Throughout the post-Civil War era, critics of monopolies and industrial capitalism protested the growing impersonality of the factory system and the long hours and grueling conditions workers endured for little pay. The membership of the largest workers' organization, the Knights of Labor, founded in 1869, reached a high point during the 1880s, with about seven hundred thousand members in 1886. The Knights of Labor opposed the traditional wage system, favoring alternatives such as worker cooperatives in which there would be no employers or employees, and laborers would control the production and distribution of the products they made. Many Americans viewed unions and other labor organizations as radical, fearing that they preached class warfare and called for too much governmental control over industry. Both houses of Congress, the presidents, and the courts objected to labor organizing and resisted any shift in power away from employers to...