Sacco and Vanzetti, the Scottsboro boys, McNamara, and a host of other
champions of the oppressed.

Parsons and his comrades were revolutionary trade unionists, they were
Anarcho-Syndicalists rather than Anarchists. In the early 'eighties, when
they developed their great mass following, the mass of the workers were
just learning to organize to resist the fierce exploitation of a ruthless
capitalism. The great eight-hour strike movement led by the "Chicago
Anarchists" gave an enormous impulse to trade union organization
everywhere and it was for this that the employing interests had them
hanged. When, for example, the older Chicago unions nowadays go out on
parade on Labor Day, banner after banner bears the historic dale of 1886.
Indeed, the A. F. of L. was practically established nationally at that
time. Although the A. F. of L. had been founded in 1881, it never got a
real hold among the masses until the big strike movement of 1886, which
established the unions in man pew trades and industries and brought about
the reorganization and renaming of the A. F. of L.

In many respects 1937 bears a kinship to 1886. Once again labor is making
a vast surge forward, but on a much higher political level. In 1886, and
the years following, the best that the working class could do in the way
of organization was to produce the craft union movement, which,
notwithstanding all its failings, was an advance in liveability at least,
over the amorphous and confused Knights of Labor. But now, the working
class, grown stronger, more experienced and more ideologically developed,
has given birth to the C.I.O. movement, with its industrial unionism,
trade union democracy, organized political action and generally advanced
conception of the workers' struggle. The militant trade union movement of
today, heading towards a broad People's Front, is the direct lineal
descendant of the great strike movement of the 1886 Chicago martyrs.