CONTENTS I. THE BACKGROUND II. FORMATIVE YEARS III. TRANSITION YEARS IV. AMALGAMATION V. FEDERATION VI. THE TRADE UNION VII. THE RAILWAY BROTHERHOODS VIII. ISSUES AND WARFARE IX. THE NEW TERRORISM: THE I.W.W. X. LABOR AND POLITICS BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTETHE ARMIES OF LABORCHAPTER I. THE BACKGROUNDThree momentous things symbolize the era that begins its cycle withthe memorable year of 1776: the Declaration of Independence, the steamengine, and Adam Smith's book, "The Wealth of Nations." The Declarationgave birth to a new nation, whose millions of acres of free land were toshift the economic equilibrium of the world; the engine multiplied man'sproductivity a thousandfold and uprooted in a generation the customs ofcenturies; the book gave to statesmen a new view of economic affairs andprofoundly influenced the course of international trade relations.The American people, as they faced the approaching age with theexperiences of the race behind them, fashioned many of theirinstitutions and laws on British models. This is true to such an extentthat the subject of this book, the rise of labor in America, cannot beunderstood without a preliminary survey of the British industrial systemnor even without some reference to the feudal system, of which Englishsociety for many centuries bore the marks and to which many relicsof tenure and of class and governmental responsibility may be traced.Feudalism was a society in which the status of an individual was fixed:he was underman or overman in a rigid social scale according as heconsidered his relation to his superiors or to his inferiors. Whatevermovement there was took place horizontally, in the same class or on thesame social level. The movement was not vertical, as it so frequently istoday, and men did not ordinarily rise above the social level of theirbirth, never by design, and only perhaps by rare accident or genius. Itwas a little world of lords and serfs; of knights who graced court andcastle, jousted at tournaments, or fought upon the field of battle;and of serfs who toiled in the fields, served in the castle, or, as theretainers of the knight, formed the crude soldiery of medieval days.For their labor and allegiance they were clothed and housed and fed.Yet though there were feast days gay with the color of pageantry andprocession, the worker was always in a servile state, an undermandependent upon his master, and sometimes looking upon his condition aslittle better than slavery.With the break-up of this rigid system came in England the emancipationof the serf, the rise of the artisan class, and the beginnings ofpeasant agriculture. That personal gravitation which always drawstogether men of similar ambitions and tasks now began to worksignificant changes in the economic order. The peasantry, more or lessscattered in the country, found it difficult to unite their powers forredressing their grievances, although there were some peasant revoltsof no mean proportions. But the artisans of the towns were soon groupedinto powerful organizations, called guilds, so carefully managed and sowell disciplined that they dominated every craft and controlledevery detail in every trade. The relation of master to journeyman andapprentice, the wages, hours, quantity, and quality of the output, wereall minutely regulated. Merchant guilds, similarly constituted, alsoprospered. The magnificent guild halls that remain in our day aremonuments of the power and splendor of these organizations that madethe towns of the later Middle Ages flourishing centers of trade, ofhandicrafts, and of art. As towns developed, they dealt the final blowto an agricultural system based on feudalism; they became cities ofrefuge for the runaway serfs, and their charters, insuring political andeconomic freedom, gave them superior advantages for trading.