instructions to cooperate with brotherhood leaders, he found that they also thought it inopportune to press Plumb Plan legislation actively.  So far as the railway men themselves are concerned, after the Railroad Labor Board set up under the Esch-Cummins act had begun to pass decisions actually affecting wages and working rules, the pressure for the Plumb Plan subsided.  Instead, the activities of the organizations, though scarcely lessened in intensity, have become centered upon the issues of conditions of employment.

The drift towards independent labor politics, which many anticipate, also remains quite inconclusive.  A Farmer-Labor party, launched in 1920 by influential labor leaders of Chicago (to be sure, against the wishes of the national leaders), polled not more than 350,000 votes.  And in the same election, despite a wide dissatisfaction in labor circles with the change in the government’s attitude after the passage of the War emergency and with a most sweeping use of the injunction in the coal strike, the vote for the socialist candidate for President fell below a million, that is behind the vote of 1912, notwithstanding a doubling of the electorate with women’s suffrage.  Finally, the same convention of the American Federation of Labor, which showed so much sympathy for the ideas of the Plumb Plan League, approved a rupture with the International Trade Union Federation, with headquarters in Amsterdam, Holland, mainly on account of the revolutionary character of the addresses issued by the latter.

FOOTNOTES: 

[89] The most plausible argument in favor of the position taken by the employing group is that no employer should be forced to decide matters as intimately connected with the welfare of his business as the ones relating to his labor costs and shop discipline with national union leaders, since the latter, at best, are interested in the welfare of the trade as a whole but rarely in the particular success of his own particular establishment.

[90] The turn in public sentiment really dated from the threat of a strike for the eight-hour day by the four railway brotherhoods in 1916, which forced the passage of the Adamson law by Congress.  The law was a victory for the brotherhoods, but also extremely useful to the enemies of organized labor in arousing public hostility to unionism.

[91] See below, 259-261, for a more detailed description of the Plan.

[92] The Transportation Act included a provision that prior to September 1, 1920, the railways could not reduce wages.

[93] A Protestant interdenominational organization of influence, which investigated the strike and issued a report.

[94] The union had not been formally “recognized” at any time.

[95] Coppage v. Kansas, 236 U.S. (1915).

[96] Hitchman Coal and Coke Co. v. Mitchell et al, 245 U.S. 229 (1917).