Order had grown to include nearly all useful members of society--so the
plan contemplated--it would control practically the whole market and
cooperative production would become the rule rather than the exception.
So far, therefore, as "First Principles" went, the Order was not an
instrument of the "class struggle," but an association of idealistic
cooperators. It was this pure idealism which drew to the Order of the
Knights of Labor the sympathetic interest of writers on social subjects
and university teachers, then unfortunately too few in number, like Dr.
Richard T. Ely[15] and President John Bascom of Wisconsin.

The other survival in the seventies of the labor movement of the
sixties, which has already been mentioned, namely the trade union
movement grouped around the Cigar Makers' Union, was neither so purely
American in its origin as the Knights of Labor nor so persistently
idealistic. On the contrary, its first membership was foreign and its
program, as we shall see, became before long primarily opportunist and
"pragmatic." The training school for this opportunistic trade unionism
was the socialist movement during the sixties and seventies,
particularly the American branch of the International Workingmen's
Association, the "First _Internationale_," which was founded by Karl
Marx in London in 1864. The conception of _economic_ labor organization
which was advanced by the _Internationale_ in a socialistic formulation
underwent in the course of years a process of change: On the one hand,
through constant conflict with the rival conception of _political_ labor
organization urged by American followers of the German socialist,
Ferdinand Lassalle, and on the other hand, through contact with American
reality. Out of that double contact emerged the trade unionism of the
American Federation of Labor.

The _Internationale_ is generally reputed to have been organized by Karl