did not rely on gratuitous newspaper publicity. They set to work a host
of lecturers, who held public meetings throughout the country adding
recruits and advertising the Order.

The most important Knights of Labor strike of this period was the
telegraphers' strike in 1883. The telegraphers had a national
organization in 1870, which soon collapsed. In 1882 they again organized
on a national basis and affiliated with the Order as District Assembly
45.[18] The strike was declared on June 19, 1883, against all commercial
telegraph companies in the country, among which the Western Union, with
about 4000 operators, was by far the largest. The demands were one day's
rest in seven, an eight-hour day shift and a seven-hour night shift, and
a general increase of 15 percent in wages. The public and a large
portion of the press gave their sympathy to the strikers, not so much on
account of the oppressed condition of the telegraphers as of the general
hatred that prevailed against Jay Gould, who then controlled the
Western Union Company. This strike was the first in the eighties to call
the attention of the general American public to the existence of a labor
question, and received considerable attention at the hands of the Senate
Committee on Education and Labor. By the end of July, over a month after
the beginning of the strike, the men who escaped the blacklist went back
to work on the old terms.

From 1879 till 1882 the labor movement was typical of a period of rising
prices. It was practically restricted to skilled workmen, who organized
to wrest from employers still better conditions than those which
prosperity would have given under individual bargaining. The movement
was essentially opportunistic and displayed no particular class feeling
and no revolutionary tendencies. The solidarity of labor was not denied
by the trade unions, but they did not try to reduce the idea to
practice: each trade coped more or less successfully with its own
employers. Even the Knights of Labor, the organization _par excellence_
of the solidarity of labor, was at this time, in so far as practical
efforts went, merely a faint echo of the trade unions.

But the situation radically changed during the depression of 1884-1885.
The unskilled and the semi-skilled, affected as they were by wage
reductions and unemployment even in a larger measure than the skilled,
were drawn into the movement. Labor organizations assumed the nature of
a real class moveme