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.
Predecessors
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.
Origins
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.
Commission members
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) Florence Jaffray Harriman, a New York socialite and social activist Harris Weinstock, a progressive California businessman S. Thruston Ballard, a Kentucky democratic flour mill owner
Shortly before the Commission's final report, Commissioner Delano resigned, and was replaced by Richard Aishton, vice-president of the Chicago & Northwestern Railroad.
Among the Commission staff were John R. Commons, a labor economist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and Luke Grant, a labor journalist and editor of the Chicago Inter Ocean. Only one of Grant's reports on the structural ironworkers bombing campaign was actually published by the CIR. However, an explosive report by Grant "Violence in Labor Disputes and Methods of Policing Industry" 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.
Investigation
The Commission's responsibilities were to:
"inquire into the general condition of labor in the principal industries of the United States, including agriculture, and especially in those which are carried on in corporate forms ...; into the growth of associations of employers and of wage earners and the effect of such associations upon the relations between employers and employees ..."