Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/786

 756 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

the past tense may be misleading. The man himself, serving a two and one-half years' term in Sing Sing prison, is indeed removed from the scene of action, but the Parks spirit, the Parks type of labor-union methods and ideas, are not in Sing Sing, and can be eliminated only through less drastic and far more tedious measures. Not even industrial peace followed his disappearance, since the iron-workers embarked in a strike of national proportions as late as November.

Parks and his following represent the standards and methods prevalent in the early days of the labor movement in this country an era that stamped unionism with a burden of odium it has never been able to escape. It is not a case of degenera- tion. The Parks element is the survival of a lower type of labor- union methods in the midst of conditions that have slowly become superior. The particular body of workingmen Parks represented has never been at a higher level. Structural iron- work is a comparatively new branch of the building industry, and demands a class of crude, rough labor. The main requisites are muscle and endurance. The heavy beams and girders must be swung into place, fitted and riveted, the foremen supplying most of the brain-work. For the chief part these workers have been recruited from the ranks of day laborers ; they are largely illiterate and the dangerous, exhausting nature of their employ- ment further develops a rough and reckless type of character precisely the type adapted to the leadership of a man like Parks, similarly rough and reckless. Not all would answer to this description, to be sure ; but it is notably true of the dominating element, for whose excesses the more conservative group (and, it must be admitted, the less active in shaping union policy) have to suffer jointly in the public eye. That Parks fought for better wage and hour conditions for his group, and with some success, was enough in their eyes to cover the multitude of sins. "What's the odds how he gets his pile?" said one of his followers at the time of his first conviction for extortion; "he gets it out of the bosses, he doesn't get it out of us." And when Parks was sent to Sing Sing, in August, Housesmiths' Local Union No. 2, of which he is the walking delegate or