Fourth interview with H. Edwin Young

H. Edwin Young #117 Transcript

AF: My name is Amy Fried, and I'm in Helen C. White hall. The date is June 18, 1987, and I'm interviewing Dr. Edwin Young.

EY: Why don't we just pass it back and forth?

AF: Okay. I know you've had a long and distinguished career with the University, and I wanted to concentrate though on your connection with the Industrial Relations Institute and the study of industrial relations. And I wanted to start by just asking you to describe your connection with the institute and the department of economics, how you came to the University of Wisconsin, and some of the early, quote, unquote, movers and shakers in the field, who you had some connection with.

EY: Yes, I, uh, learned about the institute from the, almost from the beginning. 00:01:00Around 1947 or '48, Professors Feinsinger and Witte were leading people in the field of industrial relations at Wisconsin, decided that there should be an institute or a center for industrial relations, where both labor and management problems were studied and joint meetings were arranged, etc., and research carried on. This was in vogue around the country. A number of such institutes or organizations were being organized. And so they set up an organization and Robben Fleming was invited to come from Washington.

Robben Fleming had been a graduate in law school here, and after the war had 00:02:00gone, was working in Washington. I invited him to come back as the director of it and almost the only staff person. Perhaps he had a secretary. And he set about arranging seminars and getting papers written. But he ran into a good deal of difficulty. He didn't get the cooperation of the Manufacturer's Association, nor the dean of the Business School. The Manufacturer's Association's position was, even though they may not have stated it publicly, but it was clear that they didn't want their people to appear on the same platforms with trade unionists.

Many of the members, or more vocal ones particularly, were antiunion, open shop people, whatever you called them, and they didn't want to give credence to unionism. And you're getting my, my view of the way things were.

AF: Uh-huh.

EY: Fleming worked very hard, traveled around, got to know many employers, and 00:03:00was on good terms with them, and he was on good terms with labor people. And I think you, it would be a mistake to, to go on without calling him up and talking with him on the phone at least. I've got his phone numbers.

AF: Uh-huh.

EY: Um, he's now retired as president of the University of Michigan. After two or three years of trying, Bob gave, accepted another position as director of the Industrial Relations Center at Illinois, where there was lots of money for research, where they had cooperation from management and labor in a way we didn't have in Wisconsin.

So I was asked to, to be sort of a caretaker of the Institute so it wouldn't 00:04:00die. And we, we carried on. We organized it somewhat, and kept it alive. During that period, we didn't accomplish a great deal. I was busy. I was first the School for Workers, and then was chairman of the department. But at least, we kept the program going.

Then in '55-'56, I spent the year, the academic year, in Brussels, where the International Labor Organizations were located, and Professor Reed Tripp became the director of the Institute. While I was gone, a decision, which had been much discussed before I went, to offer degree courses and a degree program, that 00:05:00decision was taken. I had argued against it, but it, in hindsight, was the right decision. I was, uh, eager to keep labor activities in the Department of Economics, where it had been for a long time. And I was worried about the Institute throwing that away.

So what had, was, had started out as a program dealing with industry and labor became increasingly a research and teaching program. And that evolved over a number of years. Professor Tripp gave it good leadership, and the number of people involved increased. We had to feel our way along at times. Once in 00:06:00awhile, some person would join, who looked upon it as a device for giving his own degree outside of his own department. We had to tighten up the rules and so on. If you read the minutes, you'll discover some of these things.

But my role wasn't tremendously important one. I worked at it. I participated, and with, and I kept the thing alive in very difficult time. And later on as dean, I was able to support it with some funding and so on. But my role was not, uh, I made no great innovations. My problem was to keep something going while I'm juggling the very tricky business in the department at that time. The department was much more important than my life and the Institute.

AF: So you were, um, department chair of economics at the same time that you 00:07:00were, you had the directorship of the, of the Institute?

EY: Yes. Not exactly, but they overlapped. They weren't identical. And so there was some, some of those years. But you, in the records, you can get the dates right. I don't remember them exactly.

AF: Uh-huh.

EY: But I remember being a very busy young man.

AF: I wanted to, to take up sort of the development you said from a, from a, uh, source of sort of meeting ground between labor and management, which the institute was originally to a, to an institution more devoted to research and teaching, if you could describe that a little bit.

EY: Well, I think the development came about because, the transition, because 00:08:00what Bob Fleming had been trying to do was so difficult. And there was a crying need for, for teaching program, and interdisciplinary one, and furthermore, as the department changed, and it went through very great changes in those years. Those are years when people such as Pearlman, Witte, Lescohier, Brandeis were retiring, and, uh, the department was moving in a more theoretical, more mathematical direction.

And so that some of the trends in industrial relations involved more work in psychology, more work in business management, and a lot of other things. So it 00:09:00was something that was bound to come. But it came a little sooner than I would've argued for. But as I said before, I was wrong, and, but that's the reason it came about. But it filled a vacuum. It, that it was there, and now, one of the very important things that happened was we were able to recruit Gerry Somers to the Economics Department. And he provided a lot of leadership. He since, he died at an early age some years ago, but he played a big role.

AF: You mentioned that, uh, there was opposition to the program from the School 00:10:00of Commerce I guess as it was called at the time.

EY: Yes.

AF: And, I mean, what form did that take, and if you want to name names, you know?

EY: Well, the Business School in the time, we called it the School of Commerce in those days, now called the Business School, Mr. Elwell didn't want to coop -- didn't want any cooperation. He just didn't, he -- opposition, just not doing it, he didn't have to do anything. He'd just not cooperate. He was a very conservative person. His friends in the business community were, tended to be quite conservative.

But, and he was well established and this -- in his own -- he, I think it's fair to say, that he regarded his role almost as defending the Business School, 00:11:00Commerce School against the rest of the University. He, because when it came about in the first place, when it was created, separate, cut off from Letters & Science, the faculty voted against it. But the regents had done it anyway. So he regarded himself as being a little beleaguered. He considered most of the, many people in the Economics Department as radicals.

One day, someone came in and told me he had referred to those Communists down in the Economics Department. So I immediately marched upstairs, and marched into his office, and pounded the table, and had him, told to put up or shut up. Well, he wasn't used to having young whippersnappers do that. That quieted him down.

AF: [Words unclear].

EY: Yes. He had to be called. He was, his views about things. Other hand, he was a very able man, and he had a, one of the strongest accounting programs at the 00:12:00time in the country. But he ran the Business School. And he had got into -- he'd given up his graduate work in World War I to teach, in order to keep the place going, and never did get advanced degree, which, I think, bothered him somewhat. But he was, he was able. But he -- trade unionism wasn't his thing.

AF: Can you, I guess, talk a little bit more about your dealings with, I don't know if Commons was still alive when you came, but I guess Pearlman. I read somewhere in the records about, uh, the Commons sat Friday nights or something and whether that was still going on even after his death or, some of the student 00:13:00associates that were still there at the time.

EY: I never met Mr. Commons. He left -- he died, I think, in 1942. He'd left here before that to go to, I think North Carolina, where his, a member of his family was or something. So I never knew him. I knew Professor Pearlman. I came to Wisconsin to do graduate work because my professor at Maine, [Kershin?] had worked with both Witte and Pearlman and maybe with

Commons too, but to less extent. And since I was interested in this field, and also in land management, Wisconsin was very strong in land management, I came for that reason.

When I arrived, expecting to be a teaching assistant in the large pool, Miss 00:14:00Bridgeman, who was the secretary, said, well, Mr. Pearlman wants to see you. And I said, what for? She said, well, go down and find out. And she, you know, for all intents and purposes, Miss Bridgeman really managed the department. And she was an instructor and secretary. So I went down, and he asked me to be his assistant, teaching assistant. He had gone through the files and discovered that I was coming, I was from Maine.

His wife came from New Hampshire, and he liked [word unclear] he liked Yankees. He used to say we Jews and Yankees have a lot in common, which was quite true because I grew up in a household where the Jewish peddler was always welcomed, and he stayed overnight and was a friend of the family. My high school class was, the best students in it and the leaders were Jewish kids, my close friends.

And so because we had kind of an affinity, which he recognized, sometimes he exaggerated it a little, but it was there. And this turned out to be a little embarrassing three days later. Bill Knowles turned up, who had been his assistant the year before, and accused me of taking his job away from him. I'd never heard of Bill Knowles. Mr. Pearlman had, for some reason, had decided that Bill -- Mr. Pearlman wasn't very good at telling people he didn't want them around anymore, or just wanted somebody else to handle that problem [Laughs.].

But that began a marvelous intellectual experience for me. That first year, I was his teaching assistance in four large courses, only one of which I'd ever had before. I, uh, I was not only his teaching assistant, but that was the fall 00:16:00that GIs came back in great numbers. By January, I had four assistants of my own. And I was managing the operation. And so then, I went back to Maine at the end of the year.

AF: This was a one-year --

EY: Yeah, well, see, I had to support with graduate school. I was married with child, and I saved some money, but I didn't have enough to stay on and finish completely. At least, didn't want, we didn't want to live at that standard. I was on leave from the University where I had, was teaching. So then, this is a bit of history which the department might be a little ashamed of, I think. They needed somebody to teach labor history, particularly, and to help with the load. So after a search, we decided the best person in the country was Philip Taft, who had been a student, Pearlman had collaborated with Pearlman on Volume 4 of 00:17:00the Commons' history.

Well, this version that I heard, again, my, some of this is hearsay, remember, I was a very junior around this place, that when they were discussing bringing Taft, they discussed his salary. And Professor Morton complained that they were bringing this guy from Brown, whom he knew quite well, at a higher salary than Morton was getting. Well, this apparently got back to Taft, and he has a short fuse, Bill Taft did. A tremendous worker and scholar, but none of us are perfect. Anyway, he said, the hell with them. I'll stay right here because he had mixed feelings.

He had an ambivalent feeling about Mr. Pearlman. In many ways, he liked him, and in other ways, he was vary critical of him. He couldn't quite make up his mind. He'd work like a demon when he was here on that book, you know. And Mr. Pearlman, he wasn't a great writer. Pearlman would rewrite it and stuff and, 00:18:00kind of thing. Well, anyway, maybe I'm telling you more than I should put on this tape. But anyway, then, this is what the department should be ashamed of, the decided since they couldn't get somebody who knew something, let's get somebody who doesn't know anything and train him ourselves.

So I was offered a position. Come back, I hadn't had my prelims yet. And, but on the condition that it, I could be an instructor, work, do my graduate work, and if I got my Ph.D., I would have a term as assistant professor. And then I would have to make my way. Well, in all those years, I worked with Mr. Pearlman very closely. And, uh, of course, with Mr. Witte too, and when Bob Fleming was here, we were very good friends. So I knew all these people. And Reed Tripp was recruited, I think, by Mr. Witte, and he came as a professor, a full professor. 00:19:00He'd been teaching elsewhere. Well --

Oh, one thing I might add, when the School for Workers was blowing up in 1950, Mr. Pearlman, Mr. Witte, and Bob Fleming insisted that I go over and be the director. All my friends said, well, that's the end of your career there. Nobody's going to ever get out of that morass. That's extension activity, and so on. I went over on a part, half-time basis. I taught half time that two years and got it, I, the fellow who should've had the job took me around and introduced me to people. And his introduction was always, this is Ed Young. There's nothing wrong with him except he just doesn't know anything about the subject, which [Laughs.]

But I got, that's when I made friends with the whole Wisconsin Labor Movement, those years as director of School for Workers. I wasn't a trade unionist. And I 00:20:00didn't pretend to be. But, and so that became useful when we get into the Industrial Relations business because I had all the labor contacts and support, that we, kept that up. The labor people thought very highly of Mr. Pearlman particularly. And so, and we, so this, indirectly -- and then through the School for Workers, I was able to recruit Jack Barbash and help recruit him here. And I got Jim Stern, even though I, by using partly School for Workers money and departmental money, and then they evolved. Oh, it was a great time to be an operator.

AF: Yeah. Lot of money, a lot of good people.

EY: Well, yes, a lot of good people and some money.

AF: Some money. Um, I guess I wanted to talk a little bit more about the separation or the establishment of the center. I know that you were not director at the time, but the -- I've sort of heard through hearsay, you know, and just from, I guess just people's experience, that that was a, quite a painful separation in some ways, as you described briefly earlier.

EY: Well, you mean having courses. Well, see, the separation, it really never came wholly. It was a gradual thing moving over. So, that is, the decision to give graduate, a graduate program was made in '55-'56 when I wasn't around. I 00:22:00don't know that that was too painful. The -- later on, we debated whether giving it a departmental status, that was quite a long, dragged-out debate, and finally, came down on the side of staying with the department, but very closely.

The economists argued that they didn't want to lose their department connection as economists, you see. I think Bob [Blantman?] was the one who met with most, felt strongest about this, that the center, if the center became a separate department, there would be no labor people, only the Chicago-types left in the department. And a Chicago labor person would, sometimes the view was that, look, you know, another commodity dealer [Laughs.]. It isn't always true, you know. 00:23:00Actually, Glen [Caines?] is a splendid person, and I think he's Chicago, isn't he?

AF: Uh-huh.

EY: Yeah.

AF: When the center was first set up, besides the Department of Economics and the School of Commerce at the time, what were some of the other parties involved?

EY: Yeah, the, I don't know in, when they first set it up, whether the School of Commerce was in it at all. They were invited. Law school was very important. Nate Feinsinger was very important. Abner Brodie was in law school too. The law school had a tradition of, of interest in labor matters. Lloyd Garrison had been 00:24:00here, and he'd been big in government as well. He was the dean for a while here before the war. And so the, I think probably Nate Feinsinger was as important as anybody. And Nate had very, very strong connections with management and labor because of his role in the War Labor Board and as an arbitrator.

Mr. Witte had been with the War Labor Board also, and he'd been the chairman in Detroit of the Detroit board, and then had gone to Washington. If you want to know about that, my secretary went with him to those places. And, but all these things -- some of these things, she may remember better than I do. She was a departmental secretary or second in command or she worked for Miss Bridgeman, then went off with Mr. Witte when he needed a secretary to go to Detroit and then to Washington.

I, no, I guess when he went to Washington, she came back to Madison, but, um, my 00:25:00advice would be for you to get on the phone with Bob Fleming and ask him what's a good time to talk for a half an hour. He can tell you a great deal more, see, I wasn't even -- probably the center was established when I was, the year I was in Maine.

AF: Uh-huh.

EY: You see? So I was not really very active in it. When I came back and then I, because of my teaching, I worked with Bob some, programs, but then when he left, I sort of, there were ongoing things, and I carried them along. But as I say, my concern was primarily the department. It may be, for a while, I was both the director of the School for Workers and the center, and then the department and 00:26:00the center for a while.

AF: Yeah, I noticed when I was looking through the biography, that there was some overlap. And because it doesn't break it down by months, it's unclear how much of it --

EY: Well, usually, I had at least two hats off the top.

AF: [Words unclear].

EY: Yes. Then, to come back to your question, quite early on, I don't know the date, Professor K. U. Smith, of psychology, became involved. He had been in industry in some role in, before he came. He came as an older person in the Psychology Department, and he had done work on time and motion study and proved quite to his own satisfaction it wasn't very scientific, which -- let's see, who else? Do you remember any of the names that you saw?

AF: Most the people you mentioned, I think.

EY: Yes, I think, yes. Elizabeth Brandeis would've been involved. I don't think Lescohier was very much involved.

AF: Was Elizabeth Brandeis also the, one of the Pearlman's protégés?

EY: Yes, she had been, yes, and he husband, Paul Roshenbush, who ran the unemployment compensations for so many years, was all, was a student of Commons. Paul, when the unemployment law was passed, he became active with, active in promoting it, and Professor Groves took leave and went to the Legislature and pushed the Unemployment Compensation Law. Wisconsin got the firs one by a day or two or something. But it was long lines that Commons had laid down, 10, 15 years 00:28:00before. So then Paul got involved with that, and became the administrator, never finished his degree.

But Elizabeth did get her Ph.D., and she was a very good teacher in the department. She was the first person to really get excited about the migrant workers, that I ever knew around here. And I raised some money from somewhere so that she could have an assistant who did the work in that field. And she was a, quite a wonderful woman. Her son is in law school, Walter Roshenbush.

AF: Uh-huh.

EY: Yeah. I would say, she's cooperative and supportive in the Industrial Relations Center or Institute. The name changes sometimes, I think you'll discover.

AF: Uh-huh.

EY: But she wouldn't, wasn't a leader in it. The leaders were, were Feinsinger 00:29:00and Witte, and first Fleming and later on Tripp, then Gerry Somers, and, of course, Jim Stern later. Bob Lampman, when he came, joined the faculty, was always a part of it, but not, that wasn't his center of his interest.

AF: Uh-huh.

EY: Have you talked with him?

AF: I have a, very briefly, he's writing a history of the Economics Department.

EY: Yes.

AF: And I have sort of tentative plans, though no date to interview with him later.

EY: Have you got the, have you been to the archives at all?

AF: The University archives?

EY: Yes. Excuse me, I --

AF: Um.

EY: I was asking you about the archives.

AF: That's right.

EY: Have you been to them?

AF: Yeah, um, I spent just a few hours there so far. But it seems like that --

EY: They weren't designed for historians [Laughs.].

AF: No, they were not. It's going to be hit or miss, I think. I know you said that you were, you know, quite involved with wearing your other hats. I wondered if you remembered some of the, the important considerations or concerns that you had as, when you were director of IRC. And that would, and also what sort of current events, so to speak, within the University and the larger social and political environment.

EY: One of the programs that Bob Fleming got started was a program under which, I believe it was AID, at least the State Department, the government supported 00:31:00bringing young labor management people from France and Germany in groups here. And that took quite a lot of attention, time, damnation -- for one thing, and it meant some employment for graduate students as well as other things, and gave people a chance to get around [Phone rings.]. It's miserable, just --

AF: I guess you were talking about the, the Foreign Scholar Program or the Foreign Graduate Student Program.

EY: Yes, German and French students were brought. And so that took some doing, and that was one of the principal activities in the last year that Bob was here and a year or two after he left. Beyond that, I don't remember a great deal about it, and I think, let's see, I don't know if my secretary was keeping a 00:32:00diary then or not. In the more recent times, she has a, she kept a diary of her own, and she'd provide me with dates of things. But I really, we may have had a conference or two, but it was a very low-key activity, sort of regrouping time.

AF: Uh-huh. What was the funding situation for the Center at that time? Were you, you were part of the president's office, is that right? And was most of your support, therefore, from that office, or was it from special project grants? Do you remember that sort of thing?

EY: Well, some of the special grants, for instance, the foreign students were supported by, with overhead, we had overhead money from that and support for that from them and individual, had individual grants. Bob got some individual grants from some studies. And then there was some from the president's office, and it, I don't know when the budget shifted to the dean of Letters & Science, but that wouldn't have made much difference, but the budget was shifted.

In general, the practice had been to move things out of the president's office to a college whenever it was possible. So that would be a normal operating procedure. Having it in the president's office in the first place was a little unusual, if anything. But the --

AF: What do you think was the reason for the, the original reason for putting it under the auspices of the president's office as opposed to a college?

EY: Well, because it was, it was supposed to be interdisciplinary across campus lines, you see, and across college lines. As it was, even if commerce didn't come in, there were law school people and occasionally somebody from engineering was involved. And so that would be the reason for doing it that way. And it may have been also that -- it was a way of getting the money probably in between budget times, you see, and the president would've, able to get some spare money from somewhere easier than a dean would. Deans don't like to give up money for somebody else's projects.

AF: Uh-huh.

EY: They're very reluctant. But I don't really know. Now if that's an important question, well, even if it isn't, the man who knows a great deal about this 00:35:00period, which we haven't mentioned, is Professor Ira Baldwin.

AF: [Words unclear] department of --

EY: Well, he's retired. He was vice president of the University under Mr. Fred. He has an office in Van Heis. He comes in almost every morning. I don't think he's 90 yet.

AF: Uh-huh.

EY: His mind is as clear as any, most of the freshmen. And he knows a lot more.

AF: Yeah.

EY: But he's one of those people almost ageless, and he's, he was Mr. Fred's right-hand man. And he would know, he could tell you some of the, if you want to spice up your story a little, some of the politicking in the regents about this because some of the regents were very conservative too. Things that I didn't 00:36:00know about because I was at the stage, you see, when he -- the first year, I wasn't here. The first year I came back, I was taking a full graduate load, teaching 12 hours a week. That kept me busy.

AF: Uh-huh.

EY: And then I had the School for Workers.

AF: Uh-huh.

EY: So there's a lot of this that I didn't pay much attention to.

AF: Uh-huh. What was, what were your reasons, if you want to go into it, for leaving the Center?

EY: Whose reasons?

AF: Your reasons for leaving the directorship, if you'd like to go into that.

EY: Oh, I left it because I went to Europe to, you see, and I was rebuilding an 00:37:00Economics Department. That was a much more important task for me. No, it wasn't any antipathy to it. And furthermore, Professor Tripp was really devoted to it, and I had lots of other things to do. It wasn't, there was no -- I just didn't, I had priorities, and my priority was the department. Remember that was a very hectic period in the history of the Economics Department. That's when we brought in people like Guy Orcutt and great numbers of people, Pete Steiner. And other people were retiring, and I was the youngest tenured member, and I was the chairman, and that wasn't easy.

AF: What was your, I guess I'd like to move on to your contact with the Institute.

EY: Yes.

AF: After your, after you, uh, after you did the directorship. I read recently that you were on a steering committee that was formed in 1956 to, and its mission, at least according to what I read, is to correct the so-called weaknesses of the original program. I wondered what your role was in that and your, in terms, your impressions in terms of the, when they started to grant degrees, what their motivations were on terms of training people for jobs in academia or for going right into the Labor Movement, or in business.

EY: Uh, I, my role would've been in the, after I came back from overseas in '56 and resumed the chairmanship of the department would've been, as a, somebody 00:39:00teaching courses in the field. I was teaching labor history or labor problems or something like that. So I was a teaching member. I was teaching courses that the students took sometimes, occasionally, helping with somebody's thesis, something. But I wasn't way out front.

Sometimes I played a political role in the sense that within the University, I ran a little interference because I had maybe a little more influence in some places than some other people because I was chairman of the Economics Department, you see. And so, and I guess, perhaps, trying to think back what my attitudes were, I would've been always plumping for the economic content of the Industrial Relations, you see.

So on the, but I wouldn't have been alone in that. But I was more concerned about economics than Mr. Witte or, or Reed Tripp were. They were concerned about labor negotiations and such things. So, but it was only a matter of mild differences, nothing -- one of the things I was concerned about is that we, that the degrees be, have quite a lot of substance to them. That a person not get a degree by working with one person, really, almost exclusively and doing research in classes, then writing at thesis under the same person, that question did come up once or twice. But we, but there was no disagreement among the majority of us.

It was a question of how do you go about enforcing it? You know, enforcing the behavior on the part of faculty members isn't easy if they -- but that was a 00:41:00minor problem. But again, as I say, my main attention was developing, and my philosophical position of, hasn't changed any, that I don't believe anybody should be in Labor Management Relations without sound grounding in economics. It's more important than -- and then secondary, law is very important. I would've said that psychology was less important.

Now there are people, some outstanding people in psychology in the industrial relations field, but that, by and large, our Psychology Department, you know, was, they say, experimental psychology department. And that's where its strength was in those days, that they weren't as interested -- the bulk of the problem wasn't very interesting in industrial relations.

AF: Uh-huh. You, um, do you have any memorable students that you, that came 00:42:00through the program after it began to grant degrees, that stick out in your mind?

EY: Let's see, when were the first degrees granted?

AF: '56 I think [word unclear] '57 I think right here.

EY: No, I don't, you know, if I heard the names, some of them have gone on and done extraordinarily well. But see, I, if they were my graduate students, they would've been in economics primarily, see. I pushed my students into economics if I were working with them if I was their major advisor. Because of my prejudice for economics, as it, that it was broader then than it is now because there were quite a few of us teaching labor courses in the department.

And so that wouldn't have been my -- oh, I behaved about the same as Bob Lamb 00:43:00has been behaving in a way. He's interested, supportive, but he's an economist at heart. Even though the purest in the department wouldn't regard either of us as really very good economists, me much less than Bob.

AF: Okay. This is backtracking a little, but can you speak to the, and this is specifically about the Economics Department, can you speak to the schism between labor economists and the so-called other, other specialties within economics? I'm not very familiar with that, but I --

EY: Well, I don't think there was ever a schism exactly between labor people and non-labor people. There was a shifting emphasis had been, the emphasis on the 00:44:00recruitment on getting labor people had changed, and as we got more theoretical people, when we were recruiting, they were people they wanted to get that, more in their mold, you see. They would regard maybe Glen [Caine?] as a borderline case, whereas, we would think of him as pretty far over in their area, that kind of thing.

But I never, you know, after all, they made me chairman, and I was chairman nine years, and so if there'd been a split, you know, a serious one, the bulk of, I would have been voted out. That election took place every year. And so there wasn't -- no, I had now then, of course, you have to get the dates of when Witte retired and Pearlman retired. That reduced the labor influence.

AF: Uh-huh.

EY: I don't think that Professor Tripp was highly regarded by some of the 00:45:00non-labor people. I think it was partly personality. I liked him very much. If he were talking to you, it was very interesting. If he's lecturing to a class, he's very dull. But his interests were very different, and somehow, now why would I think that? But when he got an offer, there was no attempt to keep him, you see. That's the test, you know, in academic circles. You discover what, how the department feels about people, is when they put an offer on the table.

AF: Uh-huh, how hard they fight.

EY: Yes, and that's going to be very disheartening to some people.

AF: This is going back to the, the Communist accusations by the director of the School of Commerce. I wondered if, and I may be speaking sort of generally to 00:46:00the Department of Economics and the Center, but whether you're connection with the Center or the Department of Economics' involvement with the Center caused any problems in the '50s in terms of, uh, McCarthyism, in terms of any kind of loyalty oath activity or --

EY: Well, first place, I would, I would assume that what, when Mr. Elwell said 00:47:00those Communists, he didn't mean card --

AF: I may be speaking sort of generally to the Department of Economics and the Center, but whether your connection with the Center or the Department of Economics' involvement with the Center caused any problems in the '50s in terms of, uh, McCarthyism, in terms of any kind of loyalty oath activity or --

EY: Well, first place, I would, I would assume that what, when Mr. Elwell said those Communists, he didn't mean card-carrying members. He meant people who were left. And being left to Mr. Elwell or there wasn't, you couldn't be any other place [Laughs.]. No, our department, to my knowledge, never had any faculty members who were even close to being Communists. They were, they'd been liberal for a long time. They were always in the forefront of labor reform and working with unions, all that. But many of the people, but, no, in fact, there were students in the, we had graduate students.

I remember one graduate student coming in my office and saying, well, something's going to happen. They're burning, I saw in my back window that so and so and two or three others are burning all their documents. That's when the 00:48:00word came from the party for them to pull out, and they dropped out of school right in the middle of semester. But that, the University itself, to my knowledge, was never attacked by McCarthy. He came here occasionally to speak, not very often. The students gave him a hard time, but we, we had no problem. We had no witch-hunts. I don't know.

So many people, of course, don't know the difference between the Communists and somebody who's a Marxist or just didn't agree with them, but I think we were in part we were fortunate because we'd been so liberal and had all kinds of people, and we knew the difference. We knew the difference between somebody who was following Stalin's party line. After all, I was teaching capitalism and socialism, and I probably knew more about their literature than most of the kids who thought they were Communists.

See, my theory about most of the young, the kids who think they're Communists 00:49:00from around the campus is that when they give them, keep them out of jail, they'll become advertising executives eventually, not always. Some of them go on, but most of them don't, you know. It's a growing-up place, and they've got to flirt with ideas in my view. My problem, my job was to try to protect them. But it wasn't a problem.

In the campus, apparently, now I don't know exactly what happened, but at that period, the party line was very tight, you know, the control. The word came to all the universities, pull out, for whatever purpose. And I remember one of the students coming back, the one who seemed to be the leader here, and ask, saying to me, call off the FBI, will you?

I said, what are you talking about? He says they keep coming around and asking me questions about who some of the members of the party are, and I refuse to 00:50:00tell them, but they keep bothering me. And he said, you can stop them. And I said, well, look, they don't work for me, you know. I can't stop them. I said, you know, you got yourself into this, and you've got to get yourself out of it. I can't do it for you.

And, of course, then the war came, and it, you know, many of the people who had been party-liners, when the treaty between Hitler and Stalin was signed, that turned off a lot of people. But it wasn't unfashionable in the late '30s around here, from what people tell me, for people to be active in, if not being card-carrying members, to be in cells and things. That was going on all over the country.

AF: Uh-huh. Are there any other political events or, either locally within 00:51:00Wisconsin or nationally, that you felt had a, had a large influence on the workings of the, of the Institute I guess it was at the time, or on the Department of Economics?

EY: No, I don't think so. You know, as I say, we had no witch-hunt. We had one member of the department we recruited, who had been at least looked upon with suspicion when he was an officer in Japan, but I never took that very seriously because he was kind of a guy where, you know, if you said you were from the FBI, he'd say, oh, you guys bothering us Communists again? When he wasn't a Communist, only that he just couldn't resist that kind of thing, so, but, no, I guess it is interesting that this group, which we're regarded as, you know, we 00:52:00still have a reputation of being a leftist university around the country.

Of course, it's not, it's nonsense because, but, you see, they don't understand the difference between being a socialist, being for progressive legislation, and that isn't such a big thing. But Commons and Garrison, Lloyd Garrison, and people who wanted to make reform, unemployment compensation, some people regard that as pretty outrageous, and that's where we got the reputation. Then we did attract a lot of liberal and some radical students because one of the, people sometimes ask me, why did Wisconsin in this relatively poor state get such preeminence.

And, well, lots of it was luck, but one of the things was that when other schools had quotas on people from New York, New Jersey, where they didn't have good public schools in those days, Wisconsin was always open to them. And so we 00:53:00got a brilliant group of alumni, and some of them were a little further left than some others. And a few of the, of course, later turned out to be involved in things, but no more than anywhere else. I think better because, as I say, Pearlman was here, and he was a very good teacher of what Marxism was about because he'd been a Marxist himself.

AF: Uh-huh. What is your, I don't know how familiar you are with the Institute these days in terms of what it's teaching and what its research activities are, and whether you have an opinion as to the strengths and the weaknesses of the program as it's presently constituted.

EY: Oh, I have a very high regard -- I have a very high regard for it. I'm very proud of [word unclear] some of the people that get, and we give degrees to, and 00:54:00are doing excellent work all over the country. There's, it's easier to, if you have a degree in industrial relations, to get a job than it is if you have it in economics.

And the, I worry a little with Jim Stern's retiring and Gerry Somers gone, but we're in the process of recruiting some young people, and the, the department has just given tenure to, is it Rouse, yes. And that's a good sign because she's good, and that also means that they're not entirely averse to labor issues. And it, she didn't get it because she was a woman. I went to that meeting. I usually stay away from all this stuff. But that was one that I was very, I was interested to get.

I was impressed at the presentation. Lee Hansen, Lee is a thorough worker. Gosh, 00:55:00he's so thorough and organized in ways that I never was, and I admire him for it. And he's a good scholar too. And so I don't know everybody that's involved, but I think it's going fine. It's attracting good students. So, no, I'm proud that -- but I'm proud of it, but I'm careful not to take too much credit, which I don't deserve. Other people have done it. I didn't do -- I, you see, by 1960, I was out of all this. I went to Pakistan and came back as dean. So I -- and then I saw it only as one more administrative unit, and a very small one at that.

AF: Uh-huh, yeah. Do you, what do you see as the future of industrial relations 00:56:00study just generally? Do you see it going in any particular direction? Do you see it, for instance, the, not the rumors, but the ideas that I think are floating around, to subsume it within the School of Business, whether you could comment on that? And also, where you'd like to see it go, you know, in addition to where you see it going.

EY: I wouldn't like to see it go into the School of Business. But if the college and the department don't give it support, it may have to do that because it's very difficult for a small unit in a large university to stand out. It's got to have somebody to help fight for its budget and protect it in a larger pool of resources. There are some very good programs that are in business schools. Ten 00:57:00year, 15 years ago, I would've fought it very hard because it -- but the business school has changed a great deal. And, but I don't think it's necessary, and I would rather it wouldn't. I think the future programs are -- I think it's pretty well established.

It's going to be a study of what's going in and collective bargaining and labor law, and what's happening to workers and affirmative action problems will be big for a while, but then they'll fade away and become less important because, once it's just taken for granted that women are entitled to equal treatment, and that will come. It's coming fast. The minority problem is a different problem, and I don't -- I despair about that one. That's so tough. But there will be some of that in industrial relations, but the mainstream will deal with management and labor relations, and labor law, and some people will go to the government.

And the Labor Department is not going to disappear. And wages are not going to go out of business. So these are fundamental issues. But another area, which will expand I think and constantly, is the area of arbitration. There are areas where labor management can't afford to have strikes. That is, I'm saying, maybe can't -- it would be against laws to forbid them, but see, what is happening to United Airlines, they beat the pilots. But it's going to -- the company is going to be gone as it was. Cudahy is going down the drain because of labor dispute.

And so people, the thoughtful people on both sides are very concerned at how do we find some way? Politically, it's hard for the labor leaders because they get, 00:59:00they have to run for election and so on, as you must know. But nevertheless, in the telephone, what's, the telephone company can run for months without the telephone workers, another world. The only place that labor is gaining strength is in the public employment because of the political pressure they can put on the Legislature. And so there's got to be some ways. But to, you know, labor isn't going to turn over and play dead. It's going to be strong. It'll be different, so there's lots to --

AF: There's lots to study.

EY: There's lots to study, and a lot of need for, for well-trained people, who know the economics, know the law, and, you know, just don't go in and demand a great deal and see what you can get. Bargaining has changed negotiations arbitration, all these things are over as a role. Now we'll always need 01:00:00university presidents. You know a great many of us, Bob Fleming, [Plack Herr?], Bock at Harvard, you know, the name went around and probably -- and there's Bucklew, who was one of our students, by the way, in industrial relations, he was president of West Virginia and was having a little difficulty there. But everybody in West Virginia is having difficulty.

AF: Secretary of states too?

EY: What?

AF: Do you also mean secretary of states?

EY: Yes.

EY: Kind of what they consider very soft discipline, you know, it doesn't have the rigor of econometrics or chemistry, get into these situations. Well, I think it's part because we have learned to deal with things that are not certain. And 01:01:00we've learned also that they're likely to be two sides to most questions, and that the simple answers just aren't there. And we, to live with that, see, when you can't have certain -- I think that may be it. I don't know. Maybe it's because we get tired of what we're doing [Laughs.].

Now before we stop, I want to remind, suggest again, now Reed Tripp can be reached by phone. I had a long phone conversation with him not too long ago. He's retired from the -- he was dean at Lehigh, and now is retired. But he's carrying on an active arbitration business. He has his own, he has an office for that in Philadelphia.

AF: [Words unclear] that's what the number is, I think, because I have a number for him in Philadelphia. I was wondering what it --

EY: Yes, there's two, he lives just outside of Philadelphia, but his office 01:02:00number. Then Ira Baldwin, you can get by calling him. Tell him that I suggested you talk with him. I don't think you'd have any trouble anyway, because he's very generous, but that would make it, that might make it a little easier. And Bob Fleming, these are all easy. Bob may be coming here. Well, he's coming sometime. I can't remember when. But sometimes it's easier to get him on the telephone just to, and if you use the University phones, it doesn't cost much, you know, with the Watts line. No problem about that. Do you want me to give you his number?

AF: Bob Fleming, I think I have his number, the department has his number.

EY: Okay. He's in Ann Arbor. Let's see, where else would, and, of course, you 01:03:00have access to the people in the department. There's nobody in the dean's office who knows anything about it. Nobody in the chancellor's office who knows anything. But beyond the, the dean knows the question of whether it should be a department or not and budgeting question. But he wouldn't know much beyond that. I guess, so that's the situation. And I wish I could be more helpful, but, you see, it wasn't something that was grabbing all my time. I was doing a job without, it was always a secondary one.