Commission on Industrial Relations

1912 US Congressional commission

The Commission on Industrial Relations (also known as the Walsh Commission) was a commission created by the U. S. Congress on August 23, 1912, to scrutinize US labor law. The commission studied work conditions throughout the industrial United States between 1913 and 1915. The final report of the Commission, published in eleven volumes in 1916, contain tens of thousands of pages of testimony from a wide range of witnesses, including Clarence Darrow, Louis Brandeis, Mary Harris "Mother" Jones, Theodore Schroeder, William "Big Bill" Haywood, scores of ordinary workers, and the titans of capitalism, including Daniel Guggenheim, George Walbridge Perkins Sr. (of U. S. Steel), Henry Ford, and Andrew Carnegie.

In 1871, there was a failed attempt to create an Industrial Commission. There was also the Hewitt committee hearings of 1878–79, the three year study of the Blair committee which ended in 1886, and a probe conducted from 1898 to 1902 by the United States Industrial Commission, appointed by President William McKinley.

In 1910, two leaders of the Structural Ironworkers Union, the McNamara Brothers, dynamited the Los Angeles Times building, killing twenty people. There was public outcry as a result, and President William Howard Taft proposed the creation of a nine person investigative committee called the Commission on Industrial Relations, which was approved by Congress to be formally created April 23, 1912. Its findings were filed April 23, 1915. The Commission on Industrial Relations got its name from a petition presented to President Taft on December 30, 1911, entitled "Petition to the President for a Federal Commission on Industrial Relations," signed by 28 prominent people, Members of the Committee on Standards of Living and Labor of the National Conference of Charities and Corrections, many of whom were associated with Survey magazine, such as Paul Underwood Kellogg and John A. Fitch.

The Commission was made up of nine commissioners, all nominated by the president and confirmed by the U. S. Senate. All but one served from beginning to end. The original nine Commissioners were:

Chairman Frank P. Walsh, Kansas City, Missouri labor lawyer and activist (who once told a friend "I hate like hell to be respectable"),
James O'Connell, of the American Federation of Labor (A. F. L.)
Austin B. Garretson, of the Order of Railway Conductors
John Brown Lennon, of the A. F. L.
Frederic A. Delano, President of the Wabash Railroad (and uncle of Franklin Roosevelt) was never published and is only available in draft form from the National Archives and Wisconsin Historical Society. Congress had authorized the Commission shortly before the 1912 presidential election, in which incumbent President Taft was defeated by New Jersey Governor Woodrow Wilson. Four Commissioners ultimately confirmed were originally named by President Taft in December 1912, one month after his defeat: Commissioners Delano, O'Connell, Garretson and Lennon. Taft also nominated five other persons, but the Senate failed to confirm them. Those failed nominees were U. S. Senator George Sutherland of Utah (who was Taft's proposed chairman), Connecticut state legislator George B. Chandler (American Book Co.), Charles S. Barrett (Farmers' Union); Adolph Lewisohn (investment banker, copper magnate, and philanthropist); and F. C. Schwedtman (electrical engineer). Two months after entering the White House, President Wilson nominated replacements for Taft's five failed nominees.

The New Republic observed that the commission had gone well beyond its duties to investigate the "cause and cure" of labor unrest. In promoting industrial democracy, it offered a "tonic" for American democracy itself. The president of the Pittsburgh Employers' Association stated publicly that Walsh "should be assassinated."

The influence the report had on US politics is debated among historians. Graham Adams Jr. argues and Louis Galambos agrees that the Commission's hearings and reports influenced the passage of such labor legislation as the Adamson Eight Hour Act. Historian Rayback explains that the commission's report influenced the decisions of the War Labor Board and the authors of New Deal labor legislation. George Brooks, reviewing Adams' book, contends that despite the fact that Frank P. Walsh later became cochairman, with William Howard Taft, of the War Labor Board during World War I that "it is an exaggeration to assume that the Commission was the principal, or even a major, cause of subsequent developments and to attribute to it, as [Adams] does, the development of "a more steeply graduated tax structure, promotion of collective bargaining, minimum wage scales, and the eight hour day ." There is nothing in [Adams book] which would support the view that the Commission ever had the importance of the La Follette or McClellan Committees."