Knights of Labor

KNIGHTS OF LABOR. The Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor, the largest U.S. labor organization of the nineteenth century, represented a massive outpouring of working-class resentment at the political corruption and social inequities that characterized industrial capitalism in the Gilded Age. It also put forward a cooperative and mutualistic vision that stood in stark contrast to the acquisitive individualism that was the era’s dominant ideology. As a result, many radicals were attracted to the Order, some of whom tried to turn it in a more explicitly anticapitalist direction. At the same time, though, the republican and religious perspectives of the Knights brought them into conflict with other radicals, especially German American anarchists and socialists.

Uriah Stephens and a small group of his fellow Philadelphia garment cutters organized the Knights of Labor as a secret society in 1869. In its early years, it was as much a fraternal order as a labor union. But it was one of the few working-class organizations to survive the depression of the 1870s and, at its first national convention in 1878, delegates began the task of building a national labor reform movement. Under the leadership of Terence V. Powderly, a former machinist and the mayor of Scranton, Pennsylvania, who became Grand Master Workman in 1879, the Knights sought to enroll members of what they called the “producing classes” in an organization that cut across lines of occupation, gender, religion, nationality, and—to an important, but limited, extent—race.

The organization grew in the early 1880s, as existing craft unions and labor reform associations affiliated with it and as previously unorganized workers began to come together under its banner. A stunning victory over financier Jay Gould in an 1885 railroad strike brought much publicity and thousands of new members to the Order, and, by the following year, it had reached a peak membership of nearly one million. (As many as three million men and women may have passed through the Order over the course of its history.) The Knights also developed an important international presence, especially in Canada, but also in places as distant as Belgium, Ireland, Britain, South Africa, Australia and—most successfully—New Zealand, where they continued to be active into the twentieth century.

The Knights of Labor was the first national labor organization to open its doors fully to women, who eventually constituted about ten percent of the total membership. The Order also attracted southern African American members, who numbered approximately sixty thousand by the summer of 1886. At the Knights’ national convention that October, in Richmond, Virginia, Frank J. Ferrell, a Black member of the national executive board, told the delegates that “one of the objects of our Order is the abolition of those distinctions maintained by creed or color.” The organization, however, was also marked by violent anti-Asian racism: in western states it spearheaded the movement against the Chinese and members were active participants in Wyoming’s1885 Rock Springs Massacre, which left at least 28 Chinese miners dead.

Although they never established their own political party, Knights of Labor activists were central figures in the explosion of independent working-class political activity that occurred throughout the country in 1885–1888. But beginning in the mid- to late 1880s, a strong counterattack by employers, government, and the press drastically weakened the organization. The Knights also suffered from serious internal divisions and from the defection of many craft unionists to the new American Federation of Labor, founded in 1886. Though continuing to operate in some industries and areas of the country through the 1890s, the Knights were virtually dead by the turn of the century, formally dissolving in 1917.

At its height in the mid-1880s, the Order upheld a distinctive and powerful political vision, one called “labor republicanism” by a number of historians. Building on a working-class tradition of thought that went back to the 1820s, Knights’ leaders criticized industrial capitalism as a system that undermined the nation’s traditional commitment to an independent citizenry. They believed, in the words of labor activist George E. McNeill, that there was “an inevitable and irresistible conflict between the wage-system of labor and the republican system of government” and sought to build what they called “a cooperative commonwealth,” a society based upon group solidarity. Their mission was thus in part a moral one, and they sought to fulfill this mission through structural reforms like shorter hours and producer cooperatives, while providing “moral uplift” to workers themselves through education and temperance. The Knights were marked in many places by a religious orientation, one that often took a Protestant shape despite the large numbers of Irish Catholic workers in the Order.

But as powerful and persuasive as it was to tens of thousands of American working people, the republican and religious outlook of the Knights also brought them into conflict with many European-born socialists and anarchists. In Chicago in the mid-1880s, for example, the Knights built strong support among native-born and Irish American workers, but their leaders vehemently denounced the “atheistic socialism” of German and Czech radicals organized in the International Working People’s Association (IWPA) and in the city’s Central Labor Union. Religion was a real issue of contention here, for atheism, or at least irreligion, did characterize the views of many of Chicago’s European-born radicals. These radicals, in turn, criticized what they regarded as the timidity and ideological confusion of the Knights.

Native-born and Irish American radicals, on the other hand, often embraced the organization and tended to see its ultimate stated objective, “the abolition of the wages system,” as quite compatible with their own. IWPA leader Albert Parsons, for example, who traced his ancestry back to the Massachusetts Bay Colony, had been the very first member of the Knights of Labor in Chicago and argued that since “the platform of the Knights of Labor contains nothing else but socialistic demands, the realization of the whole of them would amount to Socialism.”

English-speaking radicals played a key role in organizing Knights assemblies in many other cities. In Detroit, for example, Joseph Labadie, Judson Grenell, and a number of other socialists (both within and outside the Socialist Labor Party) wielded tremendous influence in the organization. In Denver, Joseph R. Buchanan, a member of the Knights’ national executive board, was a socialist who saw the organization as an important force in the struggle against capitalism. Developing a proto-syndicalist emphasis on the centrality of industrial action, Buchanan struggled to link the Knights with the emerging trade unions and to ensure that the Order give full support to workers on strike. Along with Thomas B. Barry, a Detroit-based member of the national executive board who shared his views on unions and strikes, Buchanan also worked to lead the Order into the fight to save the lives of the Chicago anarchists convicted of the Haymarket bombing. Terence Powderly’s strong condemnation of the Haymarket defendants, his growing opposition to unions and strikes, and his crackdown on internal dissent, however, led to the ouster of Buchanan and Barry from the Order and to the departure of many like-minded individuals in 1887 and 1888.

Radically different in outlook from such individuals were the Lassallean socialists, who played an important role in the New York City-based Home Club. Working within the powerful District Assembly No. 49 and in alliance with Powderly, the Home Club exerted tremendous influence in the Knights of Labor in 1886–1888, doing much to shape the organization’s hostility to trade unionism in these years. In 1894, District Assembly No. 49 also provided the base for Daniel De Leon’s ultimately unsuccessful effort to capture the (by now rapidly declining) Knights for the Socialist Labor Party.

Although it would be wrong to regard the Knights of Labor as an organization of the American Left, its significance for the Left was immense. The Order was the first “labor movement of national proportions in the United States,” noted the early-twentieth-century Socialist Party leader James Maurer, just one of many socialists whose first labor organizing experience was with the Knights. “‘The injury of one is the concern of all,’ was its constant declaration of faith. It naturally attracted radicals of all sorts.”

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Fink, Leon. Workingmen’s Democracy: The Knights of Labor and American Politics. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983.

Gerteis, Joseph. Class and the Color Line: Interracial Class Coalition in the Knights of Labor and the Populist Movement. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007.

Levine, Susan. Labor’s True Woman: Carpet Weavers, Industrialization, and Labor Reform in the Gilded Age. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984.

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Parfitt, Steven. Knights Across the Atlantic: The Knights of Labor in Britain and Ireland. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016.

Rachleff, Peter. Black Labor in Richmond, 1865–1890. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989.