Labor Militancy Rebuffed 479the sense of belonging to a group. In
other words, despite statements such as
Strasser’s, unions, in and out of the AFL,
were a kind of club as well as a means of
defending and advancing their members’
material interests.
The chief weapon of the federation was
the strike, which it used to win concessions
from employers and to attract recruits.
Gompers, president of the AFL almost con-
tinuously from 1886 until his death in
1924, encouraged workers to make “intelli-
gent use of the ballot” in order to advance
their interests. The federation worked for
such things as eight-hour days, employers’
liability, and mine-safety laws, but it avoided
direct involvement in politics. “I have my
own philosophy and my own dreams,”
Gompers once told a left-wing French
politician, “but first and foremost I want to
increase the workingman’s welfare year by
year.... The French workers waste their
economic force by their political divisions.”
Gompers’s approach to labor problems pro-
duced solid, if unspectacular, growth for the AFL.
Unions with a total of about 150,000 members
formed the federation in 1886. By 1892 the mem-
bership had reached 250,000, and in 1901 it passed
the million mark.Labor Militancy Rebuffed
The stress of the AFL on the strike weapon reflected
rather than caused the increasing militancy of labor.
Workers felt themselves threatened from all sides: the
growing size and power of their corporate employers;
the substitution of machines for human skills; the
invasion of foreign workers willing to accept substan-
dard wages. At the same time they had tasted some of
the material benefits of industrialization and had
learned the advantages of concerted action.
The average employer behaved like a tyrant when
dealing with his workers: He discharged them arbi-
trarily when they tried to organize unions; he hired
scabs to replace strikers; he frequently failed to pro-
vide the most rudimentary protection against injury
on the job. Some employers, Carnegie for example,
professed to approve of unions, but almost none
would bargain with labor collectively. To do so, they
argued, would be to deprive workers of their freedom
to contract for their own labor in any way they saw fit.
The industrialists of the period were not all
ogres; they were as alarmed by the rapid changes of
the times as their workers, and since they had morebeen closely connected with the eight-hour agitation,
and the public tended to associate it with violence and
radicalism. Its membership declined as suddenly as it
had risen, and soon it ceased to exist as a force in the
labor movement.
The Knights’ place was taken by the American
Federation of Labor (AFL), a combination of
national craft unions established in 1886. In a sense
the AFL was a reactionary organization. Its principal
leaders, Adolph Strasser and Samuel Gompers of the
Cigarmakers Union, were, like the founders of the
Knights of Labor, originally interested in utopian
social reforms. They even toyed with the idea of
forming a workers’ political party. Experience, how-
ever, soon led them to concentrate on organizing
skilled workers and fighting for “bread-and-butter”
issues such as higher wages and shorter hours. “Our
organization does not consist of idealists,” Strasser
explained to a congressional committee. “We do not
control the production of the world. That is con-
trolled by the employers.... I look first to cigars.”
The AFL accepted the fact that most workers
would remain wage earners all their lives and tried to
develop in them a sense of common purpose and
pride in their skills and station. Strasser and Gompers
paid great attention to building a strong organiza-
tion of dues-paying members committed to union-
ism as a way of improving their lot. Rank-and-file
AFL members were naturally eager to win wage
increases and other benefits, but most also valued
their unions for the companionship they provided,
On November 11, 1887, four anarchists were hanged in Chicago on charges they had
thrown a bomb that had killed policemen at the Haymarket demonstration. The
Chicago Tribunereported that after nooses were placed around the men’s necks, and
white hoods over their heads, “for a moment or two the men stood like ghosts.” “Long
live anarchy” one shouted.