“The Balance Wheel”: William Allen White, the Kansas Industrial Court, and the Progressive Approach to the Labor Question, 1914–1925 Available to Purchase

In this article, Charles Delgadillo addresses the fate of the Progressive approach to the labor question, which sought to eliminate socially costly industrial strikes through quasi-judicial measures that envisioned government as a neutral adjudicator between warring labor and capital. The Kansas Industrial Relations Act of 1920 epitomized this strategy by replacing strikes and lockouts with a system of compulsory adjudication called the industrial court. William Allen White, the celebrated Kansas newspaper editor, played a key role in advancing the industrial court as a civilized substitute for industrial warfare that was especially fair to labor. The Great Railroad Strike of 1922 dispelled White's Progressive illusions after the law was used to break the strike by crushing civil liberties. White finally understood the working class's wariness toward the state, and he realized that strikes were labor's only means of obtaining justice. The failure of the Kansas Industrial Court freed Progressives such as White to accept the necessity of conflict in resolving industrial disputes, which formed the basis of New Deal labor policy.