ployers," and hoped to be able to solve the difficulties arising because of combinations of workingmen. The prevention of strikes seemed to be one important problem. The seventh question asked whether unionists had given trouble and whether it would be easy to displace them. The eight read: "What Restrictions are imposed upon you as an Employer by Combinations of workmen assuming to regulate the pay or other conditions of Labor?" Another circular letter emanating from the same source requested employers to meet personally with the executive committee. This committee "are in session every day from 10 o'clock a. m. to 10 o'clock p. m."[1] There is reason to believe that this employers' association was not a weak organization. In a speech given at a mass meeting held in New York City in June, 1876, a member of the "executive committee of the Independent Labor Party" said:
Less than five years ago we had over 79,000 organized men in the city; but 200 or 300 men gathered together in a hotel on Fifth Ave., combined against you by using the government, by going to Albany, to Washington, and to the Board of Aldermen. They have destroyed the Trade Union system, and reduced the workmen of the city to a condition of beggary and starvation.
The employers' associations of the seventies and eighties used many of the weapons which similar bodies of a more recent date have frequently used—blacklist, detectives, coal and iron police, the labor spy, promotion of labor leaders in order to weaken the union, discharge of union men, and the like.[2]
In conclusion, the chief peculiarities of the labor movements of the quarter of a century, 1866–1889, may be briefly summarized:
1. Unstable—ebbed and flowed with industrial changes and disputes.
2. Undisciplined—demanded of leaders immediate and strenuous action. Many strikes, usually of short duration.
3. No very definite class consciousness, except in the eighties. The chief demands were of the purely trade-union type—higher wages, shorter hours, better working and living conditions, etc.—for political reform—elimination of money or land monopoly, labor bureaus, etc.—or for cooperation.
4. Time after time leaders asserted that a transition period was just ahead and that especial efforts were needed at that particular time and place.
5. Repeatedly the attention is directed to the concentration of wealth and the growing menace of monopoly power.
6. The labor leaders of the period were muckrakers; they attacked the political rottenness of the time.
7. Immigration of Chinese laborers (coolies) was feared—not only in the west but also in the east.
8. Many persistent, but futile, attempts were made to weld labor into a strong political party.
