[2] Plumb was a member of the legal department of Edward Fitzsimmons Dunne's administration in Chicago, as were J. Hamilton Lewis and Clarence Darrow.

Problems included a shortage of labor due to low wages, and policies designed to maximize profits that prevented movement of empty cars at a time when most traffic was from west to east.

The railway labor unions wanted to retain government control after the armistice, but on 2 December 1918 President Wilson told Congress that the railroads had to be returned to their owners.

The Railway Employees' Department of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) put its weight behind the Plumb Plan League.

[7] The Plumb plan was supported by labor leaders such as Warren Stanford Stone of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, who felt it should be extended to other industries.

[8] Gompers had been attending the Versailles conference in Europe when he was called home to deal with labor unrest.

He met with Plumb immediately on arrival, and was guardedly critical of the plan, which involved too much state control for his taste.

[10] Frederic C. Howe, commissioner of immigration and later a founder of the American Civil Liberties Union, resigned in the summer of 1919 to work for the Plan.

[11] He was labelled the "Plumb Plan agitator" by agents of J. Edgar Hoover's Bureau of Investigation on watch for Bolsheviks.

[14] When Plumb spoke at the January 1920 AFL convention the delegates ignored Gompers and voted by 29,159 to 8,349 to nationalize the railroads and place them under democratic management.

They had noted the improvements during the period of Federal control of the railways but rejected the Plumb plan, although they did call for some public ownership of railroad infrastructure.

Plumb said the plan would supplant the old system of competition under which the profits of the laborer's industry went to another, and in which he could never hope to share, by a new system where the profit of his industry accrued to himself alone, where all employees were united by a common purpose, all working toward a common end, inspired by the same motives, by the same incentives, and with no opportunity for a division of interest and no apprehension that another would reap what he had sown.