{"value"=>"<p>The general correspondence traces the wide-ranging administrative concerns, changes, and development of NCF. This series reveals an organization designed to act as a conservative sounding-board on political, economic, and social issues, and to study and report on the problems created by phenomena such as industrial competition, industrial combinations, the rise of a militant labor movement, the growing threat of socialism, radical subversion of American institutions, World War I, the Russian Revolution and the Bolshevik coup d'état, the rise of fascism and nazism, economic depression, and other significant social, economic, and political questions. The general correspondence also documents NCF's role as an agent of patriotic conservatism.</p> <p>The majority of outgoing letters were written by Ralph Easley as chairman of the Executive Council and as NCF's chief spokesman and general advisor. There are also letters by key members of NCF including Gertrude Beeks Easley, August Belmont, Jeremiah Jenks, Seth Low, John Mitchell, Samuel Gompers, and others, with conservative and patriotic organizations, welfare reformers, labor leaders, businessmen, industrialists, statisticians, actuaries, politicians and others engaged in reform, political activism, or patriotic activities.</p> <p>The letters of the historian John R. Commons to Easley analyzing the anthracite strike of 1902 are notable, as are the letters of John Mitchell, the leader of the mine workers, and the recommendations of Conrad Reno for the settlement of the textile workers' strike in the mills of Fall River, Massachusetts in 1904. Some other prominent correspondents are Henry Carter Adams, James Atkinson, John Barrett, Marriott Brosius, Clara Bell Brown, Charles G. Dawes, James Dill, Richard T. Ely, Lyman Gage, August E. Gans, Elbert H. Gary, Marcus A. Hanna, Samuel Insull, Seth Low, Frank O. Lowden, Robert La Follette, and U.D. Underwood.</p>"}