Following the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, America's first national labor union was formed, the "Knights of Labor". Founder Uriah Stephens stated during the Philadelphia railroad strike he saw that corporate life, through which organization works, was the machinery with which organized capital had held labor in what he considered a partially enslaved condition (8). Stephens, along with other leaders such as Terrence Powderly, unified laborers and organized trade-unions to protect workers rights.

The Great Railroad strike of 1877 did not succeed in terms of an immediate victory, but the men who banded together realized the power in numbers. Prior to the 1877 strike, only three "railroad brotherhoods" existed; by 1901 all seventeen classifications of railroad employees established a brotherhood (6). While the strikes gave the working-class American a sense of empowerment, labor tensions would continue into the twentieth century, and strikes continued to garner national attention such as the Homestead strike at Carnegie Steel. America was still in the early stages of mass industrialization, and although labor strikes and civil unrest would still occur, the working poor would continue to fight to protect their civil rights in the workplace.