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 movement.  The idea of the solidarity of labor ceased to be merely verbal and took on life!  General strikes, sympathetic strikes, nationwide boycotts and nation-wide political movements became the order of the day.  The effects of an unusually large immigration joined hands with the depression.  The eighties were the banner decade of the entire century for immigration.  The aggregate number of immigrants arriving was 5,246,613—­two and a half millions larger than during the seventies and one million and a half larger than during the nineties.  The eighties witnessed the highest tide of immigration from Great Britain and the North of Europe and the beginning of the tide of South and East European immigration.