The great labor problem before the Civil War had been that of getting enough laborers and meeting the competition which the abundant free lands of the West had offered. Labor organizations and strikes had been so unusual that public opinion had not yet come to regard them as normal features of society. But the manufacturing development of the sixties in iron and steel, in textiles, and in other machine industries, threw workmen together in increasing number, taught them their interests as a class, and set the scene for an outbreak of strikes when the shops shut down or reduced wages in the depression of the seventies. About 1877 these strikes shocked society by their violence. Neither had the public been educated to the strike itself, nor the labor leaders to that moderation, without which public sympathy cannot be retained or strikes won. A feeling adverse to organized labor swept the country and endangered the existence of the labor movement. POPULATION AND IMMIGRATION, 1850-1910 (Table and Diagram based upon Thirteenth Census, 1910, Population, Vol. 1, pp. 129, 130.) Total Foreign Population. and Mixed Foreign Born. Parentage. 1910 91,972,266 18,897,837 13,345,545 1900 75,994,575 15,646,017 10,213,817 1890 62,947,714 11,503,675 9,121,867 1880 50,155,783 8,274,867 6,559,679 1870 39,818,449 5,324,268 5,493,712 1860 31,443,321 4,096,753 1850 23,191,876 2,240,535 [Illustration: graph] The Knights of Labor received the heaviest weight of disfavor. This was an industrial union, founded in 1869, embracing labor of all trades, and held together by a secret organization. Dismissal so often followed admitted membership in a union that secrecy was defensible, but secrecy mystified and frightened the public. The policy of secrecy was abandoned in 1882, after the excesses of the "Molly Maguires" had brought discredit upon all organized labor. Under the leadership of Grand Master Workman Powderly the Knights carried on an open and aggressive campaign of education for labor and inspection laws throughout the Union. The American Federation of Labor, founded in 1881 and reorganized in 1886, aided in this general work, and with the Knights helped to reconcile the public to the principle of unionism.