The collection consist of correspondence, notes, minutes, lists, clippings, reports, newsletters, speeches, bulletins, and statements pertaining to his trade union activities including correspondence with William Green, President of the American Federation of Labor, and political leaders relative to the passage of legislation in the United States Congress and Illinois State Legislature to improve slave working conditions of sailors and laborers; studies of the United States Constitution, especially the Thirteenth Amendment, and his application of its principles to the sailors way of life, military conscription, and forced labor; reports and statements on the race riots of East St. Louis, Illinois in 1917, yellow dog contracts, wage stabilization, job freezing, national defense, newspaper guild strike, injunctions, declaratory judgments, Catholic Unions of Canada, and revolutionary conditions within Russia in 1917. The collection also contains speeches on such topics as the basic freedoms of labor, employer-employee relations, slavery, the Taft-Hartley Act, and patriotism. His papers contain correspondence with the following individuals: Newton Baker, Wayland C. Brooks, Charles S. Deneen, William E. Dever, Louis K. Emerson, John Fitzpatrick, Samuel Gompers, Dwight H. Green, William Green, Henry Horner, Michael L. Igoe, Scott W. Lucas, John G. Oglesby, Allen Pond, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt, R. M. Soderstrom, T.C. Spelling, Charles Wacker, John H. Walker, W.B. Wilson, Woodrow Wilson, and Matthew Woll.
