In the early days of the labor movement, the intellectual was of chief assistance to the workers in interpreting labor to itself and to those outside its ranks; in inspiring the movement with confidence in itself; in assisting it to formulate its program for social change, to keep its idealism, its enthusiasm alive; in widening its vision of future possibilities.
In Europe today, particularly in countries such as Russia, where labor is in control, the prime present day need is for technical assistance in the administration of socialized industry. The indifference or opposition of many brain workers to the government has been a serious handicap to it. In other countries—Sweden, Great Britain, Belgium, Germany, among them—labor has selected many "intellectuals" to voice its demands in the parliaments and in municipal councils, and to aid it in the cooperative, the educational and other movements.
In the United States, labor has for some time utilized lawyers to defend it in court—lawyers of the type of Clarence Darrow, Jackson H. Ralston, Morris Hillquit, Frank P. Walsh. It has gladly accepted the service of such university trained men and women as Jane Addams, Florence Kelley, John B. Andrews, Owen R. Lovejoy, Henry R. Seager, John R. Commons, Lillian Wald, in its fight for better labor legislation. It has received aid—material and spiritual—from writers and speakers of the type of Walt Whitman, James Russell Lowell, Horace Greeley, Margaret Fuller, Wendell Phillips, Albert Brisbane, William Henry Channing, John Swinton, Edward Bellamy, and Henry D. Lloyd, at an earlier period; and, more recently, of Jack London, William D. Howells, Frank Norris, Edwin Markham, Charles Rann Kennedy, Mary Austin, Upton Sinclair, Vida D. Scudder, Sinclair Lewis, Louis Untermeyer, Vachel Lindsay, Carl Sandburg, Ernest Poole, Frederic C. Howe, Arthur Gleason, Lincoln Steffens, among writers, poets and dramatists; William James, John Dewey, Charles P. Steinmetz, among the philosophers and scientists; Lester F. Ward, Robert H. Hoxie, Carlton Parker, Thorstein Veblen, E. A. Ross, Franklin H. Giddings, Charles A. Beard, among political scientists; and John A. Ryan, Walter Rauschenbusch, Bishops Spaulding and Williams, Harry F. Ward, Judah L. Magnes, and John Haynes Holmes, among religious leaders.
During the past few years organized labor on the economic field has developed a number of constructive features. It has entered the field of labor education, labor banking, labor health, cooperation, labor politics, and these developments have led to an increasing need for university trained technicians. In some ways service as expert advisers in these fields of trade union activity furnish the most fertile field today for the trained student who wishes to devote his energies to the strengthening of the labor movement.
How can the young intellectual be of service in this field? In what spirit should he approach the task? What pitfalls should he avoid? What should be the attitude of the trade union leaders toward the technicians?
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