CHAPTER XI LABOUR AND SOCIAL REFORM It is time that property, as compared with humanity, should take second place, not first place. We must see to it that there is no overcrowding, that there is no bad sanitation, that there is no unnecessary spread of avoidable diseases, that the purity of food is safeguarded, that there is every precaution against accident, that women are not driven to impossible tasks, nor children permitted to spend their energy before it is fit to be spent. The hope and elasticity of the race must be preserved; men must be preserved according to their individual needs, and not according to the programmes of industry merely. What is the use of having industry, if we perish in producing it? If we die in trying to feed ourselves, why should we eat? If we die trying to get a foothold in the crowd, why not let the crowd trample us sooner and be done with it ?-The New Freedom, chap. xi. EVERY quality in Mr. Wilson's character made him a social reformer. He was a social reformer as Governor of New Jersey, and he was elected President of the United States in 1912 on a social reform programme. With organized labour he had temperamentally great sympathy, but down to his entry into New Jersey politics he had come into little actual contact with Labour as a political and social force. His attitude on Labour questions had been defined as far back as 1910, when he was still President of Princeton, in a letter affirming that "it is not only perfectly legitimate, but absolutely necessary, that labour should organize if it is to secure justice from organized capital, and everything that it does to improve the condition of working-men, to obtain legislation that will impose full legal responsibility upon the employer for his treatment of his employees and for their protection against accident, to secure just and adequate wages, and to put reasonable limits upon the working day and upon the exactions of those who employ labour, ought to have the hearty support of all fair-minded and publicspirited men." Mr. Wilson has not varied from that attitude during the years that have intervened; but it is a much less simple matter to handle labour problems from the White House than from the State House at Trenton. All questions of factory laws, industrial disputes, wage rates, compensation for accidents, and the like fall within the sphere of the State legislatures, not of the Federal Government. The only legislative power to be assumed by Congress is such as can be squared with clause 3 of section 8 of Article I of the Constitution, giving it authority "to regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian tribes." The words "among the several States " are driven hard. They at once bring every considerable railway under Federal regulation; and while Congress can do nothing to influence conditions of employment in a factory doing business exclusively within its own State, it gets some I This principl was definitely confirmed by the leading case U.S. 2. E. C. Knight, heard before the Supreme Court in 1895, hold by prohibiting the transport of its goods in interstate commerce unless the conditions of their manufacture have conformed to prescribed. standards. Much of the work of the Supreme Court has consisted of deciding on the constitutionality of Federal laws challenged by the States as an encroachment on their rights. To that standing difficulty was added the fact that in America, as elsewhere, problems arising out of the European War absorbed time and attention which both Cabinet and Congress would have desired to devote to domestic legislation. In spite of that the Wilson Administration has carried through a striking list of measures bearing on social and industrial questions. And in almost every case the President's share in their initiation or successful passage has been large. His relations with Labour have not been uniformly smooth. As is usual in times of industrial prosperity, there has been much industrial unrest, and one or two serious deadlocks, since Mr. Wilson's advent to power in 1913. The great textile strike, organized at Lawrence, in Massachusetts, by the Industrial Workers of the World (the unskilled labourers' federation), fell in his predecessor's term of office; but soon after his election there was a serious difficulty among the weavers at Paterson, in the President's own State of New Jersey, and in 1914 a grave outbreak took place at the Standard Oil Company's mines in Colorado. The issue was the recognition of union officials and the employment of non-union labour, and after a serious affray between the strikers and the State militia, Mr. Wilson was compelled to draft Federal troops into the State. The dispute was finally settled by a Commission of Investigation, appointed by the President, when all other attempts at a settlement had failed. There was fortunately no other disturbance of the magnitude of the Colorado outbreak, though the railway troubles of 1916 threatened to put that and every other industrial conflict of recent times in the shade. Meanwhile President Wilson had been proving the sincerity of his promises of social legislation. Of the three great measures passed during his first year of office all had an indirect bearing on the welfare of Labour. The Federal Reserve Act by distributing credit stabilized trade, and therefore employment; the Underwood Tariff Act lowered the price of staple commodities, like sugar, to the poor; and the Clayton Anti-Trust Act in certain important particulars constituted a charter for Labour comparable to the Trade Disputes Act in Great Britain. 66 The Clayton Act, which owed its passage into law to the pressure exerted personally by the President at a critical stage, expressly exempted labour unions from the veto on combinations in restraint of trade." The unions had suffered much from the rulings of the courts. The Sherman Anti-Trust Law, of 1890, had not been aimed at Labour; but decisions of the Supreme Court in 1908 and 1911 had brought trade unions definitely under it. The clauses in the Clayton Act, legalizing peaceful strikes and boy cotts, were the response to urgent demands of Labour for relief from the impossible position in which the Sherman Act had placed it. The same measure severely limited the power of the courts to restrict the action of unions by injunctions prohibiting the continuance of practices forming the subject of an impending action. It was not without reason that Mr. Wilson sent the pen with which he signed the Act as a memento to Mr. Samuel Gompers, the President of the American Federation of Labour. The Labour legislation rarely enjoys a smooth passage. It almost invariably produces a clash of interests, and long after the law has been enacted and put in force opinion will still remain sharply divided as to its value. That was particularly true of two measures passed by the Sixty-third and Sixty-fourth Congresses, the Seamen's Act and the Adamson Railway Act. Adamson Act must be considered later. Seamen's Act, introduced by Senator La Follette, one of the founders of the Progressive Party, was dictated partly by alarm at the Titanic disaster, and partly by the demand of the seamen's unions for better conditions of service. The effect of the Act was to establish the sailor's right to at least half wages within forty-eight hours of making an American port, and to abolish arrests for desertion; while it was laid down at the same time that after a specified interval 65 per cent. of the deck hands of any vessel calling at an American port must be able seamen, and 75 per cent. of the crew must be able to under |