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

NATIONAL CIVIC FEDERATION

NATIONAL CIVIC FEDERATION. The United States was a country of small businesses and family farms when the Civil War ended in 1865. Forty years later, however, railroads, gigantic industrial corporations, and financial institutions had transformed the nation. It was not a peaceful transformation, however. In 1877, starving workers furiously attacked railroad and other corporate property and were gunned down by company militias. Fifteen years later, southern and midwestern farmers rose against the political power of eastern banks and northern manufactures in the Populist revolt. By 1900, all such movements had been defeated, but the nation was still rife with social discontent.

After observing the hostility of Kansas Populists and Chicago Socialists toward corporate domination, Ralph M. Easley, a self-styled conservative Republican, became a crusader to rationalize and stabilize the new economic system. In 1900, he organized the National Civic Federation (NCF) to bring top business and labor leaders together in harmony. Above all, this was an organization of business leaders who believed, like J. P. Morgan's partner George W. Perkins, that unless the new trust system spread its benefits to workers, it could not survive. Agreeing, the coal baron and Ohio Senator Marcus A. Hanna, NCF's first president, hoped, by accommodating labor, to "lay the foundation stone of a structure that will last for all time." Top American Federation of Labor (AFL) leaders were happy to cooperate, including Samuel Gompers, NCF's first vice president. And prominent public figures, including former U.S. presidents Grover Cleveland and William H. Taft also joined this project of class cooperation.

Together—under the guidance of corporate leaders who had transcended a narrow interest-consciousness and were emerging as class-conscious leaders of the nation—these men sought to legitimize trade unions and foster cooperation between workers and employers. For almost twenty years—from 1900 to 1918—they had mixed success, until, during the war, the Wilson administration made them obsolete.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Weinstein, James. The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State, 1900– 1918. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981.

JamesWeinstein