But the results of the Troy experiment, typical of the others, show how far from a successful solution of the labor problem is productive cooperation. Although this "Troy Cooperative Iron Founders' Association" was planned with great deliberation and launched at a time when the regular stove manufacturers were embarrassed by strikes, and although it was regularly incorporated with a provision that each member was entitled to but one vote whether he held one share at $100, or the maximum privilege of fifty in the total of two thousand shares, it failed as did the others in furnishing permanent relief to the workers as a class. At the end of the third year of this enterprise, the American Workman published a sympathetic account of its progress unconsciously disclosing its fatal weakness, namely, the inevitable tendency of cooperators to adopt the capitalistic view. The writer of this account quotes from these cooperators to show that "the fewer the stockholders in the company the greater its success."

A similar instance is furnished by the Cooperative Foundry Company of Rochester. This venture has also been a financial success, though a partial failure as a cooperative enterprise. When it was established in 1867 all employes were stockholders and profits were divided as follows: Twelve percent on capital and the balance in proportion to the earnings of the men. But the capitalist was stronger than the cooperative brother. Dividends on capital were advanced in a few years to seventeen and one-half percent, then to twenty-five, and finally the distribution of any part of the profits in proportion to wages was discontinued. Money was made every year and dividends paid, which in 1884 amounted to forty percent on the capital. At that time about one-fifth of the employes were stockholders. Also in this case cooperation did not prevent the usual conflict between employer and employe, as is shown in a strike of three and a half months' duration. It is interesting to notice that one of the strikers, a member of the Molders' Union, owned stock to the amount of $7000.

The machinists, too, throughout this period took an active interest in cooperation. Their convention which met in October, 1865, appointed a committee to report on a plan of action to establish a cooperative shop under the auspices of the International Union. The plan failed of adoption, but of machinists' shops on the joint-stock plan there were a good many. Two other trades noted for their enthusiasm for cooperation at this time were the shoemakers and the coopers. The former, organized in the Order of St. Crispin, then the largest trade union in the country, advocated cooperation even when their success in strikes was at its height. "The present demand of the Crispin is steady employment and fair wages, but his future is self-employment" was one of their mottoes. During the seventies they repeatedly attempted to carry this motto into effect. The seventies also saw the beginning of the most successful single venture in productive cooperation ever undertaken in this country, namely, the eight cooperative cooperage shops in Minneapolis, which were established at varying intervals from 1874 to 1886. The coopers took care to enforce true cooperation by providing for equal holding of stock and for a division of ordinary profits and losses in proportion to wages. The cooper shops prospered, but already ten years later four out of the eight existing in 1886 had passed into private hands.

In 1866 when the eight-hour demand was as yet uppermost, the National Labor Union resolved for an independent labor party. The espousal of greenbackism in 1867 only reenforced that resolution. The leaders realized only too well that neither the Republican nor Democratic party would voluntarily make an issue of a scheme purporting to assist the wage earner to become an independent producer. Accordingly, the history of the National Labor Union became largely the history of labor's first attempt to play a lone political hand on a national scale.

Each annual session of the National Labor Union faithfully reaffirmed the decision to "cut loose" from the old parties. But such a vast undertaking demanded time. It was not until 1872 that the National Labor Union met as a political convention to nominate a national ticket. From the first the stars were inauspicious. Charges were made that political aspirants sought to control the convention in order to influence nominations by the Republican and Democratic parties. A "greenback" platform was adopted as a matter of course and the new party was christened the National Labor and Reform Party. On the first formal ballot for nomination for President, Judge David Davis of Illinois, a personal friend of Abraham Lincoln, received 88 votes, Wendell Phillips, the abolitionist, 52, and the remainder scattered. On the third ballot Davis was nominated. Governor J. Parker of New Jersey was nominated for Vice-President. At first Judge Davis accepted the nomination, but resigned after the Democrats had nominated Horace Greeley. The loss of the candidate spelled the death of the party. The National Labor Union itself had been only an empty shell since 1870, when the national trade unions, disaffected with the turn towards politics, withdrew. Now, its pet project a failure, it, too, broke up.

In 1873, on the eve of the financial panic, the national trade unions attempted to reconstruct a national labor federation on a purely trade-union basis in the form of a National Industrial Congress. But the economic disaster of the panic nipped it in the bud just as it cut off the life of the overwhelming majority of the existing labor organizations. Another attempt to get together on a national basis was made in the National Labor Congress at Pittsburgh in 1876. But those who responded were not interested in trade unionism and, mirroring the prevailing labor sentiment during the long years of depressions, had only politics on their mind, greenback or socialist. As neither greenbacker nor socialist would meet the other half-way, the attempt naturally came to naught.

Greenbackism was popular with the working people during the depressed seventies because it now meant to them primarily currency inflation and a rise of prices and, consequently, industrial prosperity—not the phantastic scheme of the National Labor Union. Yet in the Presidential election of 1876 the Greenback party candidate, Peter Cooper, the well known manufacturer and philanthropist, drew only a poor 100,000, which came practically from the rural districts only. It was not until the great strikes of 1877 had brought in their train a political labor upheaval that the greenback movement assumed a formidable form.

The strikes of 1877, which on account of the wide area affected, the degree of violence displayed, and the amount of life and property lost, impressed contemporaries as being nothing short of social revolution, were precipitated by a general ten percent reduction in wages on the three trunk lines running West, the Pennsylvania, the Baltimore & Ohio, and the New York Central, in June and July 1877. This reduction came on top of an earlier ten percent reduction after the panic. The railway men were practically unorganized so that the steadying influence of previous organization was totally lacking in the critical situation of unrest which the newly announced wage reduction created. One must take also into account that in the four terrible years which elapsed since the panic, America had developed a new type of a man—the tramp—who naturally gravitated towards places where trouble was expected.

The first outbreak occurred at Martinsburg, West Virginia, on July 17, the day after the ten percent reduction had gone into effect. The strike spread like wildfire over the adjacent sections of the Baltimore & Ohio road, the strikers assuming absolute control at many points. The militia was either unwilling or powerless to cope with the violence. In Baltimore, where in the interest of public safety all the freight trains had stopped running, two companies of militia were beleaguered by a mob to prevent their being dispatched to Cumberland, where the strikers were in control. Order was restored only when Federal troops arrived.

But these occurrences fade into insignificance when compared with the destructive effects of the strike on the Pennsylvania in and around Pittsburgh. The situation there was aggravated by a hatred of the Pennsylvania railway corporation shared by nearly all residents on the ground of an alleged rate discrimination against the city. The Pittsburgh militia fraternized with the strikers, and when 600 troops which arrived from Philadelphia attempted to restore order and killed about twenty rioters, they were besieged in a roundhouse by a furious mob. In the battle the railway yards were set on fire. Damages amounting to about $5,000,000 were caused. The besieged militia men finally gained egress and retreated fighting rear-guard actions. At last order was restored by patrols of citizens. The strike spread also to the Erie railway and caused disturbances in several places, but not nearly of the same serious nature as on the Baltimore & Ohio and the Pennsylvania. The other places to which the strike spread were Toledo, Louisville, Chicago, St. Louis, and San Francisco.

The strikes failed in every case but their moral effect was enormous. The general public still retained a fresh memory of the Commune of Paris of 1871 and feared for the foundations of the established order. The wage earners, on the other hand, felt that the strikers had not been fairly dealt with. It was on this intense labor discontent that the greenback agitation fed and grew.

Whereas in 1876 the greenback labor vote was negligible, notwithstanding the exhortations by many of the former trade union leaders who turned greenback agitators, now, following the great strikes, greenbackism became primarily a labor movement. Local Greenback-Labor parties were being organized everywhere and a national Greenback-Labor party was not far behind in forming. The continued industrial depression was a decisive factor, the winter of 1877-1878 marking perhaps the point of its greatest intensity. Naturally the greenback movement was growing apace. One of the notable successes in the spring of 1878 was the election of Terence V. Powderly, later Grand Master Workman of the Knights of Labor, as mayor of Scranton, Pennsylvania.

The Congressional election in the autumn of 1878 marked the zenith of the movement. The aggregate greenback vote cast in the election exceeded a million, and fourteen Representatives were sent to Congress. In New England the movement was strong enough to poll almost a third of the total vote in Maine, over 8 percent of the total vote in both Connecticut and New Hampshire, and from 4 to 6 percent, in the other States. In Maine the greenbackers elected 32 members of the upper house and 151 members of the lower house and one Congressman, Thompson Murch of Rochland, who was secretary of the National Granite Cutters' Union. However, the bulk of the vote in that State was obviously agricultural. In Massachusetts, the situation was dominated by General Benjamin F. Butler, lifelong Republican politician, who had succeeded in getting the Democratic nomination for governor and was endorsed by the Greenback convention. He received a large vote but was defeated for office.

But just as the Greenback-Labor movement was assuming promising proportions a change for the better in the industrial situation cut under the very roots of its existence. In addition, one month after the election of 1878, its principal issue disappeared. January 1, 1879, was the date fixed by the act for resumption of redemption of greenbacks in gold and on December 17, 1878, the premium on gold disappeared. From that day on, the greenback became a dead issue.

Another factor of great importance was the large increase in the volume of the currency. In 1881 the currency, which had averaged about $725,000,000 for the years 1876-1878, reached over $1,111,000,000. Under these conditions, all that remained available to the platform-makers and propagandists of the party was their opposition to the so-called "monopolistic" national banks with their control over currency and to the refunding of the bonded debt of the government.

The disappearance of the financial issue snapped the threads which had held together the farmer and the wage-worker. So long as depression continued, the issue was financial and the two had, as they thought, a common enemy—the banker. The financial issue once settled, or at least suspended, the object of the attack by labor became the employer, and that of the attack by the farmer—the railway corporation and the warehouse man. Prosperity had mitigated the grievances of both classes, but while the farmer still had a great deal to expect from politics in the form of state regulation of railway rates, the wage earners' struggle now turned entirely economic and not political.

In California, as in the Eastern industrial States, the railway strikes of 1877 precipitated a political movement. California had retained gold as currency throughout the entire period of paper money, and the labor movement at no time had accepted the greenback platform. The political issue after 1877 was racial, not financial, and the weapon was not merely the ballot, but also "direct action"—violence. The anti-Chinese agitation in California, culminating as it did in the Exclusion Law passed by Congress in 1882, was doubtless the most important single factor in the history of American labor, for without it the entire country might have been overrun by Mongolian labor and the labor movement might have become a conflict of races instead of one of classes.[10]

The seventies witnessed another of those recurring attempts of consumers' cooperation already noticed in the forties and sixties. This time the movement was organized by the "Sovereigns of Industry," a secret order, founded at Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1874 by one William H. Earle. The spirit of the Order was entirely peaceful and unobtrusive as expressed in the first paragraph of the Declaration of Purposes which reads as follows:

"The Order of the Sovereigns of Industry is an association of the industrial or laboring classes, without regard to race, sex, color, nationality, or occupation; not founded for the purpose of waging any war of aggression upon any other class, or for fostering any antagonism of labor against capital, or of arraying the poor against the rich; but for mutual assistance in self-improvement and self-protection."

The scheme of organization called for a local council including members from the town or district, a state council, comprising representatives from the local councils and a National Council in which the States were represented. The president of the National Council was the founder of the Order, William H. Earle.

Success accompanied the efforts of the promoters of the Sovereigns of Industry for a few years. The total membership in 1875-1876 was 40,000, of whom seventy-five percent were in New England and forty-three percent in Massachusetts. Though the Order extended into other States and even reached the territories, its chief strength always remained in New England and the Middle States. During the last period of its existence a national organ was published at Washington, but the Order does not appear to have gained a foothold in any of the more Southern sections of the country.

In 1875, 101 local councils reported as having some method of supplying members with goods, 46 of whom operated stores. The largest store belonged to the council at Springfield, Massachusetts, which in 1875 built the "Sovereign Block" at a cost of $35,500. In his address at the fourth annual session in Washington, President Earle stated that the store in Springfield led all the others with sales amounting to $119,000 for the preceding year. About one-half of the councils failed to report, but at the Congress of 1876 President Earle estimated the annual trade at $3,000,000.

Much enthusiasm accompanied the progress of the movement. The hall in "Sovereign Block" at Springfield was dedicated amid such jubilation as marks an event thought to be the forerunner of a new era. There is indeed a certain pathos in the high hopes expressed in the Address of Dedication by President Earle, for, though the Order continued to thrive until 1878, shortly after a decline began, and dissolution was its fate in 1880.

The failure of the Sovereigns marked the latest attempt on a large scale[11] to inoculate the American workingmen with the sort of cooperative spirit which proved so successful in England.[12]

This failure of distributive cooperation to gain the strong and lasting foothold in this country that it has abroad has been accounted for in various ways by different writers. Great emphasis has been laid upon the lack of capital, the lack of suitable legislation on the subject of cooperation, the mutual isolation of the educated and wage-earning classes, the lack of business ability among wage earners, and the altogether too frequent venality and corruption among cooperators.

Probably the lack of adequate leadership has played as important a part as any. It is peculiar to America that the wage earner of exceptional ability can easily find a way for escaping into the class of independent producers or even employers of labor. The American trade union movement has suffered much less from this difficulty. The trade unions are fighting organizations; they demand the sort of leader who is of a combative spirit, who possesses the organizing ability and the "personal magnetism" to keep his men in line; and for this kind of ability the business world offers no particular demand. On the other hand, the qualifications which go to make a successful manager of a cooperative store, namely, steadiness, conservatism of judgment, attention to detail and business punctuality always will be in great demand in the business world. Hence, when no barrier is interposed in the form of preempted opportunities or class bias, the exceptional workingman who possesses these qualifications will likely desert his class and set up in business for himself. In England, fortunately for the cooperative movement, such an escape is very difficult.

The failure of consumers' cooperation in America was helped also by two other peculiarly American conditions. European economists, when speaking of the working class, assume generally that it is fixed in residence and contrast it with capital, which they say is fluid as between city and city and even between country and country. American labor, however, native as well as immigrant, is probably more mobile than capital; for, tradition and habit which keep the great majority of European wage earners in the place where their fathers and forefathers had lived before them are generally absent in this country, except perhaps in parts of New England and the South. It is therefore natural that the cooperative spirit, which after all is but an enlarged and more generalized form of the old spirit of neighborliness and mutual trust, should have failed to develop to its full strength in America.

Another condition fatal to the development of the cooperative spirit is the racial heterogeneity of the American wage-earning class, which separates it into mutually isolated groups even as the social classes of England and Scotland are separated by class spirit. As a result, we find a want of mutual trust which depends so much on "consciousness of kind." This is further aggravated by competition and a continuous displacement in industry of nationalities of a high standard of living by those of a lower one. This conflict of nationalities, which lies also at the root of the closed shop policy of many of the American trade unions, is probably the most effective carrier that there is to a widespread growth of the cooperative spirit among American wage earners. This is further hindered by other national characteristics which more or less pervade all classes of society, namely, the traditional individualism—the heritage of puritanism and the pioneer days, and the emphasis upon earning capacity with a corresponding aversion to thrift.

FOOTNOTES:

[10] The National Labor Union came out against Chinese immigration in 1869, when the issue was brought home to the Eastern wage earners following the importation by a shoe manufacturer in North Adams, Massachusetts, of Chinese strike breakers.

[11] There were many cooperative stores in the eighties and a concerted effort to duplicate the venture of the Sovereigns was attempted as late as 1919 under the pressure of the soaring cost of living.

[12] Where Consumers' Cooperation has worked under most favorable conditions as in England, its achievements have been all that its most ardent champions could have desired. Such is the picture presented by Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb in the following glowing terms:

"The organization of industry by Associations of Consumers offers, as far as it goes, a genuine alternative to capitalist ownership, because it supersedes the capitalist power, whether individual or joint-stock, alike in the control of the instruments of production by which the community lives, and in the absorption of the profits, which otherwise support a capitalist class. The ownership and control are vested in, and the profits are distributed among, the whole community of consumers, irrespective of their industrial wealth. Through the device of dividend on purchases the Cooperative Movement maintains an open democracy, through the control of this democracy of consumers it has directly or indirectly kept down prices, and protected the wage-earning class from exploitation by the Credit System and from the extortions of monopolist traders and speculators. By this same device on purchases, and the automatic accumulation of part of the profit in the capital of each society and in that of the Wholesales, it has demonstratedly added to the personal wealth of the manual working class, and has, alike in Great Britain, and in other countries, afforded both a valuable financial reserve to the wage earners against all emergencies and an instrument for their elevation from the penury to which competition is always depressing them. By making possible the upgrowth of great business enterprises in working class hands, the Cooperative Movement has, without divorcing them from their fellows, given to thousands of the manual workers both administrative experience and a well-grounded confidence; and has thus enabled them to take a fuller part in political and social life than would otherwise have been probable."—New Statesman, May 30, 1916. "Special Supplement on the Cooperative Movement."

Indeed the success of the consumer's cooperative movement in European countries has been marvellous, even measured by bare figures. In all Europe in 1914, there were about 9,000,000 cooperators of whom one-third lived in Great Britain and not less than two and a half millions in Germany. In England and Scotland alone, the 1400 stores and two Wholesale Cooperative Societies controlled in 1914 about 420 million dollars of retail distributive trade and employed nearly 50,000 operatives in processes of production in their own workshops and factories.



CHAPTER 3

THE BEGINNING OF THE KNIGHTS OF LABOR AND OF THE AMERICAN FEDERATION OF LABOR

With the practical disintegration of the organized labor movement in the seventies, two nuclei held together and showed promise of future growth. One was the "Noble Order of the Knights of Labor" and the other a small trade union movement grouped around the International Cigar Makers' Union.

The "Noble Order of the Knights of Labor," while it first became important in the labor movement after 1873, was founded in 1869 by Uriah Smith Stephens, a tailor who had been educated for the ministry, as a secret organization. Secrecy was adopted as a protection against persecutions by employers.

The principles of the Order were set forth by Stephens in the secret ritual. "Open and public association having failed after a struggle of centuries to protect or advance the interest of labor, we have lawfully constituted this Assembly," and "in using this power of organized effort and cooperation, we but imitate the example of capital heretofore set in numberless instances;" for, "in all the multifarious branches of trade, capital has its combinations, and, whether intended or not, it crushes the manly hopes of labor and tramples poor humanity into the dust." However, "we mean no conflict with legitimate enterprise, no antagonism to necessary capital." The remedy consists first in work of education: "We mean to create a healthy public opinion on the subject of labor (the only creator of values or capital) and the justice of its receiving a full, just share of the values or capital it has created." The next remedy was legislation: "We shall, with all our strength, support laws made to harmonize the interests of labor and capital, for labor alone gives life and value to capital, and also those laws which tend to lighten the exhaustiveness of toil." Next in order were mutual benefits. "We shall use every lawful and honorable means to procure and retain employ for one another, coupled with a just and fair remuneration, and, should accident or misfortune befall one of our number, render such aid as lies within our power to give, without inquiring his country or his creed."

For nine years the Order remained a secret organization and showed but a slow growth. In 1878 it was forced to abolish secrecy. The public mind was rendered uneasy by the revolutionary uprising of workingmen of Paris who set up the famous "Commune of Paris" of 1871, by the destructive great railway strikes in this country in 1877 and, lastly, by a wave of criminal disorders in the anthracite coal mining region in Eastern Pennsylvania,[13] and became only too prone to attribute revolutionary and criminal intents to any labor organization that cloaked itself in secrecy. Simultaneously with coming out into the open, the Knights adopted a new program, called the Preamble of the Knights of Labor, in place of the vague Secret Ritual which hitherto served as the authoritative expression of aims.

This Preamble recites how "wealth," with its development, has become so aggressive that "unless checked" it "will inevitably lead to the pauperisation and hopeless degradation of the toiling masses." Hence, if the toilers are "to enjoy the blessings of life," they must organize "every department of productive industry" in order to "check" the power of wealth and to put a stop to "unjust accumulation." The battle cry in this fight must be "moral worth not wealth, the true standard of individual and national greatness." As the "action" of the toilers ought to be guided by "knowledge," it is necessary to know "the true condition of the producing masses"; therefore, the Order demands "from the various governments the establishment of bureaus of labor statistics." Next in order comes the "establishment of cooperative institutions productive and distributive." Union of all trades, "education," and producers' cooperation remained forever after the cardinal points in the Knights of Labor philosophy and were steadily referred to as "First Principles," namely principles bequeathed to the Order by Uriah Stephens and the other "Founders."[14]

These idealistic "First Principles" found an ardent champion in Terence V. Powderly, a machinist by trade and twice mayor of Scranton, Pennsylvania, on a labor ticket, who succeeded Stephens in 1878 to the headship of the Order. Powderly bore unmistakably the stamp of this sort of idealism throughout all the time when he was the foremost labor leader in the country. Unlike Samuel Gompers, who came to supplant him about 1890, he was foreign to that spirit of combative unionism which accepts the wage system but concentrates on a struggle to wrest concessions from the employers. Even when circumstances which were largely beyond his control made Powderly a strike leader on a huge scale, his heart lay elsewhere—in circumventing the wage system by opening to the worker an escape into self-employment through cooperation.

Producers' cooperation, then, was the ambitious program by which the Order of the Knights of Labor expected to lead the American wage-earning class out of the bondage of the wage system into the Canaan of self-employment. Thus the Order was the true successor of the cooperative movement in the forties and sixties. Its motto was "Cooperation of the Order, by the Order, and for the Order." Not scattered local initiative, but the Order as a whole was to carry on the work. The plan resembled the Rochdale system of England in that it proposed to start with an organization of consumers—the large and ever-growing membership of the Order. But it departed radically from the English prototype in that instead of setting out to save money for the consumer, it primarily aimed to create a market for the productive establishments which were to follow. Consumers' cooperation was to be but a stepping stone to producers' self-employment. Eventually when the Order had grown to include nearly all useful members of society—so the plan contemplated—it would control practically the whole market and cooperative production would become the rule rather than the exception. So far, therefore, as "First Principles" went, the Order was not an instrument of the "class struggle," but an association of idealistic cooperators. It was this pure idealism which drew to the Order of the Knights of Labor the sympathetic interest of writers on social subjects and university teachers, then unfortunately too few in number, like Dr. Richard T. Ely[15] and President John Bascom of Wisconsin.

The other survival in the seventies of the labor movement of the sixties, which has already been mentioned, namely the trade union movement grouped around the Cigar Makers' Union, was neither so purely American in its origin as the Knights of Labor nor so persistently idealistic. On the contrary, its first membership was foreign and its program, as we shall see, became before long primarily opportunist and "pragmatic." The training school for this opportunistic trade unionism was the socialist movement during the sixties and seventies, particularly the American branch of the International Workingmen's Association, the "First Internationale," which was founded by Karl Marx in London in 1864. The conception of economic labor organization which was advanced by the Internationale in a socialistic formulation underwent in the course of years a process of change: On the one hand, through constant conflict with the rival conception of political labor organization urged by American followers of the German socialist, Ferdinand Lassalle, and on the other hand, through contact with American reality. Out of that double contact emerged the trade unionism of the American Federation of Labor.

The Internationale is generally reputed to have been organized by Karl Marx for the propaganda of international socialism. As a matter of fact, its starting point was the practical effort of British trade union leaders to organize the workingmen of the Continent and to prevent the importation of Continental strike-breakers. That Karl Marx wrote its Inaugural Address was merely incidental. It chanced that what he wrote was acceptable to the British unionists rather than the draft of an address representing the views of Giuseppe Mazzini, the leader of the "New Italy" and the "New Europe," which was submitted to them at the same time and advocated elaborate plans of cooperation. Marx emphasized the class solidarity of labor against Mazzini's harmony of capital and labor. He did this by reciting what British labor had done through the Rochdale system of cooperation without the help of capitalists and what the British Parliament had done in enacting the ten-hour law of 1847 against the protest of capitalists. Now that British trade unionists in 1864 were demanding the right of suffrage and laws to protect their unions, it followed that Marx merely stated their demands when he affirmed the independent economic and political organization of labor in all lands. His Inaugural Address was a trade union document, not a Communist Manifesto. Indeed not until Bakunin and his following of anarchists had nearly captured the organization in the years 1869 to 1872 did the program of socialism become the leading issue.

The philosophy of the Internationale at the period of its ascendency was based on the economic organization of the working class in trade unions. These must precede the political seizure of the government by labor. Then, when the workingmen's party should achieve control, it would be able to build up successively the socialist state on the foundation of a sufficient number of existing trade unions.

This conception differed widely from the teaching of Ferdinand Lassalle. Lassallean socialism was born in 1863 with Lassalle's Open Letter to a workingmen's committee in Leipzig. It sprang from his antagonism to Schultze-Delizsch's[16] system of voluntary cooperation. In Lassalle's eagerness to condemn the idea of the harmony of capital and labor, which lay at the basis of Schultze's scheme for cooperation, he struck at the same time a blow against all forms of non-political organization of wage earners. Perhaps the fact that he was ignorant of the British trade unions accounts for his insufficient appreciation of trade unionism. But no matter what the cause may have been, to Lassalle there was but one means of solving the labor problem-political action. When political control was finally achieved, the labor party, with the aid of state credit, would build up a network of cooperative societies into which eventually all industry would pass.

In short, the distinction between the ideas of the Internationale and of Lassalle consisted in the fact that the former advocated trade unionism prior to and underlying political organization, while the latter considered a political victory as the basis of socialism. These antagonistic starting points are apparent at the very beginning of American socialism as well as in the trade unionism and socialism of succeeding years.

Two distinct phases can be seen in the history of the Internationale in America. During the first phase, which began in 1866 and lasted until 1870, the Internationale had no important organization of its own on American soil, but tried to establish itself through affiliation with the National Labor Union. The inducement held out to the latter was of a practical nature, the international regulation of immigration. During the second phase the Internationale had its "sections" in nearly every large city of the country, centering in New York and Chicago, and the practical trade union part of its work receded before its activity on behalf of the propaganda of socialism.

These "sections," with a maximum membership which probably never exceeded a thousand, nearly all foreigners, became a preparatory school in trade union leadership for many of the later organizers and leaders of the American Federation of Labor: for example, Adolph Strasser, the German cigar maker, whose organization became the new model in trade unionism, and P.J. McGuire, the American-born carpenter, who founded the Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners and who was for many years the secretary-treasurer of the American Federation of Labor.

Fate had decreed that these sections of a handful of immigrants should play for a time high-sounding parts in the world labor movement. When, at the World Congress of the International Workingmen's Association at the Hague in 1872, the anarchist faction led by Bakunin had shown such strength that Marx and his socialist faction deemed it wise to move the General Council out of mischief's way, they removed it to New York and entrusted its powers into the hands of the faithful German Marxians on this side of the Atlantic. This spelled the end of the Internationale as a world organization, but enormously increased the stakes of the factional fights within the handful of American Internationalists. The organization of the workers into trade unions, the Internationale's first principle, was forgotten in the heat of intemperate struggles for empty honors and powerless offices. On top of that, with the panic of 1873 and the ensuing prolonged depression, the political drift asserted itself in socialism as it had in the labor movement in general and the movement, erstwhile devoted primarily to organization of trade unions, entered, urged on by the Lassalleans, into a series of political campaigns somewhat successful at first but soon succumbing to the inevitable fate of all amateurish attempts. Upon men of Strasser's practical mental grasp these petty tempests in the melting pot could only produce an impression of sheer futility, and he turned to trade unionism as the only activity worth his while. Strasser had been elected president of the Cigar Makers' International Union in 1877, in the midst of a great strike in New York against the tenement-house system.

The president of the local New York union of cigar makers was at the time Samuel Gompers, a young man of twenty-seven, who was born in England and came to America in 1862. In his endeavor to build up a model for the "new" unionism and in his almost uninterrupted headship of that movement for forty years is indicated Gompers' truly representative character. Born of Dutch-Jewish parents in England in 1850, he typifies the cosmopolitan origins of American unionism. His early contact in the union of his trade with men like Strasser, upon whom the ideas of Marx and the International Workingmen's Association had left an indelible stamp, and his thorough study of Marx gave him that grounding both in idealism and class consciousness which has produced many strong leaders of American unions and saved them from defection to other interests. Aggressive and uncompromising in a perpetual fight for the strongest possible position and power of trade unions, but always strong for collective agreements with the opposing employers, he displays the business tactics of organized labor. At the head of an organization which denies itself power over its constituent unions, he has brought and held together the most widely divergent and often antagonistic unions, while permitting each to develop and even to change its character to fit the changing industrial conditions.

The dismal failure of the strike against the tenement house system in cigar making brought home to both Strasser and Gompers the weakness of the plan of organization of their union as well as that of American trade unions in general. They consequently resolved to rebuild their union upon the pattern of the British unions, although they firmly intended that it should remain a militant organization. The change involved, first, complete authority over the local unions in the hands of the international officers; second, an increase in the membership dues for the purpose of building up a large fund; and, third, the adoption of a far-reaching benefit system in order to assure stability to the organization. This was accomplished at the convention held in August, 1879. This convention simultaneously adopted the British idea of the "equalization of funds," which gave the international officers the power to order a well-to-do local union to transfer a portion of its funds to another local union in financial straits. With the various modifications of the feature of "equalization of funds," the system of government in the Cigar Makers' International Union was later used as a model by the other national and international trade unions.

As Strasser and men of his ilk grew more and more absorbed in the practical problems of the everyday struggle of the wage-earners for better conditions of employment, the socialistic portion of their original philosophy kept receding further and further into the background until they arrived at pure trade unionism. But their trade unionism differed vastly from the "native" American trade unionism of their time, which still hankered for the haven of producers' cooperation. The philosophy which these new leaders developed might be termed a philosophy of pure wage-consciousness. It signified a labor movement reduced to an opportunistic basis, accepting the existence of capitalism and having for its object the enlarging of the bargaining power of the wage earner in the sale of his labor. Its opportunism was instrumental—its idealism was home and family and individual betterment. It also implied an attitude of aloofness from all those movements which aspire to replace the wage system by cooperation, whether voluntary or subsidized by government, whether greenbackism, socialism, or anarchism.

Perhaps the most concise definition of this philosophy is to be found in Strasser's testimony before the Senate Committee on Education and Labor in 1883:

"Q. You are seeking to improve home matters first?

"A. Yes, sir, I look first to the trade I represent; I look first to cigars, to the interests of men who employ me to represent their interest.

"Chairman: I was only asking you in regard to your ultimate ends.

"Witness: We have no ultimate ends. We are going on from day to day. We are fighting only for immediate objects—objects that can be realized in a few years.

"By Mr. Call: Q. You want something better to eat and to wear, and better houses to live in?

"A. Yes, we want to dress better and to live better, and become better citizens generally.

"The Chairman: I see that you are a little sensitive lest it should be thought that you are a mere theoriser, I do not look upon you in that light at all.

"The Witness: Well, we say in our constitution that we are opposed to theorists, and I have to represent the organization here. We are all practical men."

Another offshoot of the same Marxian Internationale were the "Chicago Anarchists."[17] The Internationale, as we saw, emphasized trade unionism as the first step in the direction of socialism, in opposition to the political socialism of Lassalle, which ignored the trade union and would start with a political party outright. Shorn of its socialistic futurity this philosophy became non-political "business" unionism; but, when combined with a strong revolutionary spirit, it became a non-political revolutionary unionism, or syndicalism.

The organization of those industrial revolutionaries was called the International Working People's Association, also known as the "Black" or anarchist International, which was formed at Pittsburgh in 1883. Like the old Internationale it busied itself with forming trade unions, but insisted that they conform to a revolutionary model. Such a "model" trade union was the Federation of Metal Workers of America, which was organized in 1885. It said in its Declaration of Principles that the entire abolition of the present system of society can alone emancipate the workers, but under no consideration should they resort to politics; "our organization should be a school to educate its members for the new condition of society, when the workers will regulate their own affairs without any interference by the few. Since the emancipation of the productive classes must come by their own efforts, it is unwise to meddle in present politics.... All direct struggles of the laboring masses have our fullest sympathy." Alongside the revolutionary trade unions were workers' armed organizations ready to usher in the new order by force. "By force," recited the Pittsburgh Manifesto of the Black International, "our ancestors liberated themselves from political oppression, by force their children will have to liberate themselves from economic bondage. It is, therefore, your right, it is your duty, says Jefferson,—to arms!"

The following ten years were to decide whether the leadership of the American labor movement was to be with the "practical men of the trade unions" or with the cooperative idealists of the Knights of Labor.

FOOTNOTES:

[13] After the defeat of a strong anthracite miners' union in 1869, which was an open organization, the fight against the employers was carried on by a secret organization known as the Molly Maguires, which used the method of terrorism and assassination. It was later exposed and many were sentenced and executed.

[14] The Preamble further provides that the Order will stand for the reservation of all lands for actual settlers; the "abrogation of all laws that do not bear equally upon capital and labor, the removal of unjust technicalities, delays, and discriminations in the administration of justice, and the adopting of measures providing for the health and safety of those engaged in mining, manufacturing, or building pursuits"; the enactment of a weekly pay law, a mechanics' lien law, and a law prohibiting child labor under fourteen years of age; the abolition of the contract system on national, state, and municipal work, and of the system of leasing out convicts; equal pay for equal work for both sexes; reduction of hours of labor to eight per day; "the substitution of arbitration for strikes, whenever and wherever employers and employees are willing to meet on equitable grounds"; the establishment of "a purely national circulating medium based upon the faith and resources of the nation, issued directly to the people, without the intervention of any system of banking corporations, which money shall be a legal tender in payment of all debts, public or private".

[15] Dr. Ely in his pioneer work, The Labor Movement in America, published in 1886, showed a most genuine sympathy for the idealistic strivings and gropings of labor for a better social order. He even advised some of his pupils at the Johns Hopkins University to join the Knights of Labor in order to gain a better understanding of the labor movement.

[16] Schultze-Delizsch was a German thinker and practical reformer of the liberal school.

[17] The Anarchists who were tried and executed after the Haymarket Square bomb in Chicago in May, 1886. See below, 91-93.



CHAPTER 4

REVIVAL AND UPHEAVAL, 1879-1887

With the return of business prosperity in 1879, the labor movement revived. The first symptom of the upward trend was a rapid multiplication of city federations of organized trades, variously known as trade councils, amalgamated trade and labor unions, trades assemblies, and the like. Practically all of these came into existence after 1879, since hardly any of the "trades' assemblies" of the sixties had survived the depression.

As was said above, the national trade unions existed during the sixties and seventies in only about thirty trades. Eighteen of these had either retained a nucleus during the seventies or were first formed during that decade. The following is a list of the national unions in existence in 1880 with the year of formation: Typographical (1850), Hat Finishers (1854), Iron Molders (1859), Locomotive Engineers (1863), Cigar Makers (1864), Bricklayers and Masons (1865), Silk and Fur Hat Finishers (1866), Railway Conductors (1868), Coopers (1870), German-American Typographia (1873), Locomotive Firemen (1873), Horseshoers (1874), Furniture Workers (1873), Iron and Steel Workers (1876), Granite Cutters (1877), Lake Seamen (1878), Cotton Mill Spinners (1878), New England Boot and Shoe Lasters (1879).

In 1880 the Western greenbottle blowers' national union was established; in 1881 the national unions of boiler makers and carpenters; in 1882, plasterers and metal workers; in 1883, tailors, lithographers, wood carvers, railroad brakemen, and silk workers.

An illustration of the rapid growth in trade union membership during this period is given in the following figures: the bricklayers' union had 303 in 1880; 1558 in 1881; 6848 in 1882; 9193 in 1883. The typographical union had 5968 members in 1879; 6520 in 1880; 7931 in 1881; 10,439 in 1882; 12,273 in 1883. The total trade union membership in the country, counting the three railway organizations and those organized only locally, amounted to between 200,000 and 225,000 in 1883 and probably was not below 300,000 in the beginning of 1885.

A distinguishing characteristic of the trade unions of this time was the predominance in them of the foreign element. The Illinois Bureau of Labor describes the ethnical composition of the trade unions of that State during 1886, and states that 21 percent were American, 33 percent German, 19 percent Irish, 10 percent British other than Irish, 12 percent Scandinavian, and the Poles, Bohemians, and Italians formed about 5 percent. The strong predominance of the foreign element in American trade unions should not appear unusual, since, owing to the breakdown of the apprenticeship system, the United States had been drawing its supply of skilled labor from abroad.

The Order of the Knights of Labor, despite its "First Principles" based on the cooperative ideal, was soon forced to make concessions to a large element of its membership which was pressing for strikes. With the advent of prosperity, the Order expanded, although the Knights of Labor played but a subordinate part in the labor movement of the early eighties. The membership was 20,151 in 1879; 28,136 in 1880; 19,422 in 1881; 42,517 in 1882; 51,914 in 1883; showing a steady and rapid growth, with the exception of the year 1881. But these figures are decidedly deceptive as a means of measuring the strength of the Order, for the membership fluctuated widely; so that in the year 1883, when it reached 50,000 no less than one-half of this number passed in and out of the organization during the year. The enormous fluctuation, while reducing the economic strength of the Order, brought large masses of people under its influence and prepared the ground for the upheaval in the middle of the eighties. It also brought the Order to the attention of the public press. The labor press gave the Order great publicity, but the Knights did not rely on gratuitous newspaper publicity. They set to work a host of lecturers, who held public meetings throughout the country adding recruits and advertising the Order.

The most important Knights of Labor strike of this period was the telegraphers' strike in 1883. The telegraphers had a national organization in 1870, which soon collapsed. In 1882 they again organized on a national basis and affiliated with the Order as District Assembly 45.[18] The strike was declared on June 19, 1883, against all commercial telegraph companies in the country, among which the Western Union, with about 4000 operators, was by far the largest. The demands were one day's rest in seven, an eight-hour day shift and a seven-hour night shift, and a general increase of 15 percent in wages. The public and a large portion of the press gave their sympathy to the strikers, not so much on account of the oppressed condition of the telegraphers as of the general hatred that prevailed against Jay Gould, who then controlled the Western Union Company. This strike was the first in the eighties to call the attention of the general American public to the existence of a labor question, and received considerable attention at the hands of the Senate Committee on Education and Labor. By the end of July, over a month after the beginning of the strike, the men who escaped the blacklist went back to work on the old terms.

From 1879 till 1882 the labor movement was typical of a period of rising prices. It was practically restricted to skilled workmen, who organized to wrest from employers still better conditions than those which prosperity would have given under individual bargaining. The movement was essentially opportunistic and displayed no particular class feeling and no revolutionary tendencies. The solidarity of labor was not denied by the trade unions, but they did not try to reduce the idea to practice: each trade coped more or less successfully with its own employers. Even the Knights of Labor, the organization par excellence of the solidarity of labor, was at this time, in so far as practical efforts went, merely a faint echo of the trade unions.

But the situation radically changed during the depression of 1884-1885. The unskilled and the semi-skilled, affected as they were by wage reductions and unemployment even in a larger measure than the skilled, were drawn into the movement. Labor organizations assumed the nature of a real class movement. The idea of the solidarity of labor ceased to be merely verbal and took on life! General strikes, sympathetic strikes, nationwide boycotts and nation-wide political movements became the order of the day. The effects of an unusually large immigration joined hands with the depression. The eighties were the banner decade of the entire century for immigration. The aggregate number of immigrants arriving was 5,246,613—two and a half millions larger than during the seventies and one million and a half larger than during the nineties. The eighties witnessed the highest tide of immigration from Great Britain and the North of Europe and the beginning of the tide of South and East European immigration.

However, the depression of 1883-1885 had one redeeming feature by which it was distinguished from other depressions. With falling prices, diminishing margins of profit, and decreasing wages, the amount of employment was not materially diminished. Times continued hard during 1885, a slight improvement showing itself only during the last months of the year. The years 1886 and 1887 were a period of gradual recovery, and normal conditions may be said to have returned about the middle of 1887. Except in New England, the old wages, which had been reduced during the bad years, were won again by the spring of 1887.

The year 1884 was one of decisive failure in strikes. They were practically all directed against reductions in wages and for the right of organization. The most conspicuous strikes were those of the Fall River spinners, the Troy stove mounters, the Cincinnati cigar makers and the Hocking Valley coal miners.

The failure of strikes brought into use the other weapon of labor—the boycott. But not until the latter part of 1884, when the failure of the strike as a weapon became apparent, did the boycott assume the nature of an epidemic. The boycott movement was a truly national one, affecting the South and the Far West as well as the East and Middle West. The number of boycotts during 1885 was nearly seven times as large as during 1884. Nearly all of the boycotts either originated with, or were taken up by, the Knights of Labor.

The strike again came into prominence in the latter half of 1885. This coincided with the beginning of an upward trend in general business conditions. The strikes of 1885, even more than those of the preceding year, were spontaneous outbreaks of unorganized masses.

The frequent railway strikes were a characteristic feature of the labor movement in 1885. Most notable was the Gould railway strike in March, 1885. On February 26, a cut of 10 percent was ordered in the wages of the shopmen of the Wabash road. A similar reduction had been made in October, 1884, on the Missouri, Kansas & Texas. Strikes occurred on the two roads, one on February 27 and the other March 9, and the strikers were joined by the men on the third Gould road, the Missouri Pacific, at all points where the two lines touched, making altogether over 4500 men on strike. The train service personnel, that is, the locomotive engineers, firemen, brakemen, and conductors, supported the strikers and to this fact more than to any other was due their speedy victory. The wages were restored and the strikers reemployed. But six months later this was followed by a second strike. The road, now in the hands of a receiver, reduced the force of shopmen at Moberly, Missouri, to the lowest possible limit, which virtually meant a lockout of the members of the Knights of Labor in direct violation of the conditions of settlement of the preceding strike. The General Executive Board of the Knights, after a futile attempt to have a conference with the receiver, declared a boycott on Wabash rolling stock. This order, had it been carried out, would have affected over 20,000 miles of railway and would have equalled the dimensions of the great railway strike of 1877. But Jay Gould would not risk a general strike on his lines at this time. According to an appointment made between him and the executive board of the Knights of Labor, a conference was held between that board and the managers of the Missouri Pacific and the Wabash railroads, at which he threw his influence in favor of making concessions to the men. He assured the Knights that in all troubles he wanted the men to come directly to him, that he believed in labor organizations and in the arbitration of all difficulties and that he "would always endeavor to do what was right." The Knights demanded the discharge of all new men hired in the Wabash shops since the beginning of the lockout, the reinstatement of all discharged men, the leaders being given priority, and an assurance that no discrimination against the members of the Order would be made in the future. A settlement was finally made at another conference, and the receiver of the Wabash road agreed, under pressure by Jay Gould, to issue an order conceding the demands of the Knights of Labor.

The significance of the second Wabash strike in the history of railway strikes was that the railway brotherhoods (engineers, firemen, brakemen, and conductors), in contrast with their conduct during the first Wabash strike, now refused to lend any aid to the striking shopmen, although many of the members were also Knights of Labor.

But far more important was the effect of the strike upon the general labor movement. Here a labor organization for the first time dealt on an equal footing with probably the most powerful capitalist in the country. It forced Jay Gould to recognize it as a power equal to himself, a fact which he conceded when he declared his readiness to arbitrate all labor difficulties that might arise. The oppressed laboring masses finally discovered a powerful champion. All the pent-up feeling of bitterness and resentment which had accumulated during the two years of depression, in consequence of the repeated cuts in wages and the intensified domination by employers, now found vent in a rush to organize under the banner of the powerful Knights of Labor. To the natural tendency on the part of the oppressed to exaggerate the power of a mysterious emancipator whom they suddenly found coming to their aid, there was added the influence of sensational reports in the public press. The newspapers especially took delight in exaggerating the powers and strength of the Order.

In 1885 the New York Sun detailed one of its reporters to "get up a story of the strength and purposes of the Knights of Labor." This story was copied by newspapers and magazines throughout the country and aided considerably in bringing the Knights of Labor into prominence. The following extract illustrates the exaggerated notion of the power of the Knights of Labor.

"Five men in this country control the chief interests of five hundred thousand workingmen, and can at any moment take the means of livelihood from two and a half millions of souls. These men compose the executive board of the Noble Order of the Knights of Labor of America. The ability of the president and cabinet to turn out all the men in the civil service, and to shift from one post to another the duties of the men in the army and navy, is a petty authority compared with that of these five Knights. The authority of the late Cardinal was, and that of the bishops of the Methodist Church is, narrow and prescribed, so far as material affairs are concerned, in comparison with that of these five rulers.

"They can stay the nimble touch of almost every telegraph operator; can shut up most of the mills and factories, and can disable the railroads. They can issue an edict against any manufactured goods so as to make their subjects cease buying them, and the tradesmen stop selling them.

"They can array labor against capital, putting labor on the offensive or the defensive, for quiet and stubborn self-protection, or for angry, organized assault, as they will."

Before long the Order was able to benefit by this publicity in quarters where the tale of its great power could only attract unqualified attention, namely, in Congress. The Knights of Labor led in the agitation for prohibiting the immigration of alien contract laborers. The problem of contract immigrant labor rapidly came to the front in 1884, when such labor began frequently to be used to defeat strikes.

Twenty persons appeared to testify before the committee in favor of the bill, of whom all but two or three belonged to the Knights of Labor. The anti-contract labor law which was passed by Congress on February 2, 1885, therefore, was due almost entirely to the efforts of the Knights of Labor. The trade unions gave little active support, for to the skilled workingmen the importation of contract Italian and Hungarian laborers was a matter of small importance. On the other hand, to the Knights of Labor with their vast contingent of unskilled it was a strong menace. Although the law could not be enforced and had to be amended in 1887 in order to render it effective, its passage nevertheless attests the political influence already exercised by the Order in 1885.

The outcome of the Gould strike of 1885 and the dramatic exaggeration of the prowess of the Order by press and even by pulpit were largely responsible for the psychological setting that called forth and surrounded the great upheaval of 1886. This upheaval meant more than the mere quickening of the pace of the movement begun in preceding years and decades. It signalled the appearance on the scene of a new class which had not hitherto found a place in the labor movement, namely the unskilled. All the peculiar characteristics of the dramatic events in 1886 and 1887, the highly feverish pace at which organizations grew, the nation-wide wave of strikes, particularly sympathetic strikes, the wide use of the boycott, the obliteration, apparently complete, of all lines that divided the laboring class, whether geographic or trade, the violence and turbulence which accompanied the movement—all of these were the signs of a great movement by the class of the unskilled, which had finally risen in rebellion. This movement, rising as an elemental protest against oppression and degradation, could be but feebly restrained by any considerations of expediency and prudence; nor, of course, could it be restrained by any lessons from experience. But, if the origin and powerful sweep of this movement were largely spontaneous and elemental, the issues which it took up were supplied by the existing organizations, namely the trade unions and the Knights of Labor. These served also as the dykes between which the rapid streams were gathered and, if at times it seemed that they must burst under the pressure, still they gave form and direction to the movement and partly succeeded in introducing order where chaos had reigned. The issue which first brought unity in this great mass movement was a nation-wide strike for the eight-hour day declared for May 1, 1886.

The initiative in this strike was taken not by the Order but by the trade unionists and on the eve of the strike the general officers of the Knights adopted an attitude of hostility. But if the slogan failed to arouse the enthusiasm of the national leaders of the Knights, it nevertheless found ready response in the ranks of labor. The great class of the unskilled and unorganized, which had come to look upon the Knights of Labor as the all-powerful liberator of the laboring masses from oppression, now eagerly seized upon this demand as the issue upon which the first battle with capital should be fought.

The agitation assumed large proportions in March. The main argument for the shorter day was work for the unemployed. With the exception of the cigar makers, it was left wholly in the hands of local organizations. The Knights of Labor as an organization figured far less prominently than the trade unions, and among the latter the building trades and the German-speaking furniture workers and cigar makers stood in the front of the movement. Early in the strike the workingmen's cause was gravely injured by a bomb explosion on Haymarket Square in Chicago, attributed to anarchists, which killed and wounded a score of policemen.

The bomb explosion on Haymarket Square connected two movements which had heretofore marched separately, despite a certain mutual affinity. For what many of the Knights of Labor were practising during the upheaval in a less drastic manner and without stopping to look for a theoretical justification, the contemporary Chicago "anarchists,"[19] the largest branch of the "Black International," had elevated into a well rounded-out system of thought. Both syndicalism and the Knights of Labor upheaval were related chapters in the revolutionary movement of the eighties. Whether in its conscious or unconscious form, this syndicalism was characterized by an extreme combativeness, by the ease with which minor disputes grew into widespread strikes involving many trades and large territories, by a reluctance, if not an out and out refusal, to enter into agreements with employers however temporary, and lastly by a ready resort to violence. In 1886 the membership of the Black International probably was about 5000 or 6000 and of this number about 1000 were English speaking.

The circumstances of the bomb explosion were the following. A strikers' meeting was held near the McCormick Reaper Works in Chicago, late on the third of May. About this time strike-breakers employed in these works began to leave for home and were attacked by strikers. The police arrived in large numbers and upon being received with stones, fired and killed four and wounded many. The same evening the International issued a call in which appeared the word "Revenge" with the appeal: "Workingmen, arm yourselves and appear in full force." A protest mass meeting met the next day on Haymarket Square and was addressed by Internationalists. The police were present in numbers and, as they formed in line and advanced on the crowd, some unknown hand hurled a bomb into their midst killing and wounding many.

It is unnecessary to describe here the period of police terror in Chicago, the hysterical attitude of the press, or the state of panic that came over the inhabitants of the city. Nor is it necessary to deal in detail with the trial and sentence of the accused. Suffice it to say that the Haymarket bomb showed to the labor movement what it might expect from the public and the government if it combined violence with a revolutionary purpose.

Although the bomb outrage was attributed to the anarchists and not generally to the strikers for the eight-hour day, it did materially reduce the sympathy of the public as well as intimidate many strikers. Nevertheless, Bradstreet's estimated that no fewer than 340,000 men took part in the movement; 190,000 actually struck, only 42,000 of this number with success, and 150,000 secured shorter hours without a strike. Thus the total number of those who secured with or without strikes the eight-hour day was something less than 200,000. But even those who for the present succeeded, whether with or without striking, soon lost the concession, and Bradstreet's estimated in January, 1887, that, so far as the payment of former wages for a shorter day's work is concerned, the grand total of those retaining the concession did not exceed, if it equalled, 15,000.

American labor movements have never experienced such a rush to organize as the one in the latter part of 1885 and during 1886. During 1886 the combined membership of labor organizations was exceptionally large and for the first time came near the million mark. The Knights of Labor had a membership of 700,000 and the trade unions at least 250,000, the former composed largely of unskilled and the latter of skilled. The Knights of Labor gained in a remarkably short time—in a few months—over 600,000 new members and grew from 1610 local assemblies with 104,066 members in good standing in July 1885, to 5892 assemblies with 702,924 members in July 1886. The greatest portion of this growth occurred after January 1, 1886. In the state of New York there were in July 1886, about 110,000 members (60,809 in District Assembly 49 of New York City alone); in Pennsylvania, 95,000 (51,557 in District Assembly 1, Philadelphia, alone); in Massachusetts, 90,000 (81,191 in District Assembly 30 of Boston); and in Illinois, 32,000.

In the state of Illinois, for which detailed information for that year is available, there were 204 local assemblies with 34,974 members, of which 65 percent were found in Cook County (Chicago) alone. One hundred and forty-nine assemblies were mixed, that is comprised members of different trades including unskilled and only 55 were trade assemblies. Reckoned according to country of birth the membership was 45 percent American, 16 percent German, 13 percent Irish, 10 percent British, 5 percent Scandinavian, and the remaining 2 percent scattered. The trade unions also gained many members but in a considerably lesser proportion.

The high water mark was reached in the autumn of 1886. But in the early months of 1887 a reaction became visible. By July 1, the membership of the Order had diminished to 510,351. While a share of this retrogression may have been due to the natural reaction of large masses of people who had been suddenly set in motion without experience, a more immediate cause came from the employers. Profiting by past lessons, they organized strong associations. The main object of these employers' associations was the defeat of the Knights. They were organized sectionally and nationally. In small localities, where the power of the Knights was especially great, all employers regardless of industry joined in a single association. But in large manufacturing centers, where the rich corporation prevailed, they included the employers of only one industry. To attain their end these associations made liberal use of the lockout, the blacklist, and armed guards and detectives. Often they treated agreements entered into with the Order as contracts signed under duress. The situation in the latter part of 1886 and in 1887 had been clearly foreshadowed in the treatment accorded the Knights of Labor on the Gould railways in the Southwest in the early part of 1886.

As already mentioned, at the settlement of the strike on the Gould system in March 1885, the employes were assured that the road would institute no discriminations against the Knights of Labor. However, it is apparent that a series of petty discriminations was indulged in by minor officials, which kept the men in a state of unrest. It culminated in the discharge of a foreman, a member of the Knights, from the car shop at Marshall, Texas, on the Texas & Pacific Road, which had shortly before passed into the hands of a receiver. A strike broke out over the entire road on March 1, 1886. It is necessary, however, to note that the Knights of Labor themselves were meditating aggressive action two months before the strike. District Assembly 101, the organization embracing the employes on the Southwest system, held a convention on January 10, and authorized the officers to call a strike at any time they might find opportune to enforce the two following demands: first, the formal "recognition" of the Order; and second, a daily wage of $1.50 for the unskilled. The latter demand is peculiarly characteristic of the Knights of Labor and of the feeling of labor solidarity that prevailed in the movement. But evidently the organization preferred to make the issue turn on discrimination against members. Another peculiarity which marked off this strike as the beginning of a new era was the facility with which it led to a sympathetic strike on the Missouri Pacific and all leased and operated lines. This strike broke out simultaneously over the entire system on March 6. It affected more than 5000 miles of railway situated in Missouri, Kansas, Arkansas, Indian Territory, and Nebraska. The strikers did not content themselves with mere picketing, but actually took possession of the railroad property and by a systematic "killing" of engines, that is removing some indispensable part, effectively stopped all the freight traffic. The number of men actively on strike was in the neighborhood of 9000, including practically all of the shopmen, yardmen, and section gangs. The engineers, firemen, brakemen, and conductors took no active part and had to be forced to leave their posts under threats from the strikers.

The leader, one Martin Irons, accurately represented the feelings of the strikers. Personally honest and probably well-meaning, his attitude was overbearing and tyrannical. With him as with those who followed him, a strike was not a more or less drastic means of forcing a better labor contract, but necessarily assumed the aspect of a crusade against capital. Hence all compromise and any policy of give and take were excluded.

Negotiations were conducted by Jay Gould and Powderly to submit the dispute to arbitration, but they failed and, after two months of sporadic violence, the strike spent itself and came to an end. It left, however, a profound impression upon the public mind, second only to the impression made by the great railway strike of 1877; and a Congressional committee was appointed to investigate the whole matter.

The disputes during the second half of 1886 ended, for the most part, disastrously to labor. The number of men involved in six months, was estimated at 97,300. Of these, about 75,300 were in nine great lockouts, of whom 54,000 suffered defeat at the hands of associated employers. The most important lockouts were against 15,000 laundry workers at Troy, New York, in June; against 20,000 Chicago packing house workers; and against 20,000 knitters at Cohoes, New York, both in October.

The lockout of the Chicago butcher workmen attracted the most attention. These men had obtained the eight-hour day without a strike during May. A short time thereafter, upon the initiative of Armour & Company, the employers formed a packers' association and, in the beginning of October, notified the men of a return to the ten-hour day on October 11. They justified this action on the ground that they could not compete with Cincinnati and Kansas City, which operated on the ten-hour system. On October 8, the men, who were organized in District Assemblies 27 and 54, suspended work, and the memorable lockout began. The packers' association rejected all offers of compromise and on October 18 the men were ordered to work on the ten-hour basis. But the dispute in October, which was marked by a complete lack of ill-feeling on the part of the men and was one of the most peaceable labor disputes of the year, was in reality a mere prelude to a second disturbance which broke out in the plant of Swift & Company on November 2 and became general throughout the stockyards on November 6. The men demanded a return to the eight-hour day, but the packers' association, which was now joined by Swift & Company, who formerly had kept aloof, not only refused to give up the ten-hour day, but declared that they would employ no Knights of Labor in the future. The Knights retaliated by declaring a boycott on the meat of Armour & Company. The behavior of the men was now no longer peaceable as before, and the employers took extra precautions by prevailing upon the governor to send two regiments of militia in addition to the several hundred Pinkerton detectives employed by the association. To all appearances, the men were slowly gaining over the employers, for on November 10 the packers' association rescinded its decision not to employ Knights, when suddenly on November 15, like a thunderbolt out of a clear sky, a telegram arrived from Grand Master Workman Powderly ordering the men back to work. Powderly had refused to consider the reports from the members of the General Executive Board who were on the ground, but, as was charged by them, was guided instead by the advice of a priest who had appealed to him to call off the strike and thus put an end to the suffering of the men and their families.

New York witnessed an even more characteristic Knights of Labor strike and on a larger scale. This strike began as two insignificant separate strikes, one by coal-handlers at the Jersey ports supplying New York with coal and the other by longshoremen on the New York water front; both starting on January 1, 1887. Eighty-five coal-handlers employed by the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad Company, members of the Knights of Labor, struck against a reduction of 2-1/2 cents an hour in the wages of the "top-men" and were joined by the trimmers who had grievances of their own. Soon the strike spread to the other roads and the number of striking coal-handlers reached 3000. The longshoremen's strike was begun by 200 men, employed by the Old Dominion Steamship Company, against a reduction in wages and the hiring of cheap men by the week. The strikers were not organized, but the Ocean Association, a part of the Knights of Labor, took up their cause and was assisted by the longshoremen's union. Both strikes soon widened out through a series of sympathetic strikes of related trades and finally became united into one. The Ocean Association declared a boycott on the freight of the Old Dominion Company and this was strictly obeyed by all of the longshoremen's unions. The International Boatmen's Union refused to allow their boats to be used for "scab coal" or to permit their members to steer the companies' boats. The longshoremen joined the boatmen in refusing to handle coal, and the shovelers followed. Then the grain handlers on both floating and stationary elevators refused to load ships with grain on which there was scab coal, and the bag-sewers stood with them. The longshoremen now resolved to go out and refused to work on ships which received scab coal, and finally they decided to stop work altogether on all kinds of craft in the harbor until the trouble should be settled. The strike spirit spread to a large number of freight handlers working for railroads along the river front, so that in the last week of January the number of strikers in New York, Brooklyn, and New Jersey, reached approximately 28,000; 13,000 longshoremen, 1000 boatmen, 6000 grain handlers, 7500 coal-handlers, and 400 bag-sewers.

On February 11, August Corbin, president and receiver of the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad Company, fearing a strike by the miners working in the coal mines operated by that road, settled the strike by restoring to the eighty-five coal-handlers, the original strikers, their former rate of wages. The Knights of Labor felt impelled to accept such a trivial settlement for two reasons. The coal-handlers' strike, which drove up the price of coal to the consumer, was very unpopular, and the strike itself had begun to weaken when the brewers and stationary engineers, who for some obscure reason had been ordered to strike in sympathy, refused to come out. The situation was left unchanged, as far as the coal-handlers employed by the other companies, the longshoremen, and the many thousands of men who went out on sympathetic strike were concerned. The men began to return to work by the thousands and the entire strike collapsed.

The determined attack and stubborn resistance of the employers' associations after the strikes of May 1886, coupled with the obvious incompetence displayed by the leaders, caused the turn of the tide in the labor movement in the first half of 1887. This, however, manifested itself during 1887 exclusively in the large cities, where the movement had borne in the purest form the character of an uprising by the class of the unskilled and where the hardest battles were fought with the employers. District Assembly 49, New York, fell from its membership of 60,809 in June 1886, to 32,826 in July 1887. During the same interval, District Assembly 1, Philadelphia, decreased from 51,557 to 11,294, and District Assembly 30, Boston, from 81,197 to 31,644. In Chicago there were about 40,000 Knights immediately before the packers' strike in October 1886, and only about 17,000 on July 1, 1887. The falling off of the largest district assemblies in 10 large cities practically equalled the total loss of the Order, which amounted approximately to 191,000. At the same time the membership of the smallest district assemblies, which were for the most part located in small cities, remained stationary and, outside of the national and district trade assemblies which were formed by separation from mixed district assemblies, thirty-seven new district assemblies were formed, also mostly in rural localities. In addition, state assemblies were added in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Mississippi, Nebraska, North Carolina, Ohio, West Virginia, and Wisconsin, with an average membership of about 2000 each.

It thus becomes clear that by the middle of 1887, the Great Upheaval of the unskilled and semi-skilled portions of the working class had already subsided beneath the strength of the combined employers and the unwieldiness of their own organization. After 1887 the Knights of Labor lost its hold upon the large cities with their wage-conscious and largely foreign population, and became an organization predominantly of country people, of mechanics, small merchants, and farmers,—a class of people which was more or less purely American and decidedly middle class in its philosophy.

The industrial upheaval in the middle of the eighties had, like the great strike of 1877, a political reverberation. Although the latter was heard throughout the entire country, it centered in the city of New York, where the situation was complicated by court interference in the labor struggle.