A group of Philadelphia garment workers led by Uriah Stephens organized the first local assembly of the Noble Order of the Knights of Labor (Knights) in 1869. They cloaked the society in rituals and secrecy (abolished in 1881 to placate opposition from the Roman Catholic hierarchy) to protect its members from discharge and blacklisting. At first, growth was slow, with a number of local assemblies forming district assemblies without much effort to coordinate activities. A rapid influx of members following the Great Strike Of 1877, however, necessitated the formation of a national organization.
In January 1878 delegates from the various district assemblies meeting in Reading, Pennsylvania, created the general assembly as the order’s national legislative body and elected Stephens its executive director, or “grand master workman.” The Knights opened membership to all productive people over the age of 18, including women and Aerican Americans, but excluded saloonkeepers, bankers, lawyers, and stockbrokers. The inclusive membership was necessary, for the Knights’ overarching goal was social reform. The organization lobbied for the abolition of contract labor and favored weekly pay laws and worker safety laws. It also called for government ownership of railroads and telegraph lines and established producers’ cooperatives. Terence V. Powderly, who replaced Stephens as grand master workman in 1879, and other leaders emphasized arbitration instead of strikes, which they dismissed as knee-jerk reactions that could do little or nothing to ameliorate the condition of workers.
Ironically, the Knights grew and died by the strike. Membership increased from 100,000 to more than 700,000 after two successful strikes against the southwestern railroads in 1885, but the Knights lost more than 100,000 members after the same railroads defeated them in a strike the following year. Membership continued to decline, as the order was unable to win another important strike over the next two years. The order lost additional prestige among workers when it became known that Powderly, true to antistrike philosophy, refused to support the eight-hour movement sponsored by the trade unions.
Trade union hostility also contributed to the demise of the Knights. Skilled workers resented the Knights’ organizational scheme of geographically based local units in which they were outvoted by unskilled workers and unable to dominate a trade. The Knights met these objections by permitting the formation of district assemblies based upon occupation, but skilled workers further resented Powderly’s refusal to support strikes and began joining the resurgent trade unions of the American Federation Of Labor (AFL). Soon open warfare between the two organizations (with each breaking strikes of the other) substantially weakened the Knights. By 1890 the producer cooperatives sponsored by the order, upon which it had pinned so much hope, had disappeared and many of its remaining members joined the Populist movement.
It would be a mistake, however, to write off the Knights as a failure. As a reform organization it achieved such significant legislation as the prohibition of imported contract labor, the creation of the Federal Bureau of Labor, and, in some states, the abolition of convict labor.
Further reading: Robert E. Weir, Beyond Labor’s Veil: The Culture of the Knights of Labor (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996).
—Harold W. Aurand
World History
