Phenomenon

The U. S. people awoke last week to the fact that there was a great social phenomenon just out of reach of their spectacles--a phenomenon ranking with coups d'etat, invasions and insurrections, but more timely--adjusted to the spirit and social organism of the age: the "general strike."

U. S. labor is not organized as is British labor, but it has a powerful central organization in the American Federation of Labor. The possibility of a general strike rests on the attitude of the A. F. of L. That attitude was set forth last week by William Green, President of the Federation. Mr. Green stands in the shoes which the growing feet of the great Gompers stretched in years gone by. So largely is the history of U. S. labor the history of Samuel Gompers, that there is no question that he was completely adequate to the labor problems of his decades. It was the Gompers attitude and the Gompers policy which spoke again last week from the mouth of William Green:

"The working people of the United States will observe with keen interest this experimentation in the use of the sympathetic strike as a means of bringing about the settlement of a wage controversy in a single industry.

"The great danger involved in a general or sympathetic strike is the possibility that the original grievances which are the primary causes of the strike, and which are, in this case, meritoricus, may be lost sight of because of the charge that the general strike is a challenge to Government and to the existence of Government.

"The American Federation of Labor is strongly committed to the policy of collective bargaining, of wage contracts and the observance of wage agreements."

This last declaration is practically equivalent to the statement that until American labor changes its policy, there will never be a general strike in this country. With each trade having its own wage agreement, it cannot go on strike merely in sympathy with the strike of another group.

Mr. Green, like Secretary of Labor Davis, has Welsh blood in his veins, and began life as a miner, but he was born in this country at Coshocton, Ohio. In the year and five months of his stewardship he has shown where his talents lie--as a conciliator and composer of differences within the ranks of labor and as a leader devoted to the policy of "the middle course" between a possibly imaginary Scylla of Capitalism and a certainly dreaded Charybdis of Communism.