country.  Under such conditions the legislative influence of the Federation naturally was infinitesimal.  The legislative committee carried out the instructions of the 1883 convention and communicated to the national committees of the Republican and Democratic parties the request that they should define their position upon the enforcement of the eight-hour law and other measures.  The letters were not even answered.  A subcommittee of the legislative committee appeared before the two political conventions, but received no greater attention.

It was not until the majority of the national trade unions came under the menace of becoming forcibly absorbed by the Order of the Knights of Labor that a basis appeared for a vigorous federation.

The Knights of Labor were built on an opposite principle from the national trade unions.  Whereas the latter started with independent crafts and then with hesitating hands tried, as we saw, to erect some sort of a common superstructure that should express a higher solidarity of labor, the former was built from the beginning upon a denial of craft lines and upon an absolute unity of all classes of labor under one guiding head.  The subdivision was territorial instead of occupational and the government centralized.

The constitution of the Knights of Labor was drawn in 1878 when the Order laid aside the veil of secrecy to which it had clung since its foundation in 1869.  The lowest unit of organization was the local assembly of ten or more, at least three-fourths of whom had to be wage earners at any trade.  Above the local assembly was the “district assembly” and above it the “General Assembly.”  The district assembly had absolute power over its local assemblies and the General Assembly was given “full and final jurisdiction” as “the highest tribunal” of the Order.[24] Between sessions of the General Assembly the power was vested in a General Executive Board, presided over by a Grand Master Workman.

The Order of the Knights of Labor in practice carried out the idea which is now advocated so fervently by revolutionary unionists, namely the “One Big Union,” since it avowedly aimed to bring into one organization “all productive labor.”  This idea in organization was aided by the weakness of the trade unions during the long depression of the seventies, which led many to hope for better things from a general pooling of labor strength.  But its main appeal rested on a view that machine technique tends to do away with all distinctions of trades by reducing all workers to the level of unskilled machine tenders.  To its protagonists therefore the “one big union” stood for an adjustment to the new technique.