{"value"=>"<p>Correspondence with businessmen, union leaders, journalists, statisticians, and others, chiefly relating to the department's creation, recruitment of members and response to socialist demands to abolish private ownership of the means of production and to redistribute the nation's wealth to reflect more fairly the contribution of the working class. Correspondents included are: John Agar, who was the chairman of the Executive Committee of the Industrial Economics Department, Louis Brandeis, Nicholas Murray Butler, Helen S. Harmon Brown, Charles Bonaparte, Andrew Carnegie, John Commons, Senator J.S. Crawford, Charles W. Eliot, Richard Ely, Elbert Gary, Samuel Gompers, F.G.R. Gordan, Ernest T. Hargrove, Homer Lea (London Municipal Society), Elihu Root, Theodore Roosevelt, Edwin R. A. Seligman, William H. Taft, Eva McDonald Valesh (American Federation of Labor), and Thomas E. Watson (editor of The Jeffersonian). Of special interest on the question of socialist criticism of American institutions is the exchange of letters between Easley and the suffragist, Ida Husted Harper, in which Harper explains why she and the International Woman Suffrage Alliance would not speak out against socialism as Easley had requested.</p>"}