t together the employees of each
particular craft whose interests were clearly the same. To prepare for
strikes and periods of unemployment, it raised large funds by imposing
heavy dues and created a benefit system to hold men loyally to the
union. In order to permit action on a national scale, it gave the
superior officers extensive powers over local unions.

While declaring that employers and employees had much in common, the
Federation strongly opposed company unions. Employers, it argued, were
affiliated with the National Manufacturers' Association or with similar
employers' organizations; every important industry was now national in
scope; and wages and hours, in view of competition with other shops,
could not be determined in a single factory, no matter how amicable
might be the relations of the company and its workers in that particular
plant. For these reasons, the Federation declared company unions and
local shop committees inherently weak; it insisted that hours, wages,
and other labor standards should be fixed by general trade agreements
applicable to all the plants of a given industry, even if subject to
local modifications.

At the same time, the Federation, far from deliberately antagonizing
employers, sought to enlist their cooeperation and support. It affiliated
with the National Civic Federation, an association of business men,
financiers, and professional men, founded in 1900 to promote friendly
relations in the industrial world. In brief, the American Federation of
Labor accepted the modern industrial system and, by organization within
it, endeavored to secure certain definite terms and conditions for trade
unionists.

THE WIDER RELATIONS OF ORGANIZED LABOR

=The Socialists.=--The trade unionism "pure and simple," espoused by the
American Federation of Labor, seemed to involve at first glance nothing
but businesslike negotiations with employers. In practice it did not
work out that way. The Federation was only six years old when a new
organization, appealing directly for the labor vote--namely, the
Socialist Labor Party--nominated a candidate for President, launched
into a national campaign, and called upon trade unionists to desert the
older parties and enter its fold.

The socialistic idea, introduced into national politics in 1892, had
been long in germination. Before the Civil War, a number of reformers,
including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Horace Greeley, and Wendell Phillips,
deeply moved by t