Evening public ledger. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1914-1942, 1919-09-01
TWO CLASSES OF RADICALS
RETARD INDUSTRIAL PEACE
Labor Day Shows Them Persisting, With
Diminishing Influence, on Both Sides
Of the Wage Dispute

mulCltudeS VINO Stlll regard DolSheNlSm as
hard reality rather than a shadow on
the face of events can sleep again.
! Any one who still doubts the ability of
| Americans to settle their affairs upon a
rational basis has missed the significance
of the tilt between Mr.. Wilson and the
shopmcn and has failed utterly to recog-
| nizc the newer trend of labor sentiment
in this country. Tho shopmen are more
modem than the Bolshevists. They have
not lost. By surrender they gained
something CT the general intelligent sym
pathy without which no cause can sur
vive. Mr.. Wilson has proceeded a little
farther along the road which ultimately
will lead to enlightened and frictionlcss
adjustments in all such disputes as now
occasionally threaten to disrupt industry.
Ii was when Roosevelt appointed
conciiation commission TO settle the an
thracite strike of l902 that an official
mind in the United States first went OK
plorng into the world where The other
half lives. Taft. as chief of the war
)9bC" board, has been a pioneer in that
country and Mr.. Wilson has been making
some novel surveys in the same little
known region. But until Roosevet's day
statesmen were not accustomed to
venture over the border. They led a
cloistered life in Washington. They even
then held to the delusion that politics
runs the country.
Politics doesn't run the country. which
must depend always for its strength and
its peace and its happiness upon the re-
To- FOL, etoi hnj ho-
tween the men who own and organize in
dustries and those who work them.
Labor Day might very properly in
volve some sort of tribute to Theodore
the Grim. Mr.. Roosevelt was perfectly
willing to admit the sacred rights of
property. Any man with dollar in his
pocket can understand that way of look
ing at the matter. But Roosevelt was
convinced of the even more sacred rights
of humanity. He believed in reason He
was convinced that devastating strikes
were the result of refusal Of others to
! believe in it. His commission was made
up of reasonable men--John Mitchell,
Judge George Gray, of Delaware; Bishop
! Spaulding and othersswhose experience
made them capable of judgments likely
! to be fair to everybody concerned.
This was perhaps the first great occa-
sion on record when a formal effort was
! made under government authority, to
settle a labor dispute by other methods
| than force and attrtion. The action of
the President implied the existence Of
/ definite rights upon the side of the Penn
! sylvania miners as well as of the opera
tors. Yet Mr.. Roosevelt's larger concern
was not with the men or their employers,
/ but with the country itself. He realized
that it was no longer possible to tolerate
| anywhere in the United States a condi-
| ton under which millions of people might
be left to needless depression and de-
spair-to lose faith in the order of civili-
zation and to doubt the greatness of
government in which they wanted
nightly to believe.
There were mandarins of industry
who choked over their terrapin when
they heard the news. Was the man mad?
This was the end of the world-the end
! of the republic! God help US now!
Property rights were being ignored by
a wild man who ought to be in Jail rather
than in the White House. The gentle
men dowagers who write economic re-
views groaned in print. Bolshevists
were unknown in those days or Roose-
welt would have been called a Bolshevist.
So the prophets of woe did the next best
thing.
Roosevelt became known among them
as Dangerous Radical.
Since then we have been able to per-
ceive that some new definitions of radi-
calism will be necessary before it is pos
sible to achieve a decent basis for the
adjustment of labor disputes in America
There is a radical minority in most labor
unions. But the decision recently made
by the railway shopmen shows how rela-
lively powerless and without influence
such radicals are in pinch. There are,
unauestionably, radicals in industry.
Wealth has often been radical in its own
interests. And all radicals, on one or the
other side of the economic question, are
enemies of peace and obstacles in the way
of progress.
If laborers in the steel industry of the
Allegheny region were Systematically
plotting to break up meetings of their
employers; if they hired guards to harass
street assemblages and if they openly
Disseminated against a man who hap
pened to join a council of property own
ers they would justly become known as
dangerous radicals. Dangerous radicals
they would be.
Yet the ignorant and short-sighted
under officials of mines and steel mills
who resort to these methods to retard
the processes of labor organization in
the Pittsburgh district would be amazed
if they were spoken of as radicals.
It is the radical labor leader and the
radical boss, the radical union man and