The depressed nineties demonstrated conclusively that a new era had arrived.  No longer was the labor movement a mere plaything of the alternating waves of prosperity and depression.  Formerly, as we saw, it had centered on economic or trade-union action during prosperity only to change abruptly to “panaceas” and politics with the descent of depression.  Now the movement, notwithstanding possible changes in membership, and persistent political leanings in some portions of it, as a whole for the first time became stable in purpose and action.  Trade unionism has won over politics.

This victory was synchronous with the first successful working out of a national trade agreement and the institutionalization of trade unionism in a leading industry, namely stove molding.  While one of the earliest stable trade agreements in a conspicuous trade covering a local field was a bricklayers’ agreement in Chicago in 1887, the era of trade agreements really dates from the national system established in the stove foundry industry in 1891.  It is true also that the iron and steel workers had worked under a national trade agreement since 1866.  However, that trade was too exceptionally strong to be typical.

The stove industry had early reached a high degree of development and organization.  There had existed since 1872 the National Association of Stove Manufacturers, an organization dealing with prices and embracing in its membership the largest stove manufacturers of the country.  The stove foundrymen, therefore, unlike the manufacturers in practically all other industries at that time, controlled in a large measure their own market.  Furthermore, the product had been completely standardized and reduced to a piecework basis, and machinery had not taken the place of the molders’ skill.  It consequently was no mere accident that the stove industry was the first to develop a system of permanent industrial peace.  But, on the other hand, this was not automatically established as soon as the favorable external conditions were provided.  In reality, only after years of struggle, of strikes and lockouts, and after the two sides had fought each other “to a standstill,” was the system finally installed.

The eighties abounded in stove molders’ strikes, and in 1886 the national union began to render effective aid.  The Stove Founders’ National Defense Association was formed in 1886 as an employers’ association of stove manufacturers.  The Defense Association aimed at a national labor policy; it was organized for “resistance against any unjust demands of their workmen, and such other purposes as may from time to time prove or appear to be necessary for the benefit of the members thereof as employers of labor.”  Thus, after 1886, the alignment was made national on both sides.  The great battle was fought the next year.