regiments, and enlistments for other line duty, depleted their numbers. Troop movements and the great mass of war freights called for military precision in their work. The public took the sound attitude that a railroad strike would amount to treason, and the Railroad Administration did what it could during 1918 to equalize their pay. But there was no practical way to give them relief against the rising prices after the armistice. A threatened strike in the summer of 1919 was deferred upon appeal from Wilson to wait for six months in order to allow his plans for lowering prices to become effective. In the following winter he was too sick to initiate measures of relief, although A. Mitchell Palmer, the Attorney-General, administered what remained of the powers under the Food and Fuel Act of 1917, and organized fair-price committees and sought evidence against profiteers. But prices continued to rise, and in the spring of 1920 the public demand for goods persisted in spite of them. The six-months period expired, and the railroad men were next asked to await the decision of Congress as to the future control of the railroads, and to bring their request to their future employers. Their protracted uneasiness made it hard for the roads to procure labor, lowered the efficiency of all railroad service, and encouraged other groups to more stubborn struggles.

A great steel strike was started on September 22, 1919, aiming to force the United States Steel Corporation to recSteel strike ognize the unions. The leaders that directed it of 1919 belonged to the radical group, and were characterized by their opponents as socialist, anarchist, bolshevist, and I.W.W. There had been no great strike in this industry since the two failures at Homestead in 1892 and 1901. Gary, Indiana, the company town of the Steel Corporation, was the center of the strike, which lasted officially until January 8, 1920. Long before it was called off it was a failure. Steel orders had passed their peak, and high prices were discouraging to new construction. The steel mills were able to get non-union labor for what work they had to do. Public opinion turned against the strike because a demand

by the workers to share in the direction of their industries looked like the beginnings of sovietism, and this aversion obscured public notice of the repudiation of collective bargaining and the refusal to let union men hire halls or deliver public lectures

The coal strike Degan in the Indiana fields on November 1, 1919, in spite of notice from the President that such a strike would be regarded as illegal under the Food and Fuel Act that forbade conspiracies to hinder production while the state of war lasted. The Government immediately procured a mandatory order upon the officers of the United Mine Workers directing them to recall the strike. This they complied with, under protest, and in the American Federation of Labor the voice of Gompers was raised against the doctrine that any strike could be forbidden as contrary to public interest. A federal commission was named in December to adjust the wage matter; and a year later, when the anthracite miners became discontented, they profited by the experience of 1919, and declared no strike. The men concerned merely took a concerted "vacation" against which no legal action was possible. A strike of the police force in Boston gave special emphasis to the claim of labor to the unlimited right to strike. Governor Calvin Coolidge denied that public guardians possessed this right. He was reëlected in November, 1919, largely upon this issue, and though a Republican received a warm letter of congratulation from President Wilson

Labor con

radicalism

The American delay in ratifying the peace treaty was emphasized when on October 29, 1919, the international labor conference arranged for at Paris convened in Washington to draw up a general platform for ferences and labor betterment. One attempt to do this for the United States had already failed. An industrial conference, meeting on October 6, had broken up in less than three weeks because of the inability of the delegates of capital, labor, and the general public to find common ground for discussion. A second industrial conference, likewise called by the President, met on December 1, with Herbert C.

Hoover as its dominant personality. A manifesto on industrial relations, published by this body some months later, was swallowed up in the presidential campaign.

A menace of revolutionary radicalism was believed by many to be connected with the labor troubles. About September 1, 1919, the Socialist Party split, and a "left wing," which the regulars later expelled, formed itself into the Communist Party, and proclaimed allegiance to the Socialist Internationale that had recently sat at Moscow. Leaders of this party were later tried and convicted under the Espionage Act, which remained enforceable even after hostilities ceased. A general cry against socialism and the "reds" was heard throughout the country, and the Department of Justice proceeded, under the Alien Deportation Act, to round up foreign agitators who were believed to be dangerous. At Christmas the transport Buford sailed for Finland with a cargo of such aliens, who were thus carried back to the Russia of their revolutionary hopes. Victor L. Berger was made a national figure during the reaction against socialism. He had attained some fame in 1910 as the first Socialist to sit in Congress. In 1919 he was convicted of a conspiracy to obstruct the draft, and although reëlected to Congress in 1918 was not allowed to take his seat. At a special election after his unseating his Milwaukee constituency elected him again; and again in January, 1920, the House held that he was not entitled to take his oath. His district this time remained without a representative.

In New York five Socialists who had been chosen to the Assembly were expelled on the avowed ground that members of their party could not be both consistent and loyal; and when these were reëlected to succeed themselves, three of them were again unseated in September, 1920. Charles Evans Hughes protested against the expulsion, with the support of both the Tribune and the World, and LieutenantColonel Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., made a similar protest in his maiden speech in the New York Assembly. Uneasy radicalism struggled against reaction throughout the country, while the deadlocked Senate kept the nation out of peace.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

In the absence of reliable books dealing with the immediate past, the student must turn to periodical literature. The Weekly Review (May, 1919-) was started to combat "unthinking liberalism" and entered upon weekly arguments with the Nation, the New Republic, and the Freeman. The standard economic periodicals contain many articles on current labor and industry. William Z. Foster, The Great Steel Strike (1920), is a highly partisan account by a professional labor organizer; The Interchurch Report on the Steel Strike (1920) is based on sympathetic and scientific investigation. Much material upon the treaty is in E. M. House and C. Seymour (Eds.), What Really Happened at Paris (1921), and "Treaty of Peace with Germany. Hearings before the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate" (66th Cong., 1st Sess., Sen. Doc. 106).

teenth Amendments,

CHAPTER LVII

THE ELECTION OF 1920

THE year 1920 may well be remembered because the Constitution of the League of Nations then became effective with the promulgation of the peace treaty, and Eighteenth and Nine- the Constitution of the United States, whose provisions were invoked by opponents of ratification in America, was modified by the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Amendments. The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Amendments, one authorizing the levy of an income tax and the other providing for the direct election of United States Senators, were proclaimed seven years earlier, in the opening weeks of the Wilson Administration. The new amendments established prohibition and granted full suffrage to women. Together they worked a greater change in the purport of the Federal Constitution than had been brought about by all the preceding amendments since its original adoption.

The Eighteenth, or "dry" Amendment, went into effect on the same day that the Council of the League of Nations held its first session, January 16, a year after its acceptance by the last of the thirty-six States whose approval was necessary to its adoption. When the amendment was proposed by Congress, many States were already dry by their own enactment, and the prolonged fight for prohibition had been taken up by the managers of industry and the leaders of the South. Since 1872 there had been a National Prohibition Party, with a ticket in the field every four years, and for a generation before 1872 the temperance movement had flourished in local and spasmodic waves. War, with the need for conservation of grain as well as for temperate labor, accelerated the movement. Under the provisions of a war-time prohibition act of November, 1918, the United States was made dry after July 1, 1919, for the duration of