Page:William Zebulon Foster - The Bankruptcy of the American Labor Movement (1922).djvu/51

 46 They looked upon the trade unions as a sort of conspiracy carried out by the employers against the working class, Dual unionists commonly make the charge that the A. F. of L., backed by capitalist money, was organized to destroy the Knights of Labor, and then; with characteristic inconsistency, they claim the success of the A. F. of L. as proving the feasibility of the dual union program. But the fact is the A. F. of L. was not organized as a rival organization to the K. of L. When the A. F. of L. was founded in 1881 it had 40,000 members (out of a total of 200,000 trade unionists in the whole country) whereas the K. of L. at that period had only 20,000 members. Only for a couple of years, when it was at its peak, did the K. of L. exceed the trade unions in numerical strength. Generally speaking the trade unions represented the skilled workers, and the K. of L. the semi-skilled and unskilled. At first no rivalry existed between the two movements. They maintained friendly relations until 1884, when the K. of L. began its rapid growth and hectic career. Needing the skilled workers in its bitter battles against the employers, the K. of L. embarked upon a militant campaign to absorb the trade unions. This started the fight. John R. Commons, in his History of Labor in the United States, P. 386–411, says: "The conflict was held in abeyance during the early eighties. The trade unions were by far the strongest organizations in the field (Italics ours) and they scented no particular danger when here and there the Knights formed an assembly either contiguous to the sphere of a trade union or even encroaching upon it." But with the great expansion of the Knights, beginning about 1884, the jurisdictional war began in earnest. "In nearly every instance the Knights were the aggressors." Finally, at their General Assembly in 1886, the Knights declared war against the trade unions. This aroused the latter to self-defense. They opened peace negotiations with the K. of L., but as these failed, "Thereupon the Federation declared war upon the Knights and announced the decision to carry hostilities into the enemy's territory." In view of these, facts it is idle to assert that the A. F. of L. was a capitalist conspiracy, or even a dual union, against the Knights of Labor. as capitalistic organizations which, yielding no benefits to the workers now and utterly incapable of evolving into genuine labor unions, had to be ruthlessly destroyed. The following list of miscellaneous quotations from well-known militants illustrates typically the long prevailing intense hatred and contempt for the trade unions: