THE LABOR MOVEMENT. 321 



in the fifty-first Congress was the chairman - of the Committee on Mer- 

 chant Marine and Fisheries. There were other trades that were organ- 

 ized, but few of them attained any prominence of a national character. 



In 1866 Newell Daniels of Milwaukee and a half-dozen other shoe- 

 makers founded what was known as the " Knights of St. Crispin." 

 This organization accepted the capitalistic idea that wages were governed 

 by the law of supply and demand, and they set about to regulate and 

 curtail the supply. Upon joining the order, every member was pledged 

 not to teach any new help. This had the desired effect. In the short 

 period of two years the wages in the shoe trade went up twenty per 

 cent, and all of the boys and apprentices disappeared in three or four 

 years. The manufacturers were compelled to scour the country towns 

 for men who had learned the trade, as none others were any use to 

 them, as the men refused to teach or show them. Help was advertised 

 for abroad, and it seemed that every German that came over to this 

 country at that time was born with some shoemaker's tool in his mouth, 

 for every one of them that the manufacturers hired was a shoemaker in 

 the old country, and that made him eligible to join the organization and 

 receive instructions from the craft. This was necessary, as every one of 

 them had to practically learn his trade over again, as the method of 

 working was so different. And in many instances it took longer to 

 instruct him than it would have taken to instruct a young man brought 

 up here in this country. But under the rules of the society the young 

 man was debarred by the pledge of the organization, while, if the Ger- 

 man had learned his trade in the old country, it did not prevent a mem- 

 ber from teaching him over again. But when the panic of 1873 came, 

 it broke the power of this organization to curtail help. There were so 

 many thrown out of employment that the workmen had to compete 

 with one another for work, and the organization went to the wall. 



In 1865 there was a. conference of some of the advanced thinkers 

 in the labor movement, at Louisville, Kentucky. Captain Richard F. 

 Trevellick, then president of the " Shipcarpenters and Calkers' Inter- 

 national Union," was one of the leading spirits. This conference was 

 the first step that was taken by the wage workers in this country, for 

 advancing the work of labor reform in a manner different from that 

 which had been practised by the Trades-Unionists. These men saw 

 what the Trades-Unionists did not see ; viz. : That the capitalists were 

 using Congress and the different State legislatures to strengthen them 

 in their fight against the laboring people ; that they were obtaining 

 special privileges, in the form of special laws, which gave them power to 

 obtain more of the products of the joint labor of capital and labor than 



