Although the anarchists were the immediate victims of the resulting public indignation and hysteria— seven were condemned to death and four eventually executed—organized labor, especially the Knights, suffered heavily. No tie between the Knights and the bombing could be established, but the union had
On November 11, 1887, four anarchists were hanged in Chicago on charges they had thrown a bomb that had killed policemen at the Haymarket demonstration. The Chicago Tribune reported that after nooses were placed around the men's necks, and white hoods over their heads, "for a moment or two the men stood like ghosts.” "Long live anarchy” one shouted.
Been closely connected with the eight-hour agitation, and the public tended to associate it with violence and radicalism. Its membership declined as suddenly as it had risen, and soon it ceased to exist as a force in the labor movement.
The Knights’ place was taken by the American Federation of Labor (AFL), a combination of national craft unions established in 1886. In a sense the AFL was a reactionary organization. Its principal leaders, Adolph Strasser and Samuel Gompers of the Cigarmakers Union, were, like the founders of the Knights of Labor, originally interested in utopian social reforms. They even toyed with the idea of forming a workers’ political party. Experience, however, soon led them to concentrate on organizing skilled workers and fighting for “bread-and-butter” issues such as higher wages and shorter hours. “Our organization does not consist of idealists,” Strasser explained to a congressional committee. “We do not control the production of the world. That is controlled by the employers. . . . I look first to cigars.”
The AFL accepted the fact that most workers would remain wage earners all their lives and tried to develop in them a sense of common purpose and pride in their skills and station. Strasser and Gompers paid great attention to building a strong organization of dues-paying members committed to unionism as a way of improving their lot. Rank-and-file AFL members were naturally eager to win wage increases and other benefits, but most also valued their unions for the companionship they provided, the sense of belonging to a group. In other words, despite statements such as Strasser’s, unions, in and out of the AFL, were a kind of club as well as a means of defending and advancing their members’ material interests.
The chief weapon of the federation was the strike, which it used to win concessions from employers and to attract recruits. Gompers, president of the AFL almost continuously from 1886 until his death in 1924, encouraged workers to make “intelligent use of the ballot” in order to advance their interests. The federation worked for such things as eight-hour days, employers’ liability, and mine-safety laws, but it avoided direct involvement in politics. “I have my own philosophy and my own dreams,” Gompers once told a left-wing French politician, “but first and foremost I want to increase the workingman’s welfare year by year. . . . The French workers waste their economic force by their political divisions.” Gompers’s approach to labor problems produced solid, if unspectacular, growth for the AFL. Unions with a total of about 150,000 members formed the federation in 1886. By 1892 the membership had reached 250,000, and in 1901 it passed the million mark.
World History
