These assumptions naturally colored not only the practice of the twentieth-century labor movement but efforts to understand its earlier history. Historians who took a socialist or social democratic point of view could appreciate the labor movement of the nineteenth century only when it seemed to anticipate the enlightened unionism of their own day. Marxist historians and those who belonged to the anti-Marxist school of John R. Commons were equally baffled by the Knights of Labor, with its old-fashioned enthusiasm for "cooperation" and its notorious lack of enthusiasm for strikes. They were equally unable to account for the nineteenth-century labor movement's interest in currency reform, land reform, religion, and temperance, except as evidence of workers' unfortunate susceptibility to middle-class ideologies. Everywhere they looked, they found signs of a backward-looking mentality, confusingly mixed with revolutionary militancy. The Commons school wondered why the development of trade unionism had been so tardy; Marxists, why trade unionism, once achieved, had not given way in turn to a proper class consciousness in the form of socialism. Both schools spent so much time explaining why the labor movement had failed to develop in the proper direction that they barely noticed the developments that had actually taken place. Since history so often failed to conform to their expectations, most of it had to be passed over in silence.
Only in the I960s did historians begin to throw off these confining preconceptions. The growing conservatism of the AFL-CIO discredited the assumption underlying the work of the Commons school, that trade unionism was somehow more advanced than the broad-gauged workers'
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