Page:Oregon, End of the Trail.djvu/117

Rh of united craft associations. These weathered the panic of 1873, and by 1882 were ten in number. The unions learned to make use of the strike, and, although most walkouts were lost, some, among them the strike of the harnessmakers in 1889, gave union labor confidence and a measure of badly needed prestige.

The period between 1880 and 1890 was one of tremendous expansion in Oregon, and alternately harsh and kind to labor. As the Northern Pacific Railroad, completed in 1883, linked the state to the great industrial cities of the East, Portland grew from a town of 25,000 to a marketing and shipping center with three times that many people. Building construction reached unprecedented levels. Commodity prices continued to mount until the minor depression of 1884.

Samuel Gompers visiting Portland in 1883 had to raise his voice to make himself heard above the noise of the building operations in the booming city. But he achieved his purpose, that of leading Portland's 300 organized craftsmen into forming the Portland Federated Trades Assembly, the first central labor body in Oregon with a completely unified membership. The assembly found itself opposed by the Knights of Labor, James Sovereign's organization, established since 1880, which had 600 members. The two bodies, one committed to rigid crafts unionism, the other to the policy of including all craftsmen in the same organization, engaged in a struggle for control of all Portland labor. The Knights were temporarily left in possession of the field, and in 1885 the Portland Federated Trades Assembly was dissolved.

Although Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, this legislation did not affect the Orientals already in the country. Their number was augmented by smugglers, who found the closed immigration channels easy to circumvent. Thus, during the depression of 1884, labor found itself, in spite of the exclusion law, competing with an ever-increasing number of Asiatics. Knights of Labor organizers led Oregon's aroused workers to action and in 1885 a camp of Chinese coolies was attacked by a mob at Albina. Oregon's Governor called the militia, which refused to serve. More riots followed, an anti-Chinese convention was called together, the boycott was again invoked and for the first time in Oregon dynamite was used as a class-war weapon. As the result of these events the Knights of Labor dominated the situation when Samuel Gompers returned to Portland in 1887.

All attempts to revive the Portland Federated Trades Assembly, dead for two years, had failed, but Gompers, now representing the American Federation of Labor (formed the year before) succeeded in bringing