We now come to the most significant aspect of the Great Upheaval:  the life and death struggle between two opposed principles of labor organization and between two opposed labor programs.  The Upheaval offered the practical test which the labor movement required for an intelligent decision between the rival claims of Knights and trade unionists.  The test as well as the conflict turned principally on “structure,” that is on the difference between “craft autonomists” and those who would have labor organized “under one head,” or what we would now call the “one big union” advocates.

As the issue of “structure” proved in the crucial eighties, and has remained ever since, the outstanding factional issue in the labor movement, it might be well at this point to pass in brief review the structural developments in labor organization from the beginning and try to correlate them with other important developments.

The early[20] societies of shoemakers and printers were purely local in scope and the relations between “locals” extended only to feeble attempts to deal with the competition of traveling journeymen.  Occasionally, they corresponded on trade matters, notifying each other of their purposes and the nature of their demands, or expressing fraternal greetings; chiefly for the purpose of counteracting advertisements by employers for journeymen or keeping out dishonest members and so-called “scabs.”  This mostly relates to printers.  The shoemakers, despite their bitter contests with their employers, did even less.  The Philadelphia Mechanics’ Trades Association in 1827, which we noted as the first attempted federation of trades in the United States if not in the world, was organized as a move of sympathy for the carpenters striking for the ten-hour day.  During the period of the “wild-cat” prosperity the local federation of trades, under the name of “Trades’ Union,"[21] comes to occupy the center of the stage in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and appeared even as far “West” as Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and Louisville.  The constitution of the New York “Trades’ Union” provided, among other things, that each society should pay a monthly per capita tax of 6-1/4 cents to be used as a strike fund.  Later, when strikes multiplied, the Union limited the right to claim strike aid and appointed a standing committee on mediation.  In 1835 it discussed a plan for an employment exchange or a “call room.”  The constitution of the Philadelphia Union required that a strike be endorsed by a two-thirds majority before granting aid.

The National Trades’ Union, the federation of city trades’ unions, 1834-1836, was a further development of the same idea.  Its first and second conventions went little beyond the theoretical.  The latter, however, passed a significant resolution urging the trade societies to observe a uniform wage policy throughout the country and, should the employers combine to resist it, the unions should make “one general strike.”