National Civic Federation

The National Civic Federation, was a federation of American businesses and labor leaders founded in 1900. It favoured moderate progressive reform and sought to resolve disputes arising between industry and organized labor. It emerged first in 1893 as the Chicago Civic Federation (CCF), which was also known as the Civic Federation of Chicago. The key leader was Ralph Easley, the CCF’s gregarious head who wanted it to "serve as a medium of sympathy and acquaintance between persons and societies who pursue various and differing vocations and objects, who differ in nationality, creed, and surrounding [and] who are unknown to each other." This federation of civic and reform leaders community took as its primary goal "to focus the new ideals of civic cooperation and social efficiency on the task of renovating Chicago society."

History

Easley served as chairman of the NCF’s executive council throughout the federation’s forty-five-year history. Early activists included U.S. Treasury Secretary Lyman Gage, the CCF’s two-time president; social worker Jane Addams; industrialist Franklin MacVeagh; and social scientist and civic commissioner Edward Bemis. The federation's first president was the Republican senator from Ohio, Mark Hanna, while its original vice-president was union leader Samuel Gompers. Other NCF founding members from trade unions included Daniel Keefe (International Longshoremen's Association), John Mitchell (United Mine Workers) and J J Sullivan (Typographers).^[1] Over the years, the federation's Executive Council included representatives of employers such as Vincent Astor, Jeremiah Jenks, Seth Low, and George W. Perkins.

NCF suffered a significant loss of influence after World War I. The death of Gompers in 1924 largely ended its relationship to the labor movement, and business leaders, too, withdrew their financial backing. Easley was consumed by anti-communism, and in the 1930s attacked Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal. Plagued by financial difficulties, hobbled by Easley's anti-Communism and pushed aside by a rising national consensus in favor of liberalism, the NCF-—nearly bankrupt-—shut down operations in 1950.

Opposition

One of the rivals to Samuel Gompers' American Federation of Labor (AFL) was the Western Federation of Miners (WFM). Formed on the western frontier of the United States, the WFM was "not yet 'broken in' to the discipline of business management"^[2] practiced by eastern labor leaders. The WFM formed the Western Labor Union (WLU) as a rival to the AFL, because the miners feared that the AFL wanted to crush the anti-capitalist spirit of their organization. Fred W. Thompson and Patrick Murfin have written that the miners saw the purpose of the NCF as,

...to housebreak unionism, to confine its growth to those fields where management could use it, and to emasculate it by a united front of labor leaders and captains of industry against all socialistic and insurgent elements.^[3]

According to this view, the NCF stood for "responsible unionism," in which union members were expected to follow the dictates of conservative union leaders whom Mark Hanna referred to as "the labor lieutenants of the captains of industry." Fully aware that lieutenants take orders from captains, more militant union leaders saw Gompers' participation in the NCF as a "sellout."^[4]

See also

• Melville E. Ingalls - president of the NCF in 1905 and Chairman of a Committee of Fifteen in 1906^[5]
• Archibald E. Stevenson, general counsel in the 1930s

References

• Cyphers; Christopher J. The National Civic Federation and the Making of a New Liberalism, 1900-1915 Praeger, 2002 ISBN 0-275-97327-1

External links

• National Civic Federation Records, 1894-1949 (PDF) at the New York Public Library

Notes

1. ^ Tomlins, Christopher L. (1985). The state and the unions: labor relations, law, and the organized labor movement in America, 1880-1960. CUP Archive. p. 73. ISBN 0521314526. http://books.google.com/books?id=N7E8AAAAIAAJ. 
2. ^ The IWW: Its First Seventy Years, Fred W. Thompson and Patrick Murfin, 1976, page 9 ppbk.
3. ^ The IWW: Its First Seventy Years, Fred W. Thompson and Patrick Murfin, 1976, page 11 ppbk.
4. ^ The IWW: Its First Seventy Years, Fred W. Thompson and Patrick Murfin, 1976, page 11 ppbk.
5. ^ "MELVILLEE. INGALLS, FINANCIER, IS DEAD". The New York Times: p. C5. July 12, 1914. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9902E6D81F39E633A25751C1A9619C946596D6CF.