Marshaling his parade toward Recovery, by last week President Roosevelt had swung Industry into line with a series of NRA codes. The nation's storekeepers were being regimented under a Retail Code. He was about to turn his attention to the nation's consumers, whose purchasing power was to be set in motion with a "Buy Now" campaign. Special posters, silhouets of the Capitol in blue, were rolling from the presses. Individual manufacturers were ready to launch private advertising campaigns. General Hugh Johnson declared that the "flat wallet era" was about to end.
At this important moment. Marshal Roosevelt was distressed to see that several Labor sections of his Recovery march, those for whom, individually, NRA promised most, were breaking ranks in wild disorder. Strikes, jurisdictional squabbles, bloody labor combats pocked the land. An opportunity to megaphone Labor back into line presented itself when the President went to dedicate a monument to the late great Samuel Gompers on Massachusetts Avenue, a block from the American Federation of Labor Building in Washington.
Accompanied by his wife and Cinemactress Marie Dressier, who was spending the weekend at the White House, the President reached the speakers' platform below which sat delegates to the A. F. of L.'s 53rd convention (see p. 11). He began by recalling that "In the year 1911 —only 22 years ago—Samuel Gompers, Robert F. Wagner, Alfred E. Smith and I were labeled as radicals when we fought for and finally succeeded in passing a bill through the New York State Legislature limiting the work of women in industry to 54 hours a week. . . .
"The keen analysis of President Wilson made this reference to Mr. Gompers in November 1917: 'If I may be permitted to do so, I want to express my admiration of his patriotic courage, his large vision and his statesmanlike sense of what has to be done. I like to lay my mind alongside of a mind that knows how to pull in harness. The horses that kick over the traces will have to be put in a corral.'
". . . Just as in 1917, we are seeking to pull in harness; just as in 1917. horses that kick over the traces will have to be put in a corral. . . . There are hotheads who think that results can be obtained by noise or violence; there are insidious voices seeking to instill methods or principles which are wholly foreign to the American form of Democratic government. . . . The overwhelming majority of the workers understand, as do the overwhelming majority of the employers of the country, that this is no time to seek special privilege, undue advantage, or personal gain because of the fact of a crisis."