National Civic Federation

National Civic Federation. The National Civic Federation (NCF), founded in 1900, sought to improve labor‐capital relations by finding middle ground between the “socialism” of radical labor unions and the “anarchism” of short‐sighted business interests.The founders were Ralph Easley, a midwestern journalist and economist earlier associated with the Chicago Civic Federation, and his wife, Gertrude Beeks Easley, a former director of employee‐welfare programs at Chicago's International Harvester company. The NCF was most active from 1900 to 1920. Primarily an organization of prominent business leaders (its first president was the Cleveland, Ohio, business tycoon and Republican party leader Mark Hanna), the NCF gained credibility and prominence through its alliance with Samuel Gompers and other moderate labor leaders. In promoting harmony between capital and labor, it sought, by extension, to strengthen and legitimate American capitalism. To this end, the federation urged businesses to bargain with trade unions; to offer voluntary benefits to workers (sometimes called “welfare capitalism”) as an alternative to radical unionism or state intervention; and to tolerate a limited range of prolabor legislation, such as a ban on child labor and laws requiring compensation of workers injured on the job.

Easley became obsessed with the threat of communism after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and increasingly channeled NCF attention and resources into a campaign against U.S. recognition of the Soviet Union. Neither progressive employers nor moderate unions showed much interest, and business and labor support for NCF evaporated after 1920. Easley's view of labor‐capital relations proved increasingly irrelevant amid the bitter anti‐union “open shop” campaign waged by many corporations in the 1920s, and in the Great Depression and New Deal decade of the 1930s. Gertrude Beeks Easley took over after her husband's death in 1939, but by then the NCF, a relic of the Progressive Era, had drifted into obscurity.
See also Anticommunism; Corporatism; Industrialization; Labor Movements; National Association of Manufacturers; New Deal Era, The; Strikes and Industrial Conflict; Twenties, The.

Bibliography

Marguerite Green , The National Civic Federation and the American Labor Movement, 1900–1925, 1956.
James Weinstein , The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State, 1900–1918, 1968.

Colin Gordon