Page:William Z. Foster, James P. Cannon and Earl Browder - Trade Unions in America.djvu/27

 a national direction and a rallying center to the class conscious elements in the trade unions. The growth of the left wing as a result has been phenomenal.

William Z. Foster was the organizer and directing head of this great movement. For many reasons he was particularly fitted for his task, only one of which shall be dealt with here, the part he played in the two great organization campaigns which brought the packing house workers and the steel workers into the unions and in leading the great steel strike of 1919–20. The two organization campaigns which Foster conceived, organized, and executed, marked the highest point in the American labor movement and were the last great effort along the lines of strictly trade union endeavor to save the unions from degeneration. The steel strike was not alone a struggle of half a million workers against the steel corporation, it was at the same time the supreme effort of the proletarian forces in the American labor movement to break the strangle-hold of the bureaucracy, which was choking the life out of it, by means of action along the traditional lines of trade unionism. The failure of these efforts, with the black reaction that followed, laid the basis for the modern left-wing movement, while the experience of Foster in these struggles and his outstanding leadership in them, made him the logical leader of the new movement.

Characterizing the first period in the work of the Trade Union Educational League, leading the militant rank and file of the unions, is the tremendous sweep of sentiment and demand for amalgamation of the antiquated craft unions into powerful industrial unions one of the basic slogans of the T. U. E. L. This was the period of agitation and education, the preparation of the ground for real work to come, for organization and struggle. It was the most dramatic phase of the left-wing movement in the last three years.

In March, 1922, the famous Chicago Amalgamation