as made to open its door to trade
unionism.[88] Another telling gain for the basic eight-hour day was made
by the timber workers in the Northwest, again at the insistence of the
government.

What the aid of the government in securing the right to organize meant
to the strength of trade unionism may be derived from the following
figures. In the two years from 1917 to 1919 the organization of the meat
cutters and butcher workmen increased its membership from less than
10,000 to over 66,000; the boilermakers and iron shipbuilders from
31,000 to 85,000; the blacksmiths from 12,000 to 28,000; the railway
clerks from less than 7000 to over 71,000; the machinists from 112,000
to 255,000; the maintenance of way employes from less than 10,000 to
54,000; the railway carmen from 39,000 to 100,000; the railway
telegraphers from 27,000 to 45,000; and the electrical workers from
42,000 to 131,000. The trades here enumerated--mostly related to
shipbuilding and railways--accounted for the greater part of the total
gain in the membership of the Federation from two and a half million
members in 1917 to over three and a third in 1919.

An important aspect of the cooperation of the government with the
Federation was the latter's eager self-identification with the
government's foreign policy, which went to the length of choosing to
play a lone hand in the Allied labor world. Labor in America had an
implicit faith in the national government, which was shared by neither
English nor French labor. Whereas the workers in the other Allied
Nations believed that their governments needed to be prodded or forced
into accepting the right road to a democratic peace by an international
labor congress, which would take the entire matter of war and peace out
of the diplomatic chancellories into an open conference of the
representatives of the workers, the American workers were only too eager
to follow the leadership of the head of the American nation. To this
doubtless was added the usual fervor of a new convert to any cause (in
this instance the cause of the War against Germany) and a strong
distrust of German socialism, which American labor leaders have
developed during their drawn-out struggle against the German-trained
socialists inside the Federation who have persistently tried to
"capture" the organization.

When on January 8, 1918, President Wilson enunciated his famous Fourteen
Points, the Federation of course gave them an enthusiastic endorsem