John Graham Brooks

It was under the presidency of the first Roosevelt that John Graham Brooks reached the height of his career. Born in 1846, he was already in his fifties when the anthracite coal strike came to a head in 1902 and George F. Baer, for the mine-operators, made his fatal mistake of confusing himself with the Almighty. It was Theodore Roosevelt who with the aid of public spirited conservatives like J. Pierpont Morgan and Elihu Root brought the owners to terms. But a number of progressive minds aided, among them Brooks. Like Roosevelt he was a friend and admirer of John Mitchell, the president of the United Mine Workers of America, and his point of view paralleled much of the Rooseveltian philosophy. If there was no brain trust then, the President leaned heavily on the advice of the progressive economists and sociologists of his time. The threat of force with which he finally brought the operators to heel was the President’s own idea. The outlook which fixed his sympathies upon the side of the miners was the product of just such progressive experts as Brooks.

His books, “The Social Unrest,” “As Others See Us,” “American Syndicalism,” and “Labor’s Challenge to the Social Order,” are dated for the reader of today. There is a faith in such devices of pure democracy as the initiative and referendum which few liberals would now share. But the generosity of outlook and the refusal to proclaim a formula give his words an enduring truth. He saw clearly that society “is not one thing but a thousand and an ever-changing thousand.” The world-tangle is full of “taints, survivals, atrophies, and all manner of sticky imperfections.” It was impossible to touch any part of this total—under the name of a “social question” or a “labor question”—with hostile or friendly hand without touching “a full century of tragic human experience.” No simple formula could help in such a confusion. “If I am asked ‘What is the solution of a growing child?’ I cannot answer because ‘solution’ is a misnomer. I can see that a child may be trained, guided and improved, but not ‘solved.’ This is not so grotesque as to ask ‘What is the panacea for a growing child?’ but as applied to our economic disturbances and proposals for their removal ‘solution’ is scarcely less confusion.” It was through “trying new ways and tolerating new thought” that he saw the hope of progress when he concluded his last book, written in the wake of the Great War and published in 1920.

Reaching the age of ninety-two [sic: ninety-one], he was the senior on this year’s memorial list. When visiting the city in the years of his prime he was constantly at the club-house and his friends were many. If only the warmth of his sympathies had persuaded those in power to act while there was yet time—or the calm patience of his mind prevailed in the present era of reform, when he had become a spectator! To read his pleas today is to see in sharp perspective the double tragedy in the nation’s social progress.

Geoffrey Parsons
1938 Century Memorials