43 Rocky Mountain News, September 11, November 1, 1920; Denver Express, September 15, 1920.

44 Denver Labor Bulletin, June 3, August 26, September 9, 1922.

45 See especially Driscoll, Charles, “The Kansas Industrial Court–Gassed,” The Nation (April 25, 1923): 490Google Scholar.

46 , Gagliardo, Kansas Industrial Court, 216–19Google Scholar;Denver Labor Bulletin, September 9, 1922Google Scholar.

47 Reeky Mountain News, November 4, 9, 11, 1922Google Scholar;Colorado Labor Advocate, November 9, 1922Google Scholar.

48 Driscoll, Charles, The Nation (December 6, 1922): 600–01Google Scholar;White, William Allen, The Nation (December 27, 1922): 718Google Scholar.

49 Before the U.S. Supreme Court's second decision on the Wolff Packing case, in 1925 the Kansas legislature passed a bill to merge the state labor department, the Industrial Court, Public Utilities Commission, and tax commission into one bureau. This consolidation bill effectively abolished the Industrial Court. , Gagliardo, Kansas Industrial Court, 226–27Google Scholar. The CIC continued its operations into the 1930s but much more modestly and less coercively than in the immediate postwar years. See , Warne and , Gaddis, “Eleven Years,” 663–64Google Scholar.

50 On the growing nineteenth-century support for arbitration in these terms, see , Furner, “Social Investigation,” 217Google Scholar.

51 An editorial on the 1923 Supreme Court decision suggested that mining was “as essential a public service as railroading and more essential than a packing house.” The Nation (April 29, 1925): 483. In 1921, the Colorado Supreme Court had declared coal mining to be an industry clearly affected with a “public interest,” thereby reversing a lower court ruling to the contrary. Denver Post, April 4, 1921.

52 On the impact of the CPPA program in the West generally, see Montgomery, The Fall, 436.