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    "ocrText": "Chapter 15-1, Conclusions and Inferences\n221\navoid these enthusiasms and \"sure\" paths to victory and to concentrate on the Job\ninterest as the only hard economic reality in the wage earner's life. Labor's \"dis-\ncoveries,\" learned by trial and error, also extended to the American community as\na whole-the \"public,\" to the employers and to the government.\nLabor learned that an attack, or even what might be misconstrued as an intended\nattack, on private property and private enterprise as institutions would only be a\nfree gift to its enemies; that employers, if the gods were willing, could be coerced\nor sometimes cajoled into a joint job administration under a trade agreement; that\nthe structure of political action in the United States doomed a labor party setting\nup in competition with the \"old\" parties but opened a possibility for carrying col-\nlective bargaining into politics and even, under the system of \"primary\" elections,\nfor an \"infiltration\" of the old parties; and finally, that the American government\nwith its states' rights, judicial review and general checks and balances was a very\nlimited instrument for labor's good and often a menace to labor's self-help poten-\ntial, and one which needed to be warded off (for example, the Sherman Anti-trust\nAct).\nThe assailants of Gompers' job conscious unionism have consistently viewed it\nas a phenomenon in labor movement pathology. To the extreme \"left\" job con-\nsciousness remains a case of a hopeless degeneration of vital tissue; to the \"cen-\ntrists\" in the radical movement it is a case of an arrested development to be\novercome by suitable ideological injections. However, notwithstanding the verbal\nrigidity which Gompers and his associates have often employed, this job con-\nscious philosophy, itself the product of an evolution, was one with an \"open\nend\"-toward further evolutionary development. In essence it has been an\nemphasis on what is nuclear, on what is the central core of labor's interest, which\nwhen uncomplicated by personalities, passion and dogmatism, itself compels a\nwidening of the area of labor's interest, with changing conditions. These\nall-important changing conditions were brought about by the New Deal.\nThe revolution effected by the New Deal in American government was in spirit\nquite like the Jeffersonian and Jacksonian revolutions, and in its permanent effect\non the structure of government has even exceeded its predecessors. The Roosevelt\nattack on the United States Supreme Court in February 1937 followed, for what-\never reason, by the Court's \"counter-reformation,\" has put together the American\ngovernment of limited powers into a more powerful instrument. Since the Court's\ndecisions in the spring of 1937, American labor has been fully aware of the utility\nof government as a tool. These decisions have simultaneously enfranchised gov-\nernment, both Federal and State, in the sphere of industrial relations and freed the\nformer of the straightjacket of \"State's rights.\" Consequently, the politico-legisla-\ntive arena has ceased to be a place where labor could merely pursue a mirage,\nrevealed as such when the courts declared unconstitutional the painfully attained\nlabor protective laws. It has now become a real front where enduring victories\ncould be won. And the extreme variety of \"pure and simple\" unionism with its\ndecisive inhibition against free participation in politics has therefore become"
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