INTRODUCTION
system created, and the modern industrial era inaugurated.
Special students and official commissions from the leading
industrial and commercial nations of the world have come
to America to study our amazing changes and achieve-
ments. European nations have been urged to adopt the
American constructive policies and methods. Russia, in
its desperate struggle to rehabilitate its industries, has
openly accepted and based its hope for the future upon
the new American plan of industrial performance.
This new industrial era, or the general underlying con-
structive program, was inaugurated by a group of indus-
trialists and public officials, of which one of the chief
spokesmen was the Secretary of Commerce, Herbert
Hoover. In the early part of 1923, Secretary Hoover took
issue with those who since 1920 had adopted the fallacious
slogan of “a return to normalcy” in the sense of a deflation
of wages and prices to a pre-war level. He contended
that “the road to plenty” did not lie in that direction. “We
must get our minds away,” he said, “from the notion that
pre-war standards of living and volume of business would
be normal now. Normalcy is a vastly higher and more
comfortable standard than 1913.” He then went on to
say that industry during the past decade had shown an
unparalleled growth in productive efficiency. Volume had
been increased ; labor had been more productive; higher
rates of pay had been made possible, and this, in turn, had
enabled industrial workers to purchase more of the neces-
Lt A German Trade Union Delegation visited the United States in 1925. Its
report was issued in 1926 under the title ‘“Amerikareise deutscher Gewerk-
schaftfuhrer.” Official British and Australian Industrial Commissions came in
1926 and 1927. Their reports are printed in the Labor Review, U. S. Bureau
of Labor Statistics, June 1927, pp. 45-47, and May 1928, pp. 50-51. See also
report of International Economic Conference, Geneva, May 4, 1927 (C. E. 1. 13,
[nternational Labor Office, Geneva); also “America the Golden,” by Ramsay
Muir (Williams & Northgate, Ltd., London, 1927); “America’s Secret: The
Causes of Her Economic Success” (John Murray, London, 1927); J. A.
Spender, Editor Westminster Gazette, article in Washington Star, June 3, 1928,
entitled “Every Man Has a Chance in America’s System;” ‘The Secret of
High Wages,” by Bertram Austin and W. Francis Lloyd (Dodd, Mead &
Company, 1926).
