PERSONALS

Therecent action of Congress and President Wilson, under the specific encouragement of both railroad managers and employes, in placing industrial mediation and arbitration on a wider and stronger basis, is a long step toward the realization of a definite ideal which has been cradled in the mind of Charles P. Neill, the former commissioner of labor.

Charles NeillCHARLES P. NEILL

CHARLES P. NEILL

Former President Roosevelt discovered Mr. Neill. Mr. Neill discovered the Erdman Act, which platted a narrow pathway through the industrial jungle in the United States. Congress put the Erdman Act on the statute books, but Charles P. Neill placed it definitely in the imagination of the American people and focused upon it the hope of the nation for industrial peace. It is to Mr. Neill’s credit that he found and took advantage of the possibilities of the Erdman Act in spite of its limitations.

From 1898, when the Erdman Act was passed, to 1906, only a single attempt was made to utilize its provisions in industrial warfare. That attempt, which was in June, 1899, failed. Mr. Neill became commissioner of labor in 1905. Within the five years, December, 1906, to January, 1912, the provisions of the law were invoked in nearly 60 interstate commerce disputes. Between 1908 and 1912 there was but one period as long as three months during which mediation was not sought in a railroad dispute. The threatened strikes which were averted during these five years involved over half a million miles of railroad and 163,000 railroad employes. These figures include duplicates since the same railroad was sometimes involved more than once.

In all this work as mediator Mr. Neill enjoyed the unlimited confidence of railroad managers, and employes alike. Whatever the bitterness, the differences in codes of industrial ethics, and the misunderstandings of fact which separated into bitter opposition the railroad managers and their employes, there was no time when both parties failed to give absolute confidence to Commissioner Neill and to rely with unquestioning trust on his judgment, on his personal character, and the practical wisdom of his suggestion. This extraordinary tribute to him was primarily a tribute to his character, but it was earned in part by the marvelous accuracy with which his imagination seized situations and all their parts, and enabled him to talk the minutely technical language of railroad operation. The rare assemblage of mental and moral gifts which characterize Mr. Neill was fully recognized and nothing clouded that recognition during his term of service. These extraordinary features of his career will offer but little consolation to the few lonely critics whose voices were recently heard in high circles.

Mr. Neill was made commissioner of labor in 1905. He was re-appointed in 1909. His third nomination was sent to the Senate by President Taft in January, 1913. Confirmation was withheld because of the Democratic policy toward President Taft’s nominations in general. Mr. Neill’s name was sent back to the Senate by President Wilson but it was not acted upon at the short session. It was again sent to the Senate at its extraordinary session. Meantime Mr. Neill’s term of office had expired, and on February 1 he surrendered his office. Confirmation was delayed, apparently because certain southern Senators seemed to have views of the humanities of industry which were not in accord with those of Commissioner Neill. His appointment, however, was finally confirmed and Mr. Neill resumed his office. After a few weeks of service he resigned to take the position of director of welfare with the American Smelting and Refining Company. He has taken charge of the welfare of approximately 20,000 laboring men in the employ of this corporation. The delay of the confirmation of Mr. Neill’s appointment brought forth from the labor press generally, from the railroad managers of the United States and from the American press generally, tributes to his character, to his power, and to his achievements which have been rarely equaled and more rarely exceeded in the industrial history of the nation.

In addition to the annual reports and bulletins issued by the Bureau while Mr. Neill was commissioner of labor, which publications forma very valuable contribution to the literature dealing with labor conditions, the bureau made a number of important special investigations at the direction of Congress, the results of which are embodied in various reports, notable among them are the Report of the Condition of Women and Child Wage-Earners in the United States (in 19 volumes), the Report on the Conditions of Employment in the Iron and Steel Industry, and the Reports on the Strike at Bethlehem and the Strike at Lawrence, Mass. Acting as special commissioner under Roosevelt Mr. Neill investigated the packing house industry and the Goldfield strike. In spite of the handicap under which he was placed by his mediation work, Mr. Neill gave most careful supervision to the planning and the executing of the work of the Bureau of Labor, and in many cases tested the accuracy and completeness of work of his agents by personally inspecting the fields in which they labored.

Mr. Neill was born in Rock Island, Illinois, in 1865. His college education was obtained at Notre Dame University, at the University of Texas, at Georgetown, and at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore where he took his Ph.D. in 1897. He served as an instructor at Notre Dame University from 1891 to 1894. He was professor of political economy at the Catholic University from 1898 to 1905. While occupying this position he prepared and installed an exhibit of the Catholic charities of the United States at theSt.Louis Exposition. He was United States commissioner of labor from 1905 to 1913, vice-president of the Board of Charities of the District of Columbia, 1900 to 1908; assistant recorder of the Anthracite Strike Commission in 1902; recorder of the Arbitration Board for the Birmingham strike in 1903; member of the U. S. Immigration Commission, 1907 to 1910. As member of the International Institute of Statistics, he has actively furthered plans for the adoption of international standards for the compilation of industrial statistics and has been active in working toward international conventions to promote that end.

Nature, grace and environment conspired to prepare Mr. Neill for his work. Ideals governed him from his early boyhood and gave him the courage to overcome a typical range of obstacles in working them out. Everything taught Mr. Neill. He had the rare capacity and the temperament to profit by experience. His ideals of social service and his Christian sympathies have been so powerful that nothing frightened him and nothing side-tracked him from his path. There is no way of knowing fully the pressure that was brought to bear upon him, or the dust that was stirred up to obscure the practical ideals that governed him in his work as an investigator of the industrial battlefield. Whether in a congressional hearing where a none too kindly spirit sometimes cropped out, or in protecting the accuracy and good faith of his bureau reports, some of which aroused fierce antagonisms and were subject to bitter attack, Mr. Neill displayed the same intelligent fearlessness, the same restrained idealism and the same self reliance which his friends have always noted and admired in him. He has had severe academic training, yet he has remained a thoroughly practical man. He is a brave and honest fighter, without any love of fighting for its own sake.

A personal feature of Mr. Neill’s career remains to be noted. Under the law he, as commissioner of labor, was associated with Judge Martin A. Knapp in adjusting railway disputes. Originally Judge Knapp acted in his capacity as chairman of the Interstate Commerce Commission. When he was transferred to the Court of Commerce a change in the law was made, permitting the President to select as second mediator any member of the Interstate Commerce Commission or of the Commerce Court. In this manner it was possible to continue Judge Knapp in the mediation work. Fortunately he remains to carry into the newer epoch just entered upon, the splendid traditions of the work as developed by himself and Mr. Neill. These two men worked together in a spirit of mutual understanding and trust which made their mediation work a happy experience for themselves, no less than for the railroads and the employes. It is impossible to separate them in attributing credit for the great results which have been achieved. Each has been most gratified when the public honored the other. Both will be associated in the discriminating memory of the nation as precursors of the era of industrial peace for which the nation’s heart is longing.

Wm.J. Kirby.

Charles Stelzle, pioneer in church social service, who was the founder and has for ten years been in charge of this phase of the work of the Presbyterian Board of Home Missions, will leave that board on October 1. Mr. Stelzle plans to set up offices of his own as consulting sociologist and efficiency engineer for national church organizations, social service agencies and industrial enterprises.

The broader field which he proposes to cover on severing his connection with purely denominational work Mr. Stelzle outlines as furnishing “Expert service with reference to Sociological and Religious Surveys; Exhibits; Social Service Campaigns and Conferences; Social and Religious Work among Immigrant, Industrial, and Rural Populations; Publicity, Educational, and Evangelistic Campaigns; Efficiency Methods for Local Churches and National Organizations; General Industrial Problems.”

Charles StelzleCHARLES STELZLE

CHARLES STELZLE

Mr. Stelzle came to the church, when he was ordained minister about eighteen years ago, as a worker who in his twelve years in the machine shop had been made painfully conscious of the lack of understanding and co-operation between the church and the workingmen. He organized the Department of Church and Labor of the Presbyterian Church, and this was subsequently expanded into the bureau from which he is resigning. The Labor Temple in lower Second Avenue, New York, a religious labor center which he organized a few years ago, has so evidently responded to a need that the board has recently bought the property and put the templeon a permanent basis. Labor Sunday, a nation-wide campaign for temperance carried on through the trade unions and a press service on social, religious and industrial topics which is used by 350 of the principal labor papers, are other activities of the bureau. Mr. Stelzle has served as arbitrator in many industrial disputes and has established a permanent connection between the church and organized labor through ministerial delegates to the trade unions.

In addition to this industrial work he was for a year executive secretary of the Commission on Social Service of the Federal Council of Churches, had charge of the social service features of one of the Men and Religion Forward Movement teams and directed the surveys made by the movement in seventy cities. He conducted the recent publicity campaign for the Home Missions Council and the Council of Women for Home Missions.

Mr. Stelzle’s successor in the bureau has not yet been appointed.

Theappointment of Louis F. Post, founder and for fifteen years joint editor with Alice Thatcher Post ofThe Publicand worker for many public causes in Chicago, to the assistant secretaryship of the Federal Department of Labor has been generally recognized, to use the words of a fellow journalist, as something more than the dropping of a plum into the gaping mouth of a hungry politician. Mr. Post is no politician and was by no means hungry for the position, which he at first peremptorily refused, feeling that he could not give up his work onThe Public. He consented only after pressure had been brought to bear upon him from all sides and he had been brought to realize that a still larger duty called him to the service of the nation.

The ideals which animated Mr. Post as editor and which he brings to his work in the Department of Labor, he thus himself expresses in a recent valedictory editorial:

“In citizenship it has been my object and that of my editorial associates through all those years, to inculcate a realization of the larger citizen, the civic whole, whose voice, when conflicting selfishnesses cancel one another, is in a very real sense ‘the voice of God.’ As single taxers, we have worked with the purpose on the one hand of lifting single taxers out of a cult and broadening them with visions of the ever-pulsating world of men wherein their cause must flourish if it is ever to fructify, and on the other of disclosing to all readers with democratic ideals the subtle power of this reform in democratizing industry as well as politics. With more comprehensive scope we have inculcated fundamental democracy as the social principle of which every social reform is at best but a practical application; and with scope still more comprehensive we have identified democracy with that element of the universal which exhibits the physical phenomena of life as product, instead of producer, of those faculties which some of us call ‘intellectual’ and others ‘spiritual.’”

James Mullenbach’sappointment as superintendent of the great Cook County infirmary for the poor of Chicago at Oak Forest is as creditable to President Alexander A. McCormick of the Board of County Commissioners as it is to Mr. Mullenbach.

With his experience as settlement resident at Chicago Commons, as superintendent of the Municipal Lodging House, as assistant superintendent of the United Charities, as secretary of the Land, Labor, and Immigration Officials’ Conference, and as the representative of the social agencies reporting social legislation at the Illinois Legislature, Mr. Mullenbach is regarded as the ideal head for the greatest county institutions west of New York.

It is significant of the new times to find a college educated man who rounded out his professional training on a fellowship in a German University, being sought for and accepting a position, to which only a political appointee has hitherto been appointed. No higher token of the triumph of patriotism on partisanship has been registered in America than this, and many another, achievement of Mr. McCormick in rescuing the County of Cook from the spoils exploitation of his predecessor and in establishing the efficient business management and the humane social standards of his own administration.

Therecent death of Edna P. Alter in a trolley wreck near Pasadena, Cal., removes one of the younger workers in the field of organized charity. Miss Alter knew every phase of work in the homes of the poor for she entered theHudson district of the New York Charity Organization Society as district nurse in 1908, later rounded out her preparation for the work of organized charity by a summer course in the New York School of Philanthropy, and became assistant agent in that district. In the fall of 1910 she rose to the responsible position of secretary of the Associated Charities of Pasadena.

Leo G. MacLaughlin, president of that society, speaks of her work as “sympathetic, kindly, warm-hearted and keenly intelligent. She was one of the founders of the local Associated Charities and her work won favorable attention over a wide area.”

A fewyears of school dental clinics have made “toothbrush drills” a fairly familiar idea in many cities. It took the Toronto public nurses, or rather their supervisor, Lina L. Rogers, to originate another drill quite as unique and important.

Since last October the school children of Toronto, in squads of twenty have practised daily “nose-blowing drills” and the effect on the freshness of the atmosphere of the schoolrooms has been so noticeable that the teachers have become assiduous in seeing to it that no child comes to school unprovided with a pocket handkerchief. They often, indeed, themselves order the drills without waiting for the coming of the nurse. The effect of the drill is perceptible already on individual children, in cases of catarrh, and the doctors predict that it will have an appreciable effect in time in lessening adenoids and other throat and nose affections.

It was Miss Rogers, who has recently become Mrs. W. E. Struthers, who, when a nurse at the Henry Street Settlement in New York in 1902 was chosen to demonstrate at the expense of the settlement in four local schools the need of municipal school nurses. This she did with such success that within a month the Department of Health took over the financial responsibility and extended the work, making her supervisor.

With a subsequent seven years’ experience in this capacity she went to Toronto in 1909, where she has done pioneer health work in the schools. These are now fully equipped with school nurses and with dental care, one of the four clinics now carried on in connection with the school system having been equipped with a model outfit at the expense of the enthusiastic nurses themselves.

Mrs. StruthersMRS. W. E. STRUTHERS

MRS. W. E. STRUTHERS

Besides nose-blowing drills Toronto has undertaken another departure in school health work, in establishing a real open-air school, on the model of the Forest School at Charlottenberg in Germany. To a private park on the outskirts of Toronto, which has been loaned for this purpose and equipped with shacks, fifty anaemic or delicate children were taken for three months last winter by special trolley cars each morning and not returned till twelve hours later, thus living and learning in the open air. No tubercular children were taken, sanatorium care being provided for them. Five meals are furnished, the trolley service is given free by the street railway company, a nurse is in attendance and three teachers, lessons are given for three and one-half hours in the open air. There is a great deal of outdoor play, and nose-blowing and toothbrush drills and a weekly bath form part of this school course, as well as a two-hour nap each day. The experiment has been so successful that the number of children will be increased next year to one hundred and the school term lengthened to six months.

As wife of Dr. W. E. Struthers, chief medical inspector of the schools, Mrs. Struthers will continue her interest in the physical care of school children. She will also have the direction of the work until her successor, not yet appointed, is broken in.

Tomake charity administration measure up to strict tests of business efficiency—this has been the ideal that Howell Wright has put in practice as superintendent of the Cleveland Associated Charities. He has succeeded so well that Mayor Baker has recently appointed him superintendent of the City Hospital, with instructions to use the same methods there.

Mr. Wright has no medical training. He is a social worker with a business twist. His newappointment illustrates the growing tendency today to put at the head of great specialized institutions, men who have a broad social outlook combined with executive power, but minus specialized training.

HOWELL WRIGHTHOWELL WRIGHT

HOWELL WRIGHT

The City Hospital has been a bit too professional in the past. It has looked very closely to its diagnosis and temperature charts and instruments. But almost no thought has been given to the human and social background of its patients, and patients “cured” of physical ills have been turned out with all their social ills still festering, the inevitable result being that they speedily returned to the City Hospital to be “cured” again.

The hope is that Mr. Wright will make of the City Hospital a social institution, looking backward and forward into causes and effects.

Since Mr. Wright received his master’s degree from Yale University in 1907 he has served as special agent of the Massachusetts S. P. C. C. and as general secretary of the Norwood Civic Association. During the past year as superintendent of the Cleveland Associated Charities his chief move has been the abandonment of the general employment bureau for the unskilled, which had been conducted by the Associated Charities since 1886. After a searching study of the charitable field and a special study of such bureaus in other places it was decided to transfer this work to the State Employment Bureau in the city and the experiment has so far justified itself. Mr. Wright’s service has also been notable in bringing into use simple records, centralized purchasing and smoothly systematic office methods.

Sidney B. Bock, acting head resident of Pillsbury Settlement House, Minneapolis, has been elected head resident of Neighborhood House in Detroit, Michigan. This settlement is just completing a new building, having been in rented quarters since its founding in 1909.

Berkeley G. Tobey, until recently secretary of the National Council Boy Scouts of America, has become business manager of the Masses Publishing Company.

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