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garment industry, joined the upsurge. A striking characteristic of the struggles of
this era, as documented by historian Rod Ryon, was the prominence of demands
concerning control of the labor process and limitation of the powers of supervision;
the degradation of work and the de-skilling of labor in industry was accelerating. A
wave of patriotic fervor limited trade-union protest after the U.S entry to World
War I, though some workers, such as the B & O railroad workers who struck for the
8-hour day, the textile workers at the Hampton-Woodberry Mill that won a union
shop and a few Black IWW-led longshoremen, defied the hysteria. Subsequently,
•
the broad post-war strike wave focused on making up for wage losses to inflation
and on achieving union recognition, but with the aid of another round of patriotic
hysteria — the Red Scare — most strikes in Baltimore, like the local response at
Bethlehem steel to the national steel strike of 1919, the walk-out of 6,000 Maryland
Drydock workers in 1920, the 1922 walkout of B & O and Western Maryland
Railroad shopworkers, and the spate of strikes among Jones River textile workers,
were ignominiously defeated.
As it stood at the end of the 1920s, the organized labor movement in
Baltimore was dominated by the white male workers of the skilled trades — a group
that was, as we have seen, a mixture of Euro-American ethnicities including "native"
whites, older immigrant groups, and some newer immigrants. The center of the
movement was the Baltimore Federation of Labor (BFL), which was made up of
approximately 114 local affiliates of the American Federation of Labor. The BFL
encompassed at least of 70% of all trade-union members in Baltimore. The BFL,
in turn, was affiliated with the Maryland-District of Columbia Federation of Labor,
within which the BFL was the dominant force. In the main, the BFL was an
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