ANDREW FURUSETH

...A graphic illustration which appeared recently in many newspapers throughout the country attracted wide attention because it showed that the Army of the United States is made up almost entirely of people from the humbler walks of life...

...So live that you may have nothing to lose" was his principle of life...

...That system still survives On, the sea, except on voyages outbound from American ports, where it has been destroyed by the Seamen's act The Beamen had need U an economist able to apply the doctrines of industrial freedom to their peculiar case, and they found hiifi in Andrew Furuseth...

...There was ample precedent and ampler reason for generous salaries for leaders of labor...

...For the sake of the rights of seamen, Andrew Furuseth has resolutely put away what all men count most dear...

...surface appearance is one of pure thought...

...Well, what if the Orientals do work the ships, so long as we own and officer them...

...National and international factors also require consideration...

...Let the Orient provide the sailors: in the end the sea power of the world will fail to the Orient...

...But if one has once looked at the problem of a mercantile marine through the eyes of Andrew Furuseth, he Will see its larger contingencies, he will not again be able to view it as a mere question of investment and profit...

...To raise wages 'by liberating supply and demand—does this hot sound like the classical political economy...

...There is doubtless emotion enough in him, somewhere, but hi1...

...It affects labor only in so far as it liberates the action of supply of and demand for labor...

...Furuseth inflicts a severe shock upon the middle-age complacency that lays claim to a monopoly of the generalized civic virtues...

...therefore Andrew Furuseth would live his life alone with his purpose...

...Is it not significant that "Wall Street" is not represented in the make up of our Army...

...Furuseth shows, too, how far the ship-owning business has been internationalized, and teaches you to distinguish, in the shipowners' campaign against the Seamen's law, between the element of solicitude for the national interest and the element of solicitude for class interest...

...One may not agree with Mr...

...The Seamen's law is not a labor law at all," declares Mr...

...It is possible to rejoice in the prospect that the Republicans, if carried into power, will probably give the law very short shrift, if indeed they do not kill it at sight But it is not possible to withhold admiration from Andrew Furuseth, the man whose work has culminated in the enactment of this law...

...where breaker-boys will not be permitted in coal mines...

...He tells you what proportion wages bear to-the total cost of running a ship, .what rates of wages prevail at San Francisco and Seattle, New York and Newport News...

...You demand what other explanation than the influence of the Seamen's law can be offered for the recent rapid decline of American shipping on the Pacific...

...He is not like this at all...

...Enforce the langua^ requirement in the Seamen's law, and American ships will have to secure American or British sailors, Dutch ships will be manned by Dutchmen, Norwegian ships by Norwegians...

...His argument is dispassionate, crammed with numerical calculations, like that of an economist of the old school...

...Knowing something of the principles of Andrew Furuseth, you expect to find in him an emaciated, fiery-eyed compound of sailor and labor agitator, a man vibrating with the consciousness of the wrongs of his fellows, with zeal for fighting more intense than Holy...

...Furuseth replies: "It is the lesson of history that the r.ation that swings the tools will in the long run own the tools...

...Physically he is an excellent representative of the North Sea sailor type, Norse, Dutch, or British—for essentially they are all one...

...Such men may indeed over-emphasize the labor interest, just as representatives Of the middle-class are likely to over-emphasize the business interest...

...Desire for material goods has crippled other fighters...

...He knows what differences in wages obtained among ships of the various nationalities before the enactment of the Seamen's law, and to what extent that law has operated to equalize wages...

...the work is hard and the requisite mental quality rare...

...I WANT TO LIVE in a world where 100 warships, costing $200,000,000, Will not be proudly paraded before a city too poor to feed its hungry school-children...

...The classical doctrine was friendly to labor so long as the work to be achieved was the clearing away of the remnants of the disabilities and oppressions of the feudal system...

...to live in a werld where the opinions of long-dead grandfathers inscribed in constitutions will be of less consequence than the mangled arms and limbs and the destitute women and children of our factory workers...

...If the Army of the United States should be thrown into Mexico to protect the investments of speculative financial interests, who would have their bodies exposed to the bullets of the invaded and outraged Mexicans...

...The nation that provides the men to work the ships will finally own the ships...

...He is long-limbed, loose-jointed, carrying himself with a sailor's purposefulness, rather than with a landsman's pride...

...A foreign ship, clearing from an American-port, can no longer keep its men unless it pays wages equal to those paid by American ships...

...It is a common assumption that the labor leader,* as a politician, is incapable of taking a broad view of the general interests of the nation...

...Wife and children have served to break many a fighter's spirit...

...Japan and China will send their ships to San Francisco and New York, London and , Hamburg, to enforce demands and give laws, as seas power has always done...

...It was to be a long struggle and a bitter one: hence it was necessary for him to be free from handicaps...

...Tbis in fact it is...

...They can't feed me on plainer food...

...In this too Andrew Furuseth is classical...

...One may reject the view that such a marine can thrive under the conditions of free labor established by the Seamen's Act...

...A serious obstacle will have been thrown in the way of the tendency, manifest everywhere on the Pacific and Indian Oceans, and even in the Mediterranean and on the Atlantic, to substitute Oriental crews for the sturdy sailors once the pride of the Occident...

...one asks...

...What at first puzzles you is the absence from his talk of anything like the emotional exaggeration of the labor leader...

...He has fought for it and for the principle he believes it to embody, the rights of man at sea, as very few modern men will fight for anything...

...His face is weathered, not worn...

...We shall have more varied and fruitful political life when we shall haVe learned to utilize the intellectual resources offered by organized labor...

...Enlisted in the fight, he early reached a complete understanding with himself...

...You can't convict the Seamen's act of killing a traffic that was otherwise mortally stricken...

...They Can't give me narrower quarters than those I now live in...

...But the political views of the labor leaders, like those of other classes, extend to broad considerations of social welfare and national power, and may well be precisely what we need to infuse vitality into the mass of our general political conceptions, still too largely of middle-class origin...

...He is self-trained, as the early classical economists were, and like them he Is r#> mafKably secure in hid facts and cogent la ills reasoning...

...The question of profits and wages do not, in his view, exhaust the ocean shipping problem...

...Where it will be criminal to place little children In canneries, chemical vats, glass-mills, or phosphorus-factories.—Feedeeio C. Howe...

...His features are sharp, his blue eyes roving, except when a knotty idea gathers the wrinkles about their corners and contracts his brows...

...They acknowledged the existence of political values, national or racial, to which mere economic norms might have to be subordinated...

...therefore Andrew Furuseth would limit his wants to what the barehanded laborer's toil could win...

...Furuseth silences you with a lucid though complicated economic discussion, setting forth the conditions of traffic five years ago, when railways carrying goods destined for the Orient could afford to run lines of ships in order to increase their share In the joint land and water rates, and drawing a contrast with present conditions, controlled by the opening of the Panama Canal and by the ship famine created by the war...

...When some of his friends were greatly disturbed over the possibility that he might be clapped into jail for contempt of court, on account of his activities in a strike, Andrew Furuseth merely smiled, "Put me into jail...

...The classical economists did hot restrict themselves narrowly to the economic field...

...Furuseth that a national mercantile marine is requisite to our prosperity and security...

...We shall not see clearing from bur ports ships officered by Americans, British, Germans or Dutch, and manned by Chinese, Japanese or Hindoos...

...Acquaintance with labor leaders like Mr...

...This Illustration appears above...

...Andrew Furuseth A Scholar's Estimate of "The Old Viking" Who is Fighting for Human Liberty By ALV1N S. JOHNSON In "The New Republic" IT is possible for a good American, especially for one who has too little or too much interest in the sea, to hold the Seamen's law in detestation...

...As an officer of the seamen's organization Andrew Furuseth had his salary gauged by the earnings of an ordinary seaman...

...The Make-up of Our Army IN CASE Of war, who will do the fighting...

...Wages and other conditions of employment are said to bulk too large in his cosmos...

...Force foreign shipping to pay wages equal to the American, and oiie of the most serious handicaps to our shipping development is removed...

...watch it narrowly, and you get on impression of a courageous but conciliatory disposition...

...They can't make me mora lonely than I am anyway...

...So it was with the Italians, the Hanseatic League, the Dutch, the English...