An important aspect of the cooperation of the government with the Federation was the latter’s eager self-identification with the government’s foreign policy, which went to the length of choosing to play a lone hand in the Allied labor world.  Labor in America had an implicit faith in the national government, which was shared by neither English nor French labor.  Whereas the workers in the other Allied Nations believed that their governments needed to be prodded or forced into accepting the right road to a democratic peace by an international labor congress, which would take the entire matter of war and peace out of the diplomatic chancellories into an open conference of the representatives of the workers, the American workers were only too eager to follow the leadership of the head of the American nation.  To this doubtless was added the usual fervor of a new convert to any cause (in this instance the cause of the War against Germany) and a strong distrust of German socialism, which American labor leaders have developed during their drawn-out struggle against the German-trained socialists inside the Federation who have persistently tried to “capture” the organization.

When on January 8, 1918, President Wilson enunciated his famous Fourteen Points, the Federation of course gave them an enthusiastic endorsement.  In the autumn of 1918 Gompers went to Europe and participated in an Inter-Allied labor conference.  He refused, however, to participate in the first International Labor and Socialist Congress called since the War, which met at Berne, Switzerland, in March 1919, since he would not sit with the Germans while their country was not formally at peace with the United States.  The convention of the Federation in June 1919 gave complete endorsement to the League of Nations Pact worked out at Versailles,—­on general grounds and on the ground of its specific provisions for an international regulation of labor conditions designed to equalize labor standards and costs.  Contrasting with this was the position of British labor, which regarded the Pact with a critical eye, frankly confessing disillusionment, but was willing to accept it for the sake of its future possibilities, when the Pact might be remodelled by more liberal and more democratic hands.

The contrast in outlook between the mild evolutionism of the American Federation of Labor and the social radicalism of British labor stood out nowhere so strongly as in their respective programs for Reconstruction after the War.  The chief claim of the British Labor party for recognition at the hands of the voter at the General Election in December 1918, was its well-thought-out reconstruction program put forth under the telling title of “Labour and the New Social Order.”  This program was above all a legislative program.  It called for a thoroughgoing governmental control of industry by means of a control of private finance, natural resources, transportation, and international trade.  To the workingmen such control would mean the right to steady employment, the right to a living wage, and the appropriation of economic surpluses by the state for the common good—­be they in the form of rent, excessive profits, or overlarge personal incomes.  Beyond this minimum program loomed the cooperative commonwealth with the private capitalist totally eliminated.