A History of Organized Felony and Folly - The Clarence Darrow ...

Introduction
The Wall Street Journal, in the fall and early
winter of 1922, published a series of thirty-two
articles on the record of union labor in the United
States during the past twenty years, and, at the
solicitation of many readers, these articles are
now assembled and issued under chapter headings
in the present form.
No attempt was made in the articles to discuss
theoretical unionism as an economic agency, but
an exhaustive research was made in order to
bring together the many scattered records bear-
ing on the activities of union labor organizations
in their relations to the rest of society.
The articles were made up for the most part
from official records, including records of courts,
prisons, transcripts of official investigations,
declarations of public officers, etc., the whole
being condensed into the smallest possible com-
pass. It was the first attempt to make a com-
prehensive collection of such records, and they,
in the aggregate, form a document of crime that
it would be impossible to match in any other field
or time of human acti\dty.