National Affairs: Seaside Subjects

"I regret exceedingly that circumstances will prevent me from attending the 55th annual convention of the American Federation of Labor," President Roosevelt, fishing in the Pacific, radioed William Green at Atlantic City last week. "I request that you express my regret to the convention and that you will convey to them my hope and confidence that your meeting will be successful and rich in accomplishment."

To outsiders the annual conventions of the A. F. of L., an amalgamation of 3,000,000 assorted trade unionists who attempt to speak for all U. S. Labor, are seldom either successful or rich in accomplishment. Prime reason is that the Federation has for the past decade tried vainly to digest a vast hodge-podge of fundamental contradictions, with the result that most of its public acts belch forth in a fantastic vapor of inconsistency, incoherence, ineffectually. This dyspepsia gets the Federation into many an impolite predicament, not the least embarrassing of which occurred early at last week's seaside gathering.

Ever since the Centralia, Wash, massacre of 1919, the nation's most potent strikebreaking force has been the American Legion. Nevertheless, most celebrated non-laborite invited to address last week's convention was the Legion's corpulent new National Commander James Raymond ("Ray") Murphy. Though scar-faced President Green later glossed over "mistakes by some Legionnaires" in past labor disputes, Mr. Murphy was there to ask the Federation to join the Legion (and the Daughters of the American Revolution) in a great nationwide Red-hunt. A number of radical labor delegates had absented themselves from the hall. Thirty others ostentatiously rose and walked out when Commander Murphy took the rostrum.

Thus was illustrated the pull-devil-pull-baker tension which gives a desperate organization the outward appearance of inactive somnolence. The NRA was not an unmixed blessing to the A. F. of L., for it brought into the Federation a horde of workers from hitherto unorganized, straight-line production industries. Result is serious factionalism, with Mr. Green, most of the 17 members of his all-powerful executive council and the oldtime, conservative craft unionists on one side and on the other a mass of younger, more radical workers from the modern assembly line. Impasse caused by the conflicting policies and personalities of these two groups was demonstrated in the major subjects which came before the Atlantic City convention.