or labor or from recommending, advising, or persuading others by peaceful means so to do; or from attending at any place where any such person or persons may lawfully be, for the purpose of peacefully persuading any person to work or to abstain from working, or from recommending, advising, or persuading others by peaceful and lawful means so to do; or from paying or giving to, or withholding from, any person employed in such dispute, any strike benefits or other moneys or things of value; or from peacefully assembling in a lawful manner, or for lawful purposes, or from doing any act or things which might lawfully be done in the absence of such dispute by any party thereto; nor shall any of the acts specified in this paragraph be considered or held to be violations of any law of the United States.”

The government was also rendering aid to organized labor in another, though probably little intended, form, namely through the public hearings conducted by the United States Commission on Industrial Relations.  This Commission had been authorized by Congress in 1912 to investigate labor unrest after a bomb explosion in the Los Angeles Times Building, which was set off at the order of some of the national officers of the structural iron workers’ union, incidental to a strike.  The hearings which were conducted by the able and versatile chairman, Frank P. Walsh, with a particular eye for publicity, centering as they did around the Colorado outrages, served to popularize the trade union cause from one end of the country to the other.  The report of the Commission or rather the minority report, which was signed by the chairman and the three labor members, and was known as the “staff” report, named trade unionism as the paramount remedy—­not compulsory arbitration which was advocated by the employer members, nor labor legislation and a permanent governmental industrial commission proposed by the economist on the commission.  The immediate practical effects of the commission were nil, but its agitational value proved of great importance to labor.  For the first time in the history of the United States the employing class seemed to be arrayed as a defendant before the bar of public opinion.  Also, it was for the first time that a commission representing the government not only unhesitatingly pronounced the trade union movement harmless to the country’s best interests but went to the length of raising it to the dignity of a fundamental and indispensable institution.

The Commission on Industrial Relations on the whole reflected the favorable attitude of the Administration which came to power in 1912.  The American Federation of Labor was given full sway over the Department of Labor and a decisive influence in all other government departments on matters relating to labor.  Without a political party of its own, by virtue only of its “bargaining power” over the old parties, the American Federation of Labor seemed to have attained a position not far behind that of British labor after more than a decade of independent political action.  Furthermore, fortunately for itself, labor in America had come into a political patrimony at a time when the country was standing on the threshold of a new era, during which government was destined to become the arbiter of industry.