This Day in Labor History: August 23, 1912. The U.S. Commission on Industrial Relations was founded. Let's talk about this remarkable moment where, for the first time in American history, the government challenged employer domination over workers, outraging conservatives.
The USCIR was created in response growing labor violence, especially, the bombing of the Los Angeles Times building in 1910 by two Ironworkers angry about the paper’s anti-union owner Harrison Gray Otis, finally got the government’s attention.
While President William Howard Taft created it, it was mostly operated under the administration of Woodrow Wilson, a far more pro-labor president than the Republican.
Most of the committee members were Wilson appointees after several of Taft’s nominees did not receive confirmation from the Senate. Had they, the commission would have been far more pro-business and probably less memorable.
The head of the committee was the remarkable Frank Walsh. A poor boy from Kansas City who dropped out of school at 10, Walsh trained himself in the law and became a leading Democrat in KC, attracting the attention of Wilson, who nominated him as the USCIR’s chairman.
Between 1913 and 1915, the USCIR interviewed hundreds of people about the conditions of American work. Traveling the nation, it set up shop for a few weeks in a given city and did its best to cover all the major regional types of work.
Investigators in the Northwest discovered stories about logging camp cooks infected with venereal disease and still allowed to prepare food, loggers beaten by owners and having their money stolen, and workers getting so sick from camp food that they could not work for weeks.
One investigator writing about miners at U.S. Steel operations in Duluth detailed how the police, owners, and city leaders all conspired to crush a strike. Never before had a the government invested the resources to document the horrors committed against working people.
Said the groundbreaking journalist Walter Lippmann, “The nine members of the Industrial Relations Commission have before them the task of explaining why America, supposed to become the land of promise, has become the land of disappointment and deep-seated discontent.”
Walsh encouraged people to criticize employers. Reformers such as Louis Brandeis testified as to moral corruptness of employers’ absurdly wide view of “freedom of contract,” noting how this led to the widespread exploitation of American labor.
S. Josephine Baker, the child labor crusader, talked of how American corporations using child labor did not train those workers for any kind of future, dooming them to permanent poverty, “having entered adult life and are still earning a child’s wage.”
Labor leaders and even everyday workers testified about their conditions. But most famously, Walsh saw his role as a crusader for American workers. He alienated the capitalists quickly
After the Ludlow Massacre, Walsh called John D. Rockefeller Jr. before his committee, and publicly humiliated the powerful man for his company thugs and indifference to workers’ lives. It didn’t help the capitalist that his PR man said that truth was “as the operators saw it.”
This was the first time that a leading capitalist had ever been called on the carpet for his labor policies. This was a big deal and it convinced Rockefeller to engage in welfare capitalist programs in the future.
Some capitalists did better in their testimony. When Andrew Carnegie testified, he openly lied about his role at Homestead, claiming he was out playing in Scotland when in fact he had ordered Henry Clay Frick to bust the union while he was away.
When Walsh announced he would also investigate the South, Georgia senator Hoke Smith led a charge to cut the USCIR budget by 75 percent. When the vote failed, Walsh directly targeted Georgia to stick it to Smith, holding some of his most pro-worker hearings in that state.
Not everyone on the committee was a pro-worker as Walsh and his attacks upon the rich made many uncomfortable. Taft himself was on the commission and did not approve. This meant that as an institution, the USCIR was unable to fulfill its potential.
The final report, issued in 1916, was three different reports prepared by different sections of the committee. The Walsh factio openly called for an industrial democracy. It called agricultural work, such as had led to the Wheatland Riot “industrial feudalism in an extreme form.”
The word “feudalism” was applied heavily throughout the report–to company towns, to the coal regions, to rural labor.
The response to the Walsh report was mixed. Labor publications and unions were ecstatic at the honest portrayal of the conditions of American workers. The Masses went so far as to call it, “The beginning of an indigenous American revolutionary movement.”
Again, it’s worth noting here how out of character for American history the Walsh report and USCIR in general was that American radicals would see it in this light.
On the other hand, the president of the Pittsburgh Employers Association called for Walsh’s assassination, perhaps tongue in cheek, perhaps not.
The majority report was written by the labor economist John Commons, which in a more typically Progressive manner than Walsh’s activism called for impartial labor boards rather than involve labor in politics, which reflected the belief of much of American labor, such as the AFL.
The extent to which the USCIR really changed the nation is somewhat up for debate, but it’s likely that its findings fed the pro-labor Democratic platform in 1916.
It’s worth remembering that even when considering the horrors of the Red Scare and the government suppression of the IWW in World War I, the Wilson administration is still by a significant margin the most pro-labor administration in American history before FDR.
Wilson would make alliance with Samuel Gompers during World War I to bring labor into the national planning for the war and the AFL saw significant gains during the war, however short-lasting they were.
Charles Evans Hughes campaigned against Wilson in 1916 based in part on what he saw was the waste of the USCIR, but to little effect. The moderate Commons report would become influential in the welfare capitalism of the 1920s, which still provided gains of sorts for workers.
Walsh would later go on to become the co-chair of the National War Labor Board with William Howard Taft, where the two clashed over the former’s staunchly pro-union policies and abrupt manner with the capitalists.
Walsh eventually lost Wilson’s favor over his other favorite cause–Irish nationalism.
You can read the whole USCIR report, testimony, etc., here. It's an incredibly valuable resource for historians.
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Back on Saturday to discuss the Battle of Blair Mountain, the largest insurrection in American history since the Civil War and perhaps the most unjustly unknown event in American labor history.
