Opinion editor's note: The following editorial is reprinted from the Sept. 4, 1950, issue of the Minneapolis Tribune.
In his report to the nation last week, President Harry Truman warned aggressor nations against the productive strength of the United States. Hitler and the Japanese generals, he reminded his listeners, badly miscalculated that strength 10 years ago. "Let would-be aggressors make no such mistake today," he said.
Labor day is a good occasion to contemplate the nature of that productive strength.
Essentially it is a strength which flows, not merely from an abundance of physical resources, but from a free system which makes possible the efficient and socially useful development of those resources.
In the United States, labor is free to organize and bargain. It does not wear the shackles imposed upon it in totalitarian countries.
Management, similarly, operates in an atmosphere of freedom. Here we have the elements of incentive and initiative which can flourish only in a system of free enterprise. We are productively strong because labor and management both breathe this atmosphere and operate within this system.
The totalitarian strength is the strength of a system in which the individual is nothing, the state everything. It has never measured up to, and by its very nature can never measure up to, the remarkable productive vigor which characterizes the partnership of free labor and free enterprise.
In World War II this partnership was decisive. Our industrial might slowly tipped the balance against the Axis powers. The part that American labor and management played in that victory constitutes one of the shining chapters of the war.
