KNIGHTS OF LABOR

KNIGHTS OF LABOR. The Noble Order of the Knights of Labor reached a peak membership of around 700,000 in the mid-1880s, making it the largest and most important labor organization in nineteenth-century America. The complexities of its organization, ideology, and activities reflected the problems that afflicted the American labor movement. Antebellum working-class involvement with fraternal orders, such as the Freemasons and the Odd Fellows, inspired associations like the Mechanics' Mutual Protection Association and the Brotherhood of the Union. From the Civil War and the panic of 1873 emerged new clandestine labor organizations, including the shoemakers' Knights of St. Crispin and the miners' "Molly Maguires," along with the broader Sovereigns of Industry, Industrial Brotherhood, and Junior Sons of '76. The Knights of Labor eventually subsumed all of these.

Long a hotbed of such activities, the Philadelphia needle trades built the Garment Cutters' Union during the Civil War. On 28 December 1869, Uriah Stephens gathered a handful of workers in that craft to launch the Knights of Labor. Members paid a 50-cent initiation fee. Ten members could form an assembly, though at all times at least three-quarters of the assembly had to be wage earners. Initially, membership in the Knights expanded among Philadelphia textile workers, but in the mid-1870s it spread into western Pennsylvania and began recruiting large numbers of miners. Expansion into other trades required not only the "trade assembly" but the industrially nonspecific "local assembly." The presence of the order in different communities with growing numbers of organizations inspired the formation of a "district assembly" to coordinate the work.

After an insurrectionary railroad strike in 1877, the order assumed a more public presence, and membership expanded at an unprecedented pace. The Knights numbered nearly 9,300 in 1878; over 20,000 in 1879; over 28,000 in 1880; and almost 52,000 in 1883. With the radically expanding membership, new leaders like Terence V. Powderly displaced the old fraternalists like Stephens. This turnover in leadership represented a deeper ideological shift.

The Knights of Labor proclaimed the underlying unity of the condition of all who work and urged solidarity. They asserted the equal rights of women and included them in the order despite the often Victorian values of the leadership. Calling for the unity of brain and brawn—the solidarity of all who labor—the Knights essentially shaped the popular notion of class in American life. Notwithstanding national chauvinismand ethnic rivalries, the order organized assemblies of immigrants from across Europe and Jewish associations. By some estimates, as many as ninety-five thousand African Americans became Knights. Glaringly, however, the Knights established a terrible record regarding treatment of Chinese Americans, even defending the massacre of Chinese workers by white miners at Rock Springs, Wyoming.

The order pursued legislative and political means to undermine the "money power," banks and monopolies, and favored the legislation of an eight-hour day, equal pay for equal work, abolition of child labor and convict labor, and public ownership of utilities. On the other hand, in the midst of major third-party movements, the Knights struggled, usually without success, to remain aloof. Largely to placate the active hostility of the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, the leadership of the Knights explicitly denied an interest within the order in more radical politics.

These contradictions gave the Knights great power, yet largely predisposed the order to use its power in an uncoordinated and chaotic fashion. Railroad workers in the Knights in 1883 launched a series of strikes against the widely hated railroads that came to fruition in the southwestern strike of 1885 against the Jay Gould interests. Powderly and the Knights successfully organized national boycotts in support of the strike movements. As a result of the consequent publicity and the temporary demise of third-party politics, the Knights expanded to massive proportions, attaining 110,000 members by July 1885 and over 700,000 members by October 1886. By then, the movement embraced virtually every current in the American labor movement. Some thought the strike, wage agreements, boycott, and cooperatives were sufficient. The order avoided support of the 1886 eight-hour-day strike movement and remained ambiguous about nonpolitical means of attaining its goals.

Members of the trades assemblies, including printers, molders, cigar makers, carpenters, glassworkers, ironworkers, and steelworkers, combined into the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions (FOTLU) in 1881. Although initially cooperative with the concerns of these trade unionists, the leadership of the Knights became increasingly cautious even as their successes inspired intense opposition, and the FOTLU reorganized as the American Federation of Labor (AFL) in 1886. Membership in the Knights quickly fell to 100,000 by 1890, and neither its dalliance with populism nor interventions by the Socialist Labor Party kept it from plummeting during the twentieth century.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Voss, Kim. The Making of American Exceptionalism: The Knights of Labor and Class Formation in the Nineteenth Century. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993.

Weir, Robert E. Beyond Labor's Veil: The Culture of the Knights of Labor. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996.

Mark A.Lause

See alsoAmerican Federation of Labor–Congress of Industrial Organizations ; Industrial Workers of the World ; Labor ; Strikes .

KNIGHTS OF LABOR

An American labor union, the Knights of Labor organization was founded in 1869 as a secretive fraternal society (the Noble Order of the Knights of Labor) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. A garment worker Uriah Stephens (1821–1882) and several of his colleagues banded together and opened membership to anyone except physicians, lawyers, bankers, professional gamblers, stockbrokers, and liquor dealers. After a relatively slow start in the depressed economy of the 1870s, when it spread mostly to coal-mining regions of Pennsylvania, the Knights of Labor's membership grew dramatically from fewer than 10,000 members in 1879 to 730,000 members in 1886. Recruiting women, blacks, immigrants, as well as unskilled and semiskilled workers alike, the Knights of Labor began working for reforms, including better wages, hours, and working conditions. The open-membership policy provided the organization with a broad base of support, something previous labor unions, which had limited membership based on craft or skill, lacked.

At a general meeting of its members in Reading, Pennsylvania, in 1878, the organization set its objectives. It wanted an eight-hour workday, prohibition of child labor (under age fourteen), equal opportunities and wages for women laborers, and an end to convict labor. The group became involved in numerous strikes from the late-1870s to the mid-1880s. At the same time, a faction of moderates within the organization was growing, and in 1883 it elected American machinist Terence Powderly (1849–1924) as president. Under Powderly's leadership, the Knights of Labor began to splinter. Moderates pursued a conciliatory policy in labor disputes, supporting the establishment of labor bureaus and public arbitration systems. Radicals not only opposed the policy of open membership, they strongly supported strikes as a means of achieving immediate goals—including a one-day general strike to demand implementation of an eight-hour workday.

Violence that sometimes attended labor strikes not only hurt the cause of organized labor in the country, it further divided the Knights: In May 1886, workers demonstrating in Chicago's Haymarket Square attracted a crowd of some 1,500 people; when police arrived to disperse them, a bomb exploded and rioting ensued. Eleven people were killed and more than a thousand were injured in the melee. For many Americans, the event linked the labor movement with anarchy. That same year several factions of the Knights of Labor seceded from the union to join the American Federation of Labor (AFL). The Knights of Labor remained intact for three more decades, before the organization officially dissolved in 1917, by which time the group had been overshadowed by the AFL and other unions.

See also: Haymarket Bombing, Labor Movement, Labor Unionism, Terence Powderly, Strike

Knights of Labor. Founded in 1869 as a secret society of Philadelphia garment cutters, the Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor by the early 1880s emerged at the center of a powerful movement among working people determined to challenge the terms of American industrialism. Under the leadership first of the Philadelphia tailor Uriah S. Stephens (1821–1882) and then the former machinist Terence Powderly, the Knights and their missionary message—“An Injury to One Is an Injury to All”—gained national prominence with a successful strike against Jay Gould's Wabash railway system in 1885. For the next year, the order experienced explosive growth, recruiting 700,000‐plus members distributed in every state and territory. Knights of Labor cooperatives planned large‐scale manufacturing and even mining operations. Boycotts, strikes, or the threat of a strike by the Knights won negotiated settlements from hundreds of employers. Knights‐based political tickets, operating both inside and outside the two‐party system, competed in municipal elections nation‐wide. Perhaps most significant was the Knights’ encompassing appeal to “producers” across the divisions of crafts, race, and gender.

The Knights’ decline, however, was equally precipitous. Following unsuccessful strikes against the railroad and meatpacking industries, and suffering from the repression that followed Chicago's Haymarket affair of 4 May 1886, the order collapsed into feuding disarray. The trade‐union base of the labor movement moved into the new American Federation of Labor. By the time the Knights linked up with the Populist party in 1895, their ranks had dwindled to fewer than fifty thousand members, and the order had lost all real influence.
See also Gilded Age; Industrialization; Labor Movements; Meatpacking and Meat Processing Industry; Populist Era; Railroads; Strikes and Industrial Conflict; Working‐Class Life and Culture.

Bibliography

Gerald N. Grob , Workers and Utopia: A Study of Ideological Conflict in the American Labor Movement, 1865–1900, 1961.
Leon Fink , Workingmen's Democracy: The Knights of Labor and American Politics, 1985.

Leon Fink

Knights of Labor American labor organization, started by Philadelphia tailors in 1869, led by Uriah S. Stephens. It became a body of national scope and importance in 1878 and grew more rapidly after 1881, when its earlier secrecy was abandoned. Organized on an industrial basis, with women, black workers (after 1883), and employers welcomed, excluding only bankers, lawyers, gamblers, and stockholders, the Knights of Labor aided various groups in strikes and boycotts, winning important strikes on the Union Pacific in 1884 and on the Wabash RR in 1885. But failure in the Missouri Pacific strike in 1886 and the Haymarket Square riot (for which it was, although not responsible, condemned by the press) caused a loss of prestige and strengthened factional disputes between the craft unionists and the advocates of all-inclusive unionism. With the motto "an injury to one is the concern of all," the Knights of Labor attempted through educational means to further its aims—an 8-hour day, abolition of child and convict labor, equal pay for equal work, elimination of private banks, cooperation—which, like its methods, were highly idealistic. The organization reached its apex in 1886, when under Terence V. Powderly its membership reached a total of 702,000. Among the causes of its downfall were factional disputes, too much centralization with a resulting autocracy from top to bottom, mismanagement, drainage of financial resources through unsuccessful strikes, and the emergence of the American Federation of Labor. By 1890 its membership had dropped to 100,000, and in 1900 it was practically extinct.

Bibliography: See P. S. Foner and R. L. Lewis, ed., Black Worker: The Era of the Knights of Labor (1979).

Knights of Labor A US industrial trade union, founded in 1869 at a tailors' meeting in Philadelphia. By 1879 it was organized on a national basis, with membership open to all workers. Its goals were reformist rather than radical, and included the demand for an eight-hour day. Its growth was phenomenal. In 1882 the Knights helped push through Congress the Chinese Exclusion Act, prohibiting the entry into the USA of Chinese labourers. The union was at its height in 1886 under the leadership of Terence V. Powderly, with a membership of almost a million, but declined thereafter, partly due to involvement in unsuccessful strikes and to general antipathy to labour organizations after the HAYMARKET SQUARE RIOT. Factional disputes reduced its membership after the AMERICAN FEDERATION OF LABOR was founded, and by 1900 it was virtually extinct.