President White—The subject of the next address is “Social, Industrial and Civic Progress.” It is to be a review of fifty years of what has been done in labor economics, by one who has given a great deal of study to the subject, Mr. Ralph M. Easley, of New York City, Chairman of the Executive Council of the National Civic Federation.
Address, “Social, Industrial and Civic Progress”
Mr. Easley—Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen: In view of the fact that the work of the Committee on Civics was not outlined at the time it was organized, and as it was the desire of the national officers of the Conservation Congress that its work should not duplicate nor overlap the work of other organizations, the mapping out of a practical program for the committee was deferred until this meeting of the Congress.
Recognizing this situation, the officers of the Congress suggested that, as Chairman of the Committee on Civics, I should briefly review the progress that has been made by others in this country along industrial, social and civic lines. This seemed to me wise because at a gathering of this kind, which has discussed conditions that call for improvements, it might be helpful to note what progress our country has already made along these lines. To look back adown the slopes we have so painfully and undauntedly climbed in advancing to our present plane of material and moral welfare, far from inspiring us with a smug complacency, should heighten our resolves and give renewed energy and freshness of spirit.
Another reason for accepting the suggestion is that I had just read in an English newspaper a sweeping and vitrolic criticism of our social and civic conditions. Our unkind critic spoke of us as a people so utterly bound up in the worship of the “almighty dollar” that we had lost whatever social vision might have illumined the minds of our fathers. To all sense of social righteousness we were as a people pitiably indifferent. In mill, factory and mine our working people slaved; in tenement and farmhouse our poor lived, little if any better than the poorest of Europe’s poor; our sick and otherwise helpless were scarcely given a thought. Politically we were rotten to the core, statesmanship and graft going hand in hand.
That, in short, ours was a dog-eat-dog civilization, and that the only direction in which light might be seen breaking was in the “fact that making headway among the wisest and most far-seeing Americans was the conviction that American institutions were a failure!”
The editorial concluded with the statement that if any one considered that view a biased one, all such skeptical readers need do was to acquaint themselves with the writings and speeches of American sociologists and magazine writers or to converse with any of that “dwindling proportion” of our well-informed citizens to whom human values are not a mere academic phrase or an abstraction.
It is unnecessary to point out that our English critic might have used his columns to better advantage if he had differentiated between the sociologists and magazine writers who seek our country’s good and those who seek only its destruction—a very important differentiation to make at this time.
In fact, our critic may be a Socialist, who is only passing along to England the general cry of the pessimists of this country, that “whatever is, is wrong”; and that there is a great unrest in the industrial world which will, sooner or later, burst out in volcanic force and engulf us in a terrible cataclysm—all of which is unspeakable rot.
I think I am in a position through the organization with which I am connected (composed as it is of the representatives of the great labor, agricultural, manufacturing, banking, commercial, educational and professional organizations) to know something about this “great unrest” upon which the Socialists and other radical writers and speakers declaim so much, and I can assure you that the only unrest in the industrial and social fields that I can discern is that wholesome, normal unrest which comes through the education of the people, and therefore a better understanding of their rights as workers and the translation of that knowledge through the labor unions and other social and economic organizations into concrete demands for better living conditions.