When our industries were small, a strong human tie bound together employer and worker. Following the expansion which began after the Civil War, our industries resolved themselves into vast organizations and corporations, and the relations between employer and worker became more and more impersonal. The workers first organized into trade unions, which presently expanded into federated unions similar to those which a generation before had begun to be formed in Great Britain.
The rapid growth of our industries and the impersonal relations between employer and employed made it apparent that social justice required that reciprocal rights be recognized in order to bring about a better understanding of a relationship which had already become increasingly strained and often embittered, resulting in serious strikes and lock-outs. One of the first organizations to meet this need was formed in Chicago in 1894, following the Pullman strike. It was called the Civic Federation of Chicago and was under the leadership of a number of prominent men of that city, directed by Ralph M. Easley.
Six years later the scope of this organization was enlarged, and in the name of the National Civic Federation a conference was called in Chicago, in December, 1900, and the debate centered round the proposition that in American industries voluntary conciliation was preferable to compulsory arbitration. At that conference a committee was selected whose duty it was to collect information at home and abroad regarding measures of arbitration, and to advise with employers and workmen in this country whenever and wherever possible.
In the following December, 1901, the National Civic Federation held a conference in New York in the rooms of the New York Board of Trade and Transportation. I was then president of that Board and was asked to preside at the conference. After adjourning the sessions, we organized the industrial department of the Federation, with a committee of twelve men representing the public, twelve men representing employers, and twelve men representing wage-earners. These three groups were headed, respectively, by Grover Cleveland, Marcus A. Hanna, and Samuel Gompers. All of their colleagues were men of national distinction and were recognized leaders in their fields. From this larger committee of thirty-six, an executive committee of five was selected, whose members were as follows: Marcus A. Hanna, chairman; Samuel Gompers, first vice-president; I, second vice-president; Charles A. Moore, treasurer; and Ralph M. Easley, secretary.
The scope and plan of the industrial department was to promote industrial peace in whatever way might seem best. We planned for a large meeting in May, when two public sessions were to be held, one at Cooper Union and one in the rooms of the New York Chamber of Commerce. We issued a statement of our plan and scope and inaugurated a broad educational campaign.
Meanwhile our department proved itself most practical. It actively helped settle several disputes, notably the Albany street-car strike, the disagreement between the National Metal Trades Association and the International Association of Machinists, and the United States steel strike. And it was instrumental in averting the threatened anthracite coal strike.
The identical ideal that I held up in my opening address at the meeting in January, 1901, I should hold up to-day: namely, that industrial peace, to be permanent, cannot rest upon force, but must rest upon justice, and in essential industries especially, upon a high sense of responsibility to the public by both employer and employed. In no other country are conditions, by nature and by principles of government, better adapted to the equitable adjustment of the reciprocal rights, duties, and privileges of labor and capital than in our own, because we are a democratic people with no fixed class distinctions to separate us. The laborer of to-day may be the capitalist of to-morrow, and vice versa. Capital and labor are interdependent, not opponents; and it is on the basis of that dependency that adjustments in the relationship between them must be made. This ideal is, happily, more widely recognized to-day than it was when the National Civic Federation was organized.
I gave considerable attention to the work of the Federation for a number of years. As the offices were in New York and the president and first vice-president were both resident in other cities, the direction of the organization between conferences largely fell upon me as second vice-president, with the important assistance of the secretary, Mr. Easley.
The Federation afforded a neutral forum where, under the chairmanship of one of its officers, the disputants could discuss their grievances and arrive at an understanding. Many times the growing bitterness between them was checked and a strike or lock-out averted. The fact was often borne in upon me how many of these industrial disputes grew out of misunderstandings which were cleared away when men assembled around a table and frankly discussed their differences.
To further the work and interests of the Federation I brought together in social relationship, at several dinners at my home, the representatives of all three groups; namely, the public, the wage-earner, and the employer. One day Andrew Carnegie expressed the desire to meet the labor leaders who had instigated the strike in the Carnegie works which resulted in the Homestead riots. Accordingly I arranged a dinner, to which I invited a number of the men of the labor wing of the Federation, as well as some others of the committee, together with Messrs. Wighe and Schaeffer, of Pittsburgh, officers of the Amalgamated Union, who had led the Homestead strike.