One Calm Voice

A New York draft board last week protested "against Government officials allowing continuation of strikes and sabotage in industry while we induct men into service to give their all, perhaps their lives, at Army pay." A Georgia draft board had had the same indignant thought. Although there was a period of halfway quiet on the labor front, the public's wrath over labor disputes did not abate. How could people know that there might not be more of the same still coming? When was the Government going to do something about it?

Through the babel of indignation, of cries for laws to outlaw strikes, came one calm voice. The owner of the voice was William Hammatt Davis, vice chairman of the National Defense Mediation Board. He spoke to the House Military Affairs Committee, but his words were for the whole U.S. Said he: "When you pass compulsory legislation you make the workingman a slave, and there is no use producing defense materials for a nation of slaves, because if there is anything certain in history, it is that a national establishment which has to depend on slaves to produce its materials is inevitably destroyed."

This is not the maxim with which Naziism attains its great production for war, but perhaps in the long run it is wiser. Mr. Davis called upon U.S. industrialists to "do what most of them have done: accept and recognize without reservation the spirit of the National Labor Relations Act and of collective bargaining." To labor he said: "Labor organizations owe an equally great respect to the opinion of the citizens.

They ought to use their legal remedy and not the remedy of force." A squat, sloppily dressed man with a mop of uncombed hair and the face of a kindly bulldog, William Hammatt Davis, 61, is a successful Manhattan patent attorney who has long made labor relations his avocation. He has served in many a Government agency, State and national, was chairman of the New York State Board of Mediation. To him belongs credit for settlement of the Allis-Chalmers strike, which Labor Department conciliators had given up, OPM's Hillman had fumbled and OPM's Knudsen and Navy's Knox had thrown into confusion that seemed, after two days of rioting, irreparable.

Davis' astute handling of the Aiiis-Chalmers strike was a model for mediators.

With fellow members of the Mediation Board, he called management and labor into conference, calmed them by being calm, let each side give its account of the 75-day-old fight. Then he began to ask questions, avoiding questions which could be answered No. He covered the main point of the controversy by writing an agreement which gave the union security against attempts to organize another union within the plant, and reassured the company that no man's job depended on union membership.

After packing both sides off to think it over alone, he reassembled them next morning, convinced them that the agreement said exactly what they both wanted to say, in different words. They capitulated, unanimously adopted a resolution thanking Davis for his "able, patient and impartial work." Day after that exhausting weekend, indefatigable Mr. Davis appeared before the U.S. Supreme Court and masterfully argued a patent-infringement case.

Davis' brother, Owen, writes plays (The Nervorts Wreck). He himself makes sermons, quotes platitudes and verse: "The most convincing evidence that the Creator is a Divine Being is that no one except a Divine Being would have known that He would need an eternity to correct the mistakes of human beings." Last week Mediator Davis' calm and reasonable philosophy appeared to be prevailing on the labor front. The Ford strike had ended and a strike threat in steel had been removed (see p. 82). What might well be a model for future labor-management relations was announced by OPM--an agreement between Pacific Coast shipbuilders and workers (see p. 88).

The jittery country had only to look back four years to realize that what had happened had not been the worst that could have happened, by a long shot.

Strikes then had the nation in convulsions: strikes in "Little Steel," a massacre of workers in Chicago, sit-down strikes in the motor industry, textile strikes, transportation tie-ups. From Columnist Dorothy Thompson then came the irritated cry: "How long, O Catilines, Catilines of the right and Catilines of the left, will you abuse our patience?" The patience of the U.S. has not been so long in the momentous year of 1941 as it was in 1937. Luckily William Hammatt Davis could parody Plato, a wiser man than Cicero, on the labor situation: "Creation is the product of persuasion, except in case of rape."

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