The organization that was a few years later to become the American Federation of Labor began in 1881. In the autumn of 1885 the New York Sun delegated a reporter to “get up a story on the strength and purposes of the Knights of Labor.” The Knights were at the height of their power and influence. They possessed what many would regard, now as then, as the ingredients essential to a satisfactory labor movement. Their social program was broad and attractive; toward the unskilled of industry they took a democratic and sympathetic attitude; and they were ready to throw down the gauntlet of battle as frequently in the political, as in the economic arena. But in the next year the Haymarket bomb was thrown; and by the close of the decade the career of the Knights was ended. What there was of a labor movement was inherited by the American Federation of Labor, under the leadership of Samuel Gompers. The Federation received as its legacy a handful of members, a few in the skilled crafts, an undisciplined and impermanent residue elsewhere; internal suspicion and dissensions and a hostile public opinion.

It is not such a labor movement that Samuel Gompers left when he died last week. Imperfect as it often seems in conception and in performance, it still has all of the appearance of solidity and permanence. When every allowance is made for the industries into which it has so far failed to penetrate, the sheer magnitude of the movement remains impressive. Disputes between and within unions occur only too frequently, but they no longer shake the movement to its foundations. Now it is the exceptional and backward community in this country which does not grant its labor organizations a status and a place in its counsels and life.

Changes so profound as these do not as a rule grow out of the conscious and deliberate policy of a single man. They were, however, in large measure due to the sensitiveness of Samuel Gompers to the American industrial situation and to his understanding of the requirements of an organized labor movement. During his tenure of office the massive machine for organizing the unorganized, for carrying on the slow, detailed, dull operations of organization campaigns was constructed. At its close the steel industry is not yet organized and unions are weak in other basic industries. But in a wide range of industries, like coal, railroads, building, printing, and clothing, large and powerful unions are firmly established. From less than 250,000 members in 1890 the Federation has grown more than ten fold to its present membership of nearly 3,000,000.

At the same time the unions have come more and more to assume the character of institutions. For the most part American labor organizations are not the sort that rise and fall with a spectacular strike. Members have been taught the need of treasuries, of a staff of paid officers, of permanent offices for their control and local headquarters. Administrations may be ousted, individuals defeated for office, but the staffs of the unions like the civil service of the government, carry on from one year to the next. No strike is regarded as having had a successful issue unless it leaves in the union dues-paying members who are determined to adhere permanently to the organization and to submit to its rules and regulations.

This process of establishing the organization and of tying members to it has likewise continued after the unions have won recognition in industry. The systems of trade agreements and of collective bargaining which are so significant a feature of American industrial relations in unionized industries give labor organizations a continuous function in industry. Whether used wisely or effectively or not, they have without question made the union tbe daily representative of its members in shop and factory. They constitute the foundations for most elaborate programs of workers’ control, no matter how that control is defined or conceived. And in many cases the control already exercised under the terms of such agreements is much more effective than it is commonly supposed to be.