There were many interesting characters on the body. Two that I particularly enjoyed were Henry Endicott, who with the Johnsons had established the famous shoe towns near Binghamton, New York, and a delightful pungent character from Georgia—Fuller E. Callaway—who in twenty years had built up from scratch mills and a village with homes and schools—everything to give life and a chance to hard-working mill people. Mr. Callaway’s story of what he had done in Georgia was one of the very few joyous contributions to a gathering doomed to be a dismal failure. A body could have scarcely had a heartier welcome from the public than we did. People seemed to feel we should find a way to end the fighting; that was what we were there for, Secretary of Labor Wilson told us in his keynote speech. If we could produce a document which would secure the rights of all those concerned in an industry, it would find a place in the hearts of men like the Magna Charta, the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States and the Emancipation Proclamation. He brought us all to our feet—all save a few who were too interested in political strategy to entertain a high purpose. We were there to plan for the future of industry. But almost at once we discovered that it was not peace or the future of industry that was in Mr. Gompers’ mind. Also, we discovered that the master politician of the body was Mr. Gompers. We were hardly organized before he called upon us to appoint a committee to report on the steel strike. Dr. Charles Eliot, outraged, rose in all his very genuine majesty and reminded the body that we were not there to attend to the troubles of the present but to plan that such troubles might be avoided in the future. But the steel strike was on the table, and we left it there when we disbanded, a menace and an irritation. It was not Mr. Gompers’ resolution, however, which ruined the Conference. It was the inability of the representatives of labor and employers to agree on a definition for collective bargaining. The Conference as a whole contended that such a definition must be a leading plank in the platform we were there to make, but there were to be many other planks. Committees were at once formed to frame them. Almost every member of the Conference, too, had some particular resolution that he wanted to incorporate. I know I did. But most of us never found an opportunity to present our notions. Collective bargaining and what it meant were always getting in our way. The employer group and a considerable number of the public group believed that the definition which the labor group offered meant a closed shop. Judge Gary openly charged this. But labor was quite as strong in its suspicion that the definition which came from the employer group encouraged company unions, at that moment flourishing in numbers that alarmed them. Suspicion governed both groups.