Although metal trades workers never reestablished the FMTC that focused on building local solidarities in the way the earlier organization had done, the influence of radical ideas and industrial unionism continued to foster this inclination.

A new Metal Trades Council, an attempt to coordinate actions, was established by the AFL and began to act cooperatively in the prewar period.

And the IAM (machinists union) had made changes to respond to the IWW's challenges even while denouncing it. .

A strong chapter of the Women's Trade Union League and the unifying effect of a local campaign for the eight-hour day fostered solidarity.

In 1916, the IAM organizer declared, "We hold that woman shall have the same rights as man, industrially, politically, and socially." The Machinists union lowered dues to attract unskilled workers, including women. This impulse was more limited in respect to black workers.

Beginning in 1915, the machinists' and electricians' unions, the most keenly affected by these influences, agreed to launch a joint campaign to organize all the workers in the electrical plants.

Their main target was Wagner, the key power behind antiunionism in the area. Their focus was on the 8 hours day with no decrease in pay, and more controls over the workplace.

With their financial ties, and their ability to distribute sub-contracts during World War I, the MTA figures were indeed powerful, particularly as World War I brought a tight labor market. For example, in the face of a local drive for the eight hour day led by Machinists in 1916, the MTA warned smaller firms to resist workers' demands.

George Fritz of Fritz Foundry came to a Machinists union meeting to plead that if he agreed to the eight hour demand at his plant, the MTA would "ruin him."

When Century Electric's workforce walked out of the plant in support of the eight hour day drive in 1916, the company easily secured injunctions and imported workers from "the countryside," including substantial numbers of women and a small number of black workers.

Century management stood outside the plant gates and directed the police in mass arrests by pointing out leading "agitators." The police openly recruited strikebreakers for the company.

St. Louis workers enthusiastically they joined the CTLU's drive to organize "100 percent of St. Louis workers." A strike wave began at the end of February 1918 when five thousand department store clerks walked out, escalating until more than thirty thousand St. Louis workers were on strike, and moved St. Louis to one of the most turbulent cities as far as strikes were concerned.

Unskilled workers, women, African Americans, and others long outside labor's ranks joined and, in some cases, led the movement.

The strikes were widely interpreted as a community uprising as well as a workplace-based organizing drive. The St. Louis Labor newspaper, on the other hand, declared, "St. Louis is in the midst of an industrial war--the biggest and most serious since the memorable days of [the] 1877 [general strike]."

Observers agreed that the Wagner Electric strike was the central conflict of that upheaval, in large part because of Wagner's leadership of the NMTA and the CIA. Unionists claimed that St. Louis workers and the entire southwestern labor movement were carefully watching its outcome.

Wagner workers demanded union recognition, an eight hour day, wages based on a "union standard," the end to the premium piece work, and disbanding of the Mutual Aid Society, the key instrument of Wagner's welfare system.

Above: Wagner strike parade, March 1918. The strike tested the leanings toward inclusivity that had grown in the prewar period. One signal of this was that it was women workers at Wagner who led the parade of strikers who gathered outside the plant, "waving flags and blowing horns" in a spirited display of unity.

Management especially denounced the call for "union" wages, contending that wages reflected "the prevailing market price in this locality. The prevailing scale is the open market price for labor."

Wagner workers called for government to intervene to help them define the wage standard.

Left: loyalty pledge Wagner workers were required to sign if they wanted to work at the plant. In Wagner management's view, dissent from the workplace wages and conditions was a sign of worker subversion of the war effort, and they blamed foreign elements for the dissent.

For close up version, click here

From: National Archives

Wagner Electric spy photos that targeted union agitators, from the Wagner Electric photo collection, Missouri Historical Society. The focus on women "agitators" is clear from the photos. At the right, workers gather at a workers' home. Firings of agitators and union supporters resulted.

The 1918 uprising anticipated the decisive battles between labor and capital that occurred in St. Louis and across the United States from 1919 to 1922.

In September 1919, a Department of Labor mediator observed that St. Louis employers, still operating through a solid united front, were "defiant," "arbitrary," and "generally favorable to controversies."

The postwar Depression gave employers enviable leverage. Local employers took up with enthusiasm the "American Plan" that portrayed unions as "anti-American," a plan that simply expanded upon the CIA's earlier ideological campaigns.

The CTLU put up a valiant fight against the open shop campaigns in printing and railroads, the established unions in St. Louis survived, but dreams of "100 percent unionism" and real contests for power that had escalated during the war period gradually faded.