damaging to the Knights of Labor, for they had officially taken
charge of the strike and were censured on the one hand for their
conduct of the struggle and on the other for the defeat which
they had sustained.

In the same year, against the earnest advice of the national
leaders of the Knights of Labor, the employees of the Third
Avenue Railway in New York began a strike which lasted many
months and which was characterized by such violence that
policemen were detailed to guard every car leaving the barns. In
Chicago the freight handlers struck, and some 60,000 workmen
stopped work in sympathy. On the 3d of May, at the McCormick
Harvester Works, several strikers were wounded in a tussle with
the police. On the following day a mass meeting held in Haymarket
Square, Chicago, was harangued by a number of anarchists. When
the police attempted to disperse the mob, guns were fired at the
officers of the law and a bomb was hurled into their throng,
killing seven and wounding sixty. For this crime seven anarchists
were indicted, found guilty, and sentenced to be hanged. The
Knights of Labor passed resolutions asking clemency for these
murderers and thereby grossly offended public opinion, and that
at a time when public opinion was frightened by these outrages,
angered by the disclosures of brazen plotting, and upset by the
sudden consciousness that the immunity of the United States from
the red terror of Europe was at an end.

Powderly and the more conservative national officers who were
opposed to these radical machinations were strong enough in the
Grand Lodge in the following year to suppress a vote of sympathy
for the condemned anarchists. The radicals thereupon seceded from