The constant radicalism of America, based on free land, frequent movement, and belief in the future, flared up in the 1880's and for generations this country was engaged in a class war between the rich and the poor (as it had been in Shays' time and in Jackson's). Our political education was won in this time, but Populism died under the combined effects of a war against Spain and a new process of extracting gold; it was revived under Theodore Roosevelt, under Woodrow Wilson, and under Franklin Delano Roosevelt, all of whom tried to shift the base of wealth without cracking the structure itself. Wealth had come into conflict with some other American desires, it had begun to _limit_ enterprise and, in its bad spots, was creating a peasantry and a proletariat. With some feeling that Europe must not repeat itself in America, the people on three occasions chose liberal Presidents and these men built on the "wild" ideas of the 1880's the safeguards of economic democracy which seemed needed at the time. We are a nation in which the Continental European class system has not become rooted; it is socially negated and politically checked; we are a democracy tempered by the special influence of wealth and, more important, by the special position of working-wealth; (inherited money counts so little that the great inheritors of our time fight their way back into production or politics, with a dosage of liberal principles). According to radicals we are still governed by massed and concentrated finance-capital, and according to certain Congressmen we are living under a labor-dictatorship. Very little perspective is required to see that we are living as we always have lived, our purposes not fully realized, our errors a little too glaring, our capacity to change and improve not yet impaired. _Labor Troubles_ The reason we seem to be particularly unsure of ourselves now is that we are creating a national labor policy forty years late. We are hurried and immature; the depression drained our vitality because we were told that change in our institutions meant death to our "way of life"; the traditional American eagerness to abandon whatever he had exhausted, died down; the investment was too great and the interests were too complex. So the changes we had to make all seemed revolutionary if not vengeful, and men whose fathers had lived through the Populist rebellion often seriously felt that the recognition of organized labor was the beginning of class warfare in America.