l Conference, and the strike of the soft coal
miners. The great steel strike, prepared and directed by a Committee
representing twenty-four national and international unions with William
Z. Foster as Secretary and moving spirit, tried in September 1919 to
wrest from the owners of the steel mills what the railway shopmen had
achieved in 1918 by invitation of the government, namely, "recognition"
and the eight-hour day. Three hundred thousand men went out on strike at
the call of the committee. The industry came to a practical standstill.
But in this case the twenty-four allied unions were not dealing with a
government amenable to political pressure, nor with a loosely joined
association of employers competing among themselves. Furthermore, the
time had passed when the government had either the will or the power to
interfere and order both sides to arbitrate their dispute. On the
contrary, the unions were now dealing unaided with the strongest
capitalist aggregation in the world.

At the request of President Wilson, Gompers had urged the strike
committee to postpone the strike until after the meeting of the national
industrial conference called by the President in October, but the
committee claimed that it could not have kept the men back after a
summer of agitation and feverish organization had they even tried. The
President's conference, modelled upon a similar conference which met
earlier in Great Britain, was composed of three groups of
representatives equal in number, one for capital, one for labor, and one
for the general public. Decisions, to be held effective, had to be
adopted by a majority in each group. The labor representation, dominated
of course by Gompers, was eager to make the discussion turn on the steel
strike. It proposed a resolution to this effect which had the support of
the public group, but fearing a certain rejection by the employer group
the matter was postponed. The issue upon which the alignment was
effected was industrial control and collective bargaining. All three
groups, the employer and public groups and of course the labor group,
advocated collective bargaining,--but with a difference. The labor group
insisted that collective bargaining is doomed to be a farce unless the
employes are allowed to choose as their spokesmen representatives of the
national trade union. In the absence of a powerful protector in the
national union, they argued, the workers in a shop can never feel
themselves on