man submits more
detailed figures for 1910. Excluding employers, the salaried group,
agricultural and clerical workers, persons engaged in personal or
domestic service, and those below twenty years of age (unorganizable
workers), the organizable total was 11,490,944. With an estimated trade
union strength of 2,116,317 for 1910 the percentage of the organized was
18.4.[46] Excluding only employers and salaried persons, his percentage
was 7.7, which compares closely with Professor Barnett's.

Of greater significance are Wolman's figures for organization by
industries. These computations show that in 1910 the breweries had 88.8
percent, organized, printing and book binding 34.3 percent, mining 30.5
percent, transportation 17.3 percent, clothing 16.9 percent, building
trades 16.2 percent, iron and steel 9.9 percent, metal 4.7 percent, and
textile 3.7 percent.[47] By separate occupations, railway conductors,
brakemen, and locomotive engineers were from 50-100 percent organized;
printers, locomotive firemen, molders and plasterers, from 30-50
percent; bakers, carpenters, plumbers, from 15-30 percent organized.[48]

Accompanying the numerical growth of labor organizations was an
extension of organization into heretofore untouched trades as well as a
branching out into new geographical regions, the South and the West. On
the whole, however, though the Federation was not unmindful of the
unskilled, still, during the fifteen years after 1898 it brought into
its fold principally the upper strata of semi-skilled labor. Down to the
"boom" period brought on by the World War, the Federation did not
comprise to any great extent either the totally unskilled, or the
partially skilled foreign-speaking workmen, with the exception of the
miners and the clothing workers. In other words, those below the level
of the skilled trades, which did gain admittance, were principally the
same elements which had asserted their claim to organization during the
stormy period of the Knights of Labor.[49] The new accretions to the
American wage-earning class since the eighties, the East and South
Europeans, on the one hand, and the ever-growing contingent of
"floaters" of native and North and West European stock, on the other
hand, were still largely outside the organization.

The years of prosperity brought an intensified activity of the trade
unions on a scale hitherto unknown. Wages were raised and hours reduced
all along the line. The new strength of