Wisconsin Library Bulletin Volume 17 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1921 Excerpt: ... than In any other near-by basic industry, that 50 per cent of the U. S. Steel employees work 12 hours a day and onehalf of these work seven days a week. The commission therefore concluded that "the causes of the strike lay in grievances which gave the workers just cause for complaint and for action" (p. 16), and that "unless changes are made approximating in some degree the findings here presented, further unrest is inevitable and another strike must come. In the measure that workmen become intelligent and Americanized, will they refuse to labor under such conditions" (p. 251). Mr. Foster's book, says John A. Fitch in the Introduction "sets forth as no other book has, and as no other writer could, the need of the workers in this great basic industry for organization and the extreme difficulty of achieving this essential right. It shows also in the sanity, good temper and straightforward speech of the author what sort of a leadership it is that the steel companies have decreed their workers shall not have." And George Soule, reviewing it in the Nation, says: Foster's "book is worth a dozen abstract discussions of the labor movement, for it is an example, one of the best examples that has ever arisen, of labor doing its own thinking, making its own detailed and disinterested analysis." Mary Heaton Vorse is a novelist who gives us vivid pictures of the steel mills, of the men who work in them and of the women and children in these workers' homes. Her book is based on facts, but her sympathies are plainly with the strikers. The Survey calls Men of Steel "propaganda of a high quality." Turning from the story of the part played by labor in one basic industry to the history of the labor movement in this country, we...