For industrialism, or the adjustment of union structure to
meet the employer with ranks closed on the front of an entire industry,
is not altogether new even in the most conservative portion of the
Federation, although it has never been called by that name.
Long before industrialism entered the national arena as the economic
creed of socialists, the unions of the skilled had begun to evolve an
industrialism of their own. This species may properly be termed craft
industrialism, as it sought merely to unite on an efficient basis the
fighting strength of the unions of the skilled trades by devising a
method for speedy solution of jurisdictional disputes between
overlapping unions and by reducing the sympathetic strike to a science.
The movement first manifested itself in the early eighties in the form
of local building trades' councils, which especially devoted themselves
to sympathetic strikes. This local industrialism grew, after a fashion,
to national dimensions in the form of the International Building Trades'
Council organized in St. Louis in 1897. The latter proved, however,
ineffective, since, having for its basic unit the local building trades'
council, it inevitably came into conflict with the national unions in
the building trades.
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