[14] The Preamble further provides that the Order will stand for the reservation of all lands for actual settlers; the “abrogation of all laws that do not bear equally upon capital and labor, the removal of unjust technicalities, delays, and discriminations in the administration of justice, and the adopting of measures providing for the health and safety of those engaged in mining, manufacturing, or building pursuits”; the enactment of a weekly pay law, a mechanics’ lien law, and a law prohibiting child labor under fourteen years of age; the abolition of the contract system on national, state, and municipal work, and of the system of leasing out convicts; equal pay for equal work for both sexes; reduction of hours of labor to eight per day; “the substitution of arbitration for strikes, whenever and wherever employers and employees are willing to meet on equitable grounds”; the establishment of “a purely national circulating medium based upon the faith and resources of the nation, issued directly to the people, without the intervention of any system of banking corporations, which money shall be a legal tender in payment of all debts, public or private”.

[15] Dr. Ely in his pioneer work, The Labor Movement in America, published in 1886, showed a most genuine sympathy for the idealistic strivings and gropings of labor for a better social order.  He even advised some of his pupils at the Johns Hopkins University to join the Knights of Labor in order to gain a better understanding of the labor movement.

[16] Schultze-Delizsch was a German thinker and practical reformer of the liberal school.

[17] The Anarchists who were tried and executed after the Haymarket Square bomb in Chicago in May, 1886.  See below, 91-93.

CHAPTER 4

REVIVAL AND UPHEAVAL, 1879-1887

With the return of business prosperity in 1879, the labor movement revived.  The first symptom of the upward trend was a rapid multiplication of city federations of organized trades, variously known as trade councils, amalgamated trade and labor unions, trades assemblies, and the like.  Practically all of these came into existence after 1879, since hardly any of the “trades’ assemblies” of the sixties had survived the depression.

As was said above, the national trade unions existed during the sixties and seventies in only about thirty trades.  Eighteen of these had either retained a nucleus during the seventies or were first formed during that decade.  The following is a list of the national unions in existence in 1880 with the year of formation:  Typographical (1850), Hat Finishers (1854), Iron Molders (1859), Locomotive Engineers (1863), Cigar Makers (1864), Bricklayers and Masons (1865), Silk and Fur Hat Finishers (1866), Railway Conductors (1868), Coopers (1870), German-American Typographia (1873), Locomotive Firemen (1873), Horseshoers (1874), Furniture Workers (1873), Iron and Steel Workers (1876), Granite Cutters (1877), Lake Seamen (1878), Cotton Mill Spinners (1878), New England Boot and Shoe Lasters (1879).