practical trade union part of its work receded before its activity on
behalf of the propaganda of socialism.

These "sections," with a maximum membership which probably never
exceeded a thousand, nearly all foreigners, became a preparatory school
in trade union leadership for many of the later organizers and leaders
of the American Federation of Labor: for example, Adolph Strasser, the
German cigar maker, whose organization became the new model in trade
unionism, and P.J. McGuire, the American-born carpenter, who founded the
Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners and who was for many years the
secretary-treasurer of the American Federation of Labor.

Fate had decreed that these sections of a handful of immigrants should
play for a time high-sounding parts in the world labor movement. When,
at the World Congress of the International Workingmen's Association at
the Hague in 1872, the anarchist faction led by Bakunin had shown such
strength that Marx and his socialist faction deemed it wise to move the
General Council out of mischief's way, they removed it to New York and
entrusted its powers into the hands of the faithful German Marxians on
this side of the Atlantic. This spelled the end of the _Internationale_
as a world organization, but enormously increased the stakes of the
factional fights within the handful of American Internationalists. The
organization of the workers into trade unions, the _Internationale's_
first principle, was forgotten in the heat of intemperate struggles for
empty honors and powerless offices. On top of that, with the panic of
1873 and the ensuing prolonged depression, the political drift asserted
itself in socialism as it had in the labor movement in general and the
movement, erstwhile devoted primarily to organization of trade unions,
entered, urged on by the Lassalleans, into a series of political
campaigns somewhat successful at first but soon succumbing to the