National Civic Federation
Encyclopedia
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
Chicago Civic Federation
- Summary :The Civic Federation is a Chicago-based non-partisan research organization focused on governments in the Chicago area and the state of Illinois...

 (CCF), which was also known as the Civic Federation of Chicago. The key leader was Ralph Easley
Ralph Easley
Ralph Montgomery Easley was an American journalist and political organizer. He was Director of the American political reform group, the National Civic Federation....

, 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
Jane Addams
Jane Addams was a pioneer settlement worker, founder of Hull House in Chicago, public philosopher, sociologist, author, and leader in woman suffrage and world peace...

; industrialist Franklin MacVeagh
Franklin MacVeagh
Franklin MacVeagh was an American banker and Treasury Secretary.Born in Chester County, Pennsylvania, he graduated from Yale University in 1858, where he was a member of Skull and Bones. He graduated from Columbia Law School in 1864. He worked as a wholesale grocer and lawyer...

; and social scientist and civic commissioner Edward Bemis. The federation's first president was the Republican senator from Ohio, Mark Hanna
Mark Hanna
Marcus Alonzo "Mark" Hanna was a United States Senator from Ohio and the friend and political manager of President William McKinley...

, while its original vice-president was union leader Samuel Gompers
Samuel Gompers
Samuel Gompers was an English-born American cigar maker who became a labor union leader and a key figure in American labor history. Gompers founded the American Federation of Labor , and served as that organization's president from 1886 to 1894 and from 1895 until his death in 1924...

. Other NCF founding members from trade unions included Daniel Keefe
Daniel Keefe
Daniel Joseph Keefe was a founder and the first president of the International Longshoremen's Association , a trade union representing waterside workers in Canada and the United States of America.-Early life:...

 (International Longshoremen's Association
International Longshoremen's Association
The International Longshoremen's Association is a labor union representing longshore workers along the East Coast of the United States and Canada, the Gulf Coast, the Great Lakes, Puerto Rico, and inland waterways...

), John Mitchell
John Mitchell (United Mine Workers)
John Mitchell was a United States labor leader and president of the United Mine Workers of America from 1898 to 1908....

 (United Mine Workers) and J J Sullivan (Typographers
International Typographical Union
The International Typographical Union was a labor union founded on May 3, 1852 in the United States as the National Typographical Union. In its 1869 convention in Albany, New York, the union—having organized members in Canada—changed its name to the International Typographical Union...

). Over the years, the federation's Executive Council included representatives of employers such as Vincent Astor
Vincent Astor
William Vincent Astor was a businessman and philanthropist and a member of the prominent Astor family.-Early life:...

, Jeremiah Jenks
Jeremiah Jenks
Jeremiah Whipple Jenks, Ph.D., LL.D. was an American economist and educator, born at Saint Clair, Michigan. He graduated from the University of Michigan in 1878, studied for several years in Germany, taking his doctorate from the University of Halle in 1885, and after his return to the United...

, Seth Low
Seth Low
Seth Low , born in Brooklyn, New York, was an American educator and political figure who served as mayor of Brooklyn, as President of Columbia University, as diplomatic representative of the United States, and as Mayor of New York City...

, and George W. Perkins.

NCF suffered a significant loss of influence after World War I
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...

. 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
Anti-communism
Anti-communism is opposition to communism. Organized anti-communism developed in reaction to the rise of communism, especially after the 1917 October Revolution in Russia and the beginning of the Cold War in 1947.-Objections to communist theory:...

, and in the 1930s attacked Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal
New Deal
The New Deal was a series of economic programs implemented in the United States between 1933 and 1936. They were passed by the U.S. Congress during the first term of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The programs were Roosevelt's responses to the Great Depression, and focused on what historians call...

. 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
American Federation of Labor
The American Federation of Labor was one of the first federations of labor unions in the United States. It was founded in 1886 by an alliance of craft unions disaffected from the Knights of Labor, a national labor association. Samuel Gompers was elected president of the Federation at its...

 (AFL) was the Western Federation of Miners
Western Federation of Miners
The Western Federation of Miners was a radical labor union that gained a reputation for militancy in the mines of the western United States and British Columbia. Its efforts to organize both hard rock miners and smelter workers brought it into sharp conflicts – and often pitched battles...

 (WFM). Formed on the western frontier of the United States, the WFM was "not yet 'broken in' to the discipline of business management" practiced by eastern labor leaders. The WFM formed the Western Labor Union
Western Labor Union
The Western Labor Union was a labor federation created by the Western Federation of Miners after the disastrous Leadville strike of 1896-97. The WLU was conceived in November, 1897 in a proclamation of the State Trades and Labor Council of Montana, and gained support from the WFM's executive...

 (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.


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."

See also

  • Melville E. Ingalls
    Melville E. Ingalls
    Melville Ezra Ingalls , commonly abbreviated M.E. Ingalls, was a Massachusetts state legislator who went on to become president of the Cleveland, Cincinnati, Chicago and St. Louis Railroad .-Career:...

     - president of the NCF in 1905 and Chairman of a Committee of Fifteen in 1906
  • Archibald E. Stevenson
    Archibald E. Stevenson
    Archibald E. Stevenson was an American attorney and legislative researcher. Stevenson is best remembered for his work as Assistant Counsel of the Lusk Committee of the New York State Senate from 1919 to 1920, the activities of which led to a series of sensational raids and trials of self-professed...

    , general counsel in the 1930s

External links

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