Page:William Z. Foster - The Revolutionary Crisis of 1918-1921 (1921).djvu/26

 industrial unionists in 1905 (the one which launched the I. W. W.), to pull the militants out of the old organizations, those bodies surely would have been bled white of all progressive thought and ruined even as our unions have been. But fortunately the militants were kept within—to the movement's possessive enormous profit.

Immediately after the Manchester conference the industrial unionists, then calling themselves Syndicalists for the most part, made a great drive on the trade unions to infuse them with the new spirit and to remodel their structures. They set up many minority committees and independent journals to advocate the cause of progress. Especial attention was paid to the miners, railwaymen, and transport workers. Nor were results slow in coming. In 1911 each of these three groups of workers, under the direct stimulus and leadership of the radicals, engaged in great national strikes, all of which were markedly successful. The whole labor movement was shaken from top to bottom by the profound upheaval. During the next two years it added to itself 1,500,000 members, and progressive sentiment spread everywhere.

As a result of this famous drive of the radicals, the movement for amalgamation and consolidation extended like wildfire. Few indeed were the organizations that did not have in their midst close groups of militants diligently working to fuse them together. One early achievement, in 1911, was the creation of the National Federation of Transport Workers. In the beginning of 1913 followed the amalgamation that produced the National Union of Railwaymen. The general movement culminated in the formation of the Triple Alliance, which was proposed by the miners in 1913 and completed by all-three organizations at the end of 1915.

Militant British trade unionists generally pinned great hopes on the Triple Alliance. They believed that inasmuch