say, the individual self-interest of the craft leaders worked hand in
hand with the self-interest of the craft as a whole, for had they been
annexed by the Order they would have become subject to orders from the
General Master Workman or the General Assembly of the Order.

In addition to platonic stirrings for "self-determination" and to narrow
group interest, there was a motive for craft autonomy which could pass
muster both as strictly social and realistic. The fact was that the
autonomous craft union could win strikes where the centralized
promiscuous Order merely floundered and suffered defeat after defeat.
The craft union had the advantage, on the one hand, of a leadership
which was thoroughly familiar with the bit of ground upon which it
operated, and, on the other hand, of handling a group of people of equal
financial endurance and of identical interest. It has already been seen
how dreadfully mismanaged were the great Knights of Labor strikes of
1886 and 1887. The ease with which the leaders were able to call out
trade after trade on a strike of sympathy proved more a liability than
an asset. Often the choice of trades to strike bore no particular
relation to their strategic value in the given situation; altogether one
gathers the impression that these great strikes were conducted by
blundering amateurs who possessed more authority than was good for them
or for the cause. It is therefore not to be wondered at if the compact
craft unions led by specialists scored successes where the heterogeneous
mobs of the Knights of Labor had been doomed from the first. Clearly
then the survival of the craft union was a survival of the fittest; and
the Federation's attachment to the principle of craft autonomy was, to
say the least, a product of an evolutionary past, whatever one may hold
with reference to its fitness in our own time.

Whatever reasons moved the trade unions of the skilled to battle with