In 1866 Steward organized the Grand Eight-Hour League of Massachusetts
as a special propagandist organization of the eight-hour philosophy. The
League was a secret organization with pass words and obligations,
intended as the central organization of a chain of subordinate leagues
in the State, afterwards to be created. Of a total of about eighty local
leagues in existence from 1865 to 1877, about twenty were in
Massachusetts, eight elsewhere in New England, at least twenty-five in
Michigan, four or five in Pennsylvania, about seven in Illinois, as many
in Wisconsin, and smaller numbers in Missouri, Iowa, Indiana, and
California. Michigan, Illinois, Iowa, and Pennsylvania had each a Grand
Eight-Hour League. Practically all of these organizations disappeared
soon after the panic of 1873.
The National Labor Union centered on the passage of an eight-hour law
for employes of the Federal government. It was believed, perhaps not
without some justice, that the effect of such law would eventually lead
to the introduction of the same standard in private employment--not
indeed through the operation of the law of supply and demand, for it was
realized that this would be practically negligible, but rather through
its contagious effect on the minds of employes and even employers.
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