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. For the same reason it was barred from recognition of the American Federation of Labor. The date of the real birth of craft industrialism on a national scale, was therefore deferred to 1903, when a Structural Building Trades' Alliance was founded. The formation of the Alliance marks an event of supreme importance, not only because it united for the first time for common action all the important national unions in the building industry, but especially because it promulgated a new principle which, if generally adopted, was apparently destined to revolutionize the structure of American labor organizations. The Alliance purported to be a federation of the "basic" trades in the industry, and in reality it did represent an _entente_ of the big and aggressive unions. The latter were moved to federate not only for the purpose of forcing the struggle against the employers, but also of expanding at the expense of the "non-basic" or weak unions, besides seeking to annihilate the last vestiges of the International Building Trades' Council. The Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners, probably the most aggressive union in the American Federation of Labor, was the leader in this movement. From the standpoint of the Federation, the Structural Alliance was at best an extra-legal organization, as it did not receive the latter's formal sanction, but the Federation could scarcely afford to ignore it as it had ignored the International Building Trades' Council. Thus in 1908 the Alliance was "legitimatized" and made a "Department" of the American Federation of Labor, under the name of the Building Trades' Department, with the settlement of jurisdictional disputes as its main function. It was accompanied by departments of metal trades, of railway employes, of miners, and by a "label" department.