History of Labor in the United States. Volume Ht.—Work- ing
Conditions. By Don D. Lescohiei,
Labour and American Society
Legislation. By Elizabeth Brandeis. (Macmillan. 20a) Tnis book ought to be made required reading for a commen- tator on American affairs. Here is a section cut through American Society in which archaic iilees fight (with remarkable success) with modern technology, in which governmental systems and social attitudes native not merely (to quote President Roosevelt) to the horse and buggy age," but to the age of the ox-plow and the village economy, have to be adjusted to the world of air-conditioning and of power production.
Take, for example, unemployment. To the law and to the " folkways " of a great part of America, this was and still is a moral problem. The masses of _victims of boom and slump are simply an arithmetical aggregate ; each individual is the equivalent of the village loafer, of the village drunkard, of the village natural. He was to be helped, if at all, on a narrowly charitable basis, above all by private charity. Fortunately for him there was a lot of it; for the Statein bfitine, Mississippi, and New Hampshire empowered overseers of the poor to " bind out to labor every person who needed poor relief." We are back in the sixteenth century, with squires who had done well out of the Reformation dealing with sturdy beggars. We are not even at the age of Speenhamland or of the new poor law. Not only was the legal framework antiquated, it was rotten. The local politicians who ran the system were often Bumbles—at best. They were often mere machine politicians. who were on the lookout for spoils. One of. the great problems of relief at the present moment is just the horror with which the politician sees good money being spent without paying political dividends. Professor Lescohier notes the gallant efforts of Tammany to get round this and I remem- ber, vividly,-the indignation with which a senator from down- state Illinois extracted from an official witness the damning admission that the administrator of relief in the senator's own county was not merely a foreigner (e.g. not from the corinty) but not even a legal resident of the State! That she was a com- petent person for the work was a plea which neither the senator or his colleagues thought worthy of a more serious 'tribute than a scornful laugh. As is here pointed out, the publication of Professor Wesley Mitchell's Business Cycles in 1913 was an event of great importance in American poor law history. But, as was self-evident in 1929, all that old stuff had been abolished by the new boom economics of the Coolidge period, so President Hoover was able to dodge, for years, the necessities of the ease, to throw relief on to " community chests," to attempt to throw it on to states and cities, to denounce the demoralising " dole " which had ruined Britain—and thus help to create a situation in which a regular " dole " appears to the rich as a positive good almost impossible of attainment, and in which problems of relief, desperate beyond the direst dreams of the Poor Law Commissioners of 1834, are piling up.
The second half of the book is devoted to the legal regula- tion of conditions of hours, wages, safety conditions, &c. The American people, more than any other lesson, need the lesson of the Sibylline books. Here we have the lawyers instead of the law as Public Enemy No. 1. • Public Enemy, not only because of the delays they have imposed, of the injustices they have helped to perpetuate, but because of their distortion of the public mind.. Again and again we find care and thought that ought to be devoted to studying the usefulness and practicability of legislation (e.g., in the case of minimum wage laws) devoted to dodging possible legal traps, the possible use of " weasel words " to thwart the intention of legislabirS. Instead of studying the problems raised, for example, by a book like Dr. .1. R. Hicks's Theory of Wages, we have able men and women trying to get round Lochner V. 1Vetv York or to find some way of opening the mind of judges which had been closed with a bang in decisions like that of Adkins v. Children's Hospital.
The damage is very widespread. It encourages a fear of any legislation and makes it easier to argue against a grant of powers instead of against a bad use of powers. So attempts to regulate child labour may be resisted by people like Senator Stephens of MiSsissippi as being a socialist movement and [as having] for its end purposes far deeper and more radical than appear on the surface. It is part of a hellith scheme laid in foreign countries to destroy our. Government." It is hard to see why the Senator did not openly reveal the damnable secret, the object was without doubt the Nationalisa- tion of Women (particularly women of the - Southland). Senator Stephens in the South, President Lowell and Cardinal O'Connell in the North, stood in the breach. The sacred rights of parents, children, and. stockholders in cotton mills must be saved. But not only women and children Men, too, have their rights. Did not the Supreme Court of Penn- sylvania (which is not, as is sometimes supposed, actually a branch of the railroad) invalidate an anti-truck Act as an " insulting attempt to put the laborer under a legislative tutelage, which is not only degrading to his manhood, but subversive of his rights as a citizen of the United States ? " Dr. Brandeis wonders (probably ironically) that it was possible to put down white slavery (and foster the struggling blackmail industry) within the terms of the interstate- commerce clause, and possible to prohibit alcohol by constitu- tional amendment, but not directly_ or indirectly to hear the cry of the children. Mr. Chesterton has suggested that when our revolution breaks out, the lamp-posts will be all used up for hanging philanthropists. In America it will be lawyers. For the moment they can say with the Prussian Junker :
"Und der Honig absolut
Wenn er uns den Willen that."
For " King " read Constitution. D. W.' BitocAtx.
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