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amalgamation of conservative, craft-oriented organizations that stressed bread-and-
butter unionism of the Samuel Gompers variety, promoted self-help over
government regulation, showed little interest in organizing semi- and unskilled
workers, and displayed hostility to industrial unionism. In fact, the balance of
power within the BFL was held by the extremely conservative and aristocratic
Building Trades Council, which was comprised of the construction locals of the city.
The president of the BFL between 1920 and 1933 was Henry Broening, a cousin of
the two-term Republican mayor of Baltimore. In the words of historian Dorothy
M. Brown, Broening, whose trade was horse shoeing and who held a degree from
Baltimore's Loyola College, "exemplified the middle-class posture and aspirations
of the local membership."^4

Too much, however, can be made of the narrow, conservative aspects of
bodies like the BFL at the end of the 1920s. The BFL in fact embodied
contradictory tendencies. For example, despite the emphasis on narrow craft
unionism and self-help of its affiliates, the BFL as a city central necessarily took a
broader outlook and attempted, throughout the 1920s, to affect wider political
processes. Some of its political activities reflected a narrow craft perspective, such
as its ongoing battle to prevent vocational training in the public schools in an
attempt to protect union apprenticeship programs. Other activities reflected the
BFL's support of traditional demands of the broader trade-union movement and of
Urban Progressivism. The BFL was, for example, involved in successful campaigns
for more adequate state workman's compensation and for reorganization of the
Bureau of Labor Statistics. It also backed the unsuccessful drives for Maryland's
ratification of a federal Constitutional amendment on child labor and for an 8-hour