em
associated in the public mind with that order. One of the most important
of these occurred on the Southwestern Railroad. In the preceding year,
the Knights had increased their lodges in St. Louis from five to thirty,
and these were under the domination of a coarse and ruthless district
leader. When in February, 1886, a mechanic, working in the shops of the
Texas and Pacific Railroad at Marshall, Texas, was discharged for cause
and the road refused to reinstate him, a strike ensued which spread over
the entire six thousand miles of the Gould system; and St. Louis became
the center of the tumult. After nearly two months of violence, the
outbreak ended in the complete collapse of the strikers. This result was
doubly damaging to the Knights of Labor, for they had officially taken
charge of the strike and were censured on the one hand for their
conduct of the struggle and on the other for the defeat which they had
sustained.

In the same year, against the earnest advice of the national leaders of
the Knights of Labor, the employees of the Third Avenue Railway in New
York began a strike which lasted many months and which was characterized
by such violence that policemen were detailed to guard every car leaving
the barns. In Chicago the freight handlers struck, and some 60,000
workmen stopped work in sympathy. On the 3d of May, at the McCormick
Harvester Works, several strikers were wounded in a tussle with the
police. On the following day a mass meeting held in Haymarket Square,
Chicago, was harangued by a number of anarchists. When the police
attempted to disperse the mob, guns were fired at the officers of the
law and a bomb was hurled into their throng, killing seven and wounding
sixty. For this crime seven anarchists were indicted, found guilty, and
sentenced to be hanged. The Knights of Labor passed resolutions asking
clemency for these murderers and thereby grossly offended public
opinion, and that at a time when public opinion was frightened by these
outrages, angered by the disclosures of brazen plotting, and upset by
the sudden consciousness that the immunity of the United States from the
red terror of Europe was at an end.

Powderly and the more conservative national officers who were opposed to
these radical machinations were strong enough in the Grand Lodge in
the following year to suppress a vote of sympathy for the condemned
anarchists. The radicals thereupon seceded from the organization. This
outcome, how