Labor Looks at Religion

LABOR SPEAKS FOR ITSELF ON RELIGION --A Symposium Edited by Jerome Davis --Macmillan ($2).

What do labor leaders think of religion?

Editor Davis, though forced to neglect France, Italy, all of South America and Africa, nevertheless manages to collect in this book the opinions of 31 labor leaders from the rest of the world, 13 of them from the U. S. and Canada.

Some of the U. S. authorities are William Green (American Labor and the Church), James P. Thompson (Religion is the Negation of Truth), Abraham J. Muste (Questions from the Left), A. Philip Randolph (Negro Labor and the Church).

For Russia speak Lenin, Trotzky, Lunacharsky, Yaroslavsky, bigwigs all.

Other notable contributors: Arthur Crispien (Germany), Emanuel Radl (Czechoslovakia), Roberto Haberman (Mexico), Karl Kautsky (Austria). India's Mahatma Gandhi adds 54 words.

The consensus: Labor sometimes praises organized religion, more often indicts.

A remedy: "To bridge the gap between the church and organized labor in America the editor intends to start in the near future a Religion and Labor Bureau, which shall be nondenominational and nonsectarian, and which will include both church and labor leaders on its board."