My dear Professor Zueblin:
I have just read your letter "A Progressive Labor Policy," to Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Pinchot.
I have been acting for Miss Addams during her absence abroad as acting director of the Department of Social and Industrial Justice. To bring the broad planks of the platform down to tacks in that field, we have just been able to arrange with Dr. Lindsay, Prof. Seager, the Columbia drafting bureau, and others, to work out a series of bed rock principles on which standard legislation can be drafted. We are taking up workmen's compensation, industrial accidents, organization of industrial labor departments, schemes of social insurance, etc. I take it that this work is going to be fundamentally constructive, even if at the outset it may do some pretty drastic things in separating the sheep from the goats in the Progressive Party. It will enable us to put out in the fall or winter a bed rock statement of working principles along the lines of the platform.
In another field, Miss Addams and others of us have helped get the Federal Industrial Relations Commission launched, to canvass fundamentally the very subjects set forth in your letter. The resources and authority of this body will enable it to get at the situation in a much deeper and broader way than would the rather embryonic party organization which we now have at Progressive headquarters. That is taking a head, of course, under Miss Kellor's direction of the Progressive Service, but it still has a long way to go. It is in a position to get the broad principles of the platform on the subjects named down to earth and then push them; but it is not in so favorable a position to crytallize policies in the more or less unexplored field of industrial relations. That, it has seemed to me, could wait until the commission lays bare the ground.
Your letter suggests the opportuneness of the Progressive Service and Miss Addams' department, appointing a committee to follow [page 2] the work of the Federal Commission from point to point, so that whatever the Commission's own recommendations, the Progressive Party at the end of next year ought to be able to bring forward at least the elements of a program in that field.
I have just wired you as enclosed, in connection with the Survey symposium.
Sincerely,
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