of petroleum, ninety per cent of sugar production
are brought under the control of industrial combinations. Nearly
one-fourth of the wage-earners of America are employed by great
corporations. But while financiers are talking only in terms of
millions, while super-organization is reaching its eager fingers into
every industry, and while the units of business are becoming national in
scope, the workingman himself is being taught at last to rely more
and more upon group action in his endeavor to obtain better wages
and working conditions. He is taught also to widen the area of his
organization and to intensify its efforts. So, while the public reads in
the daily and periodical press about the oil trust and the coffee
trust, it is also being admonished against a labor trust and against two
personages, both symbols of colossal economic unrest--the promoter, or
the stalking horse of financial enterprise, and the walking delegate, or
the labor union representative and only too frequently the advance agent
of bitterness and revenge.

In response to the call of the hour there appeared the American
Federation of Labor, frequently called in these later days the labor
trust. The Federation was first suggested at Terre Haute, Indiana, on
August 2, 1881, at a convention called by the Knights of Industry and
the Amalgamated Labor Union, two secret societies patterned after the
model common at that period. The Amalgamated Union was composed
largely of disaffected Knights of Labor, and the avowed purpose of the
Convention was to organize a new secret society to supplant the Knights.
But the trades union element predominated and held up the British Trades
Union and its powerful annual congress as a model. At this meeting
the needs of intensive local organization, of trades autonomy, and of
comprehensive team work were foreseen, and from the discussion there
grew a plan for a second convention. With this meeting, which was held
at Pittsburgh in November, 1881, the actual work of the new association
began under the name, "The Federation of Organized Trades and Labor
Unions of the United States of America and Canada."

When this Federation learned that a convention representing independent
trade unions was called to meet in Columbus, Ohio, in December, 1886, it
promptly altered its arrangements for its own annual session so that it,
too, met at the same time and place. Thereupon the Federation effected
a union with this independent body,