LABOR: Maguire of Green Mountain

When Bishop James Bernard Sheil of Chicago was a student at St. Viator College, his teacher of sociology and economics was Father John W. R. Maguire. Bishop Sheil is now a potent friend of Chicago Labor, a very present help to C. I. O. in its offensive against meat-packing Armour & Co. (TIME, July 24). Also serving the Lord and Labor in his diocese is his onetime mentor, Father Maguire.

Last week placid, union-wise Father Maguire did a signal service to Labor and to another St. Viator alumnus. Vice President of big Warner Construction Co. is Thomas LeRoy Warner, who studied under Father Maguire over 30 years ago and is still his admiring friend. Last July his company was building Green Mountain Dam and power plant in Colorado for the U. S. Reclamation Bureau when five A. F. of L. unions struck for a closed shop. Deputized vigilantes from nearby towns and farms shot down five pickets, took over the dam site, behaved so raucously that Colorado’s Governor Ralph L. Carr dispatched National Guardsmen to suppress “a state of insurrection.” Distressed by the bloodshed, put out by delay, Roy Warner remembered his wise, calm friend in Chicago.

Father Maguire was just the man for such a dispute. A native of Ireland, a onetime student at Oxford, he went to the U. S. as a newspaperman to report a big Labor trial, became a Roman Catholic soon afterward. Seldom does he figure in the news, but midwestern Labor and employers account him their best and most active mediator. He helped settle the long, bloody Kohler of Kohler (plumbing) strike in Wisconsin five years ago, has calmed many another row before it reached the headlines. Now sixtyish, he is a husky six-footer with a lined, full face, a kindly smile, a soothing voice. “If all priests were like you, I’d never have left the church,” he was assured by Labor’s late, famed Mary Harris (“Mother”) Jones, at whose grave he preached in 1930. “The best trouble shooter Labor has,” Madam Secretary Perkins has said of him. One of his good friends is A. F. of L.’s Baptist president, William Green.

Last week, at Contractor Warner’s request, trouble-shooting Father Maguire hied to Washington. There he conferred with spokesmen for the unions, the Labor Department, Colorado’s Labor Federation. A telephone call to a negotiating committee in Denver cost $150, which the U. S. Treasury will pay. Soon Father Maguire was able to announce a basis for peace at Green Mountain. A. F. of L. got the equivalent of a closed shop for its unions. Contractor Warner got assurance that he can resume work, catch up on his $4,000,000 contract. Back to Chicago went Father Maguire with much to tell his friend the Bishop.