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The failure of the NLU did not, however, mean that workers were not interested in organizing, as the case of the Knights of the Order of St. Crispin suggests. Newell Daniels organized the Knights of St. Crispin in Milwaukee a year after the founding of the NLU, 1867, to secure better wages and work conditions for shoe and boot makers. By 1869 the order possessed 83,000 members in local lodges across the United States. A Daughters of St. Crispin was founded for female workers as well, in 1870. Though both orders collapsed by 1878, the Knights of St. Crispin did manage to compel the Massachusetts legislature to pass a ten-hour workday law-and certainly they would inspire future labor organizing.
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Like the National Labor Union and the Knights of St. Crispin, the Knights of Labor sought to organize nationally. Founded in Philadelphia in 1869 by Uriah Stephens and eight fellow garment cutters, the Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor was at first created simply to replace a local union. Under the guidance of its second and more ambitious leader, Terence V. Powderly, however, Knights membership would swell to 700,000 members, gaining international recognition in the process. The Knights of Labor was the first national labor organization to recruit women and African Americans, to organize throughout the country, and to unionize both industrial and rural workers. The only excluded were individuals the Knights deemed "non-producers" such as bankers and lawyers-people viewed as exploitative and as not contributing to the production of finished material goods. The notion of excluding people who did not produce goods sounds odd today, but remember that we are living in a postindustrial society in which much of what we produce comes in the form of information and service. The products of the industrial society took a different shape.
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Powderly, a charismatic and idealistic machinist from Carbondale Pennsylvania became the organization's General Master Workman in 1879. He was an extremely popular leader. People wrote celebratory songs and poems about him and hung his portrait in their homes. He was often greeted with cheers and celebration when he traveled to promote the Knights. William Mullen, a Knights leader and organizer in Richmond, Virginia, named his son Terence Powderly Mullen when the boy was born in 1885. A Nashville, Tennessee furniture worker admiringly wrote "I have never seen or heard you but once, but I fell in love with you with a love that will burn till I die."9 If the admiration for Powderly seems excessive or corny, it nonetheless attests to the desperate plight and need for leadership among laborers in the 1880s. A committed leader that cared about individuals often ruthlessly exploited by big business, Powderly can be understood as a representative of the collective will of late-nineteenth century labor.
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Accordingly, letters to Powderly reveal anger at big business's disregard for the welfare of their workers, and intense determination to level the employer-employee playing field. James Bishop, a coal miner from western Maryland, wrote to Powderly in 1878 asking for assistance because their demands for higher wages from their employers "were treated with contempt. Consequently, on the 1st day of September 1878, we struck." This left many of the miners in dire economic circumstances, so Bishop asked for financial help from Powderly and "our brothers in Scranton, P.A." John Coggeshall, a Knight in Iowa wondered in an 1882 letter to Powderly how they would get "releif [sic.] from the state of slavery to which the Vanderbilts, Goulds, Garretts, Perkins and other corporation magnates have reduced us owing to our hitherto isolated and consequently defenseless condition."(SeeDocument 6)
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The Knights of Labor outlined their grievances and hopes for reform in their Constitution. As the document's Preamble states:
"The alarming development and aggressiveness of great capitalists and corporations, unless checked, will inevitably lead to the pauperization and degradation of the toiling masses."
The only way to prevent this degradation of the toiling masses was to unite in their own interests:
"Therefore we have formed the Order of Knights of Labor, for the purpose and power of the industrial masses, not as a political party, for it is more-in it are crystallized sentiments and measures for the benefit of the whole people, but it should be borne in mind, when exercising the right of suffrage, that most of the objects herein set forth can only be obtained through legislation, and that it is the duty of all to assist in nominating and supporting with their votes only such candidates as will pledge their support to those measures, regardless of party." (See Document 1, page 2)
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In short, the Knights hoped to influence the legislative process on behalf of the American worker. They sought, among other things, laws and regulations that improved worker safety, set work hours and pay schedules, a graduated income tax, banking regulation, and the regular collection of labor statistics in order to measure work conditions and pay. The Knights of Labor saw themselves as transcending politics, their goals were human goals, not to be equated with any party agenda. At first they opposed strikes as non-cooperative, as their goal was to promote change in a cooperative manner. Instead of strikes, the Knights resorted to boycotts to achieve goals like the eight-hour workday and improved work conditions-in 1885 the order approved 196 such boycotts. Although they came to use strikes with much reluctance, it was a major successful strike of 1885, where members struck against the powerful railroad magnate Jay Gould, that caused a huge jump in membership.
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The Knights' approach to generating change was both local and national. Between 1869 and 1896 the order could be found in every state, and possessed 15,000 Local Assemblies. The Knights found community, solace, and valuable information in their local meetings throughout the country. Local Knights organized and sponsored lectures and study clubs that were aimed at educating workers and others in economic principles. Knights' members were shoemakers, glass blowers, food processors, garment workers, and especially coal miners. Often, a local group was comprised of a single type of worker, say glass blowers; by the mid 1880s, however, "mixed" locals, those composed of members of different types of workers became more popular. New York, Chicago, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, and Boston all saw the rise of hundreds of locals.
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Nor were the Knights merely a city-based phenomenon: locals could be found in 3,000 locations where the population was under 1,000. Finally, the Knights spilled outside the borders of the United States, with organizations founded in England, Ireland, Belgium, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada.
The Catholic Church and the Knights of Labor (Top of Page)
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It was, in fact, an event related to a group of Canadian Knights that touched off a controversy between the order and the Catholic Church. In 1884, Eleazar Taschereau, the Archbishop of Quebec, invoked the Church's ban on secret societies, a restriction that dated back to the 1734 condemnation of the Freemasons, to condemn the Knights in Canada. This was no small matter. A large number of the Knights of Labor in both Canada and the United states were Catholic, reflecting the working-class nature of the Church in the nineteenth century. Condemnation of the Knights would mean that Catholic workers that joined the order would lose their good standing in the Church-baptism of their children, receiving communion, marriage and other sacraments would all be jeopardized by Knights membership. Some Bishops in the United States, moreover, believed that Taschereau's condemnation was correct and they should follow his lead. Bishop James Healy of Portland, Maine, for example, published Taschereau's ban and forbade Knights in his diocese from receiving the sacraments.
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Why, exactly, would the Catholic Church condemn the Knights of Labor, an organization that sought to gain a measure of justice for an exploited group of workers? It was true that the Church prohibited membership in secret societies. As the Pastoral Letter of the American Archbishops and Bishops assembled at the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore stated in 1884,
"There is one characteristic which is always a strong presumption against a society, and that is secrecy. Our Divine Lord Himself has laid down the rule: 'Every one that doth evil, hateth the light and cometh not to the light, that his works may not be reproved. But he that doth truth cometh to the light that his works may be made manifest, because they are done in God' When, therefore associations veil themselves in secrecy and darkness, the presumption is against them, and it rests with them to prove that there is nothing evil in them." (SeeDocument 3)
In secret societies evil activities, it was thought, could be conducted and flourish outside the corrective eye of the Church. The Knights did in fact conduct their activities in secret, indeed, they kept their very name secret for a time, but this was because they feared that employers would discover Knights working in their factories, mines, and shops and fire them. Church leaders, moreover, did not object only to the secret elements of the Knights' activities. They feared that the order was a breeding ground for anti-religious socialism, disagreed with the idea of redistribution of wealth inherent in the Knights' reform program, were against strikes (which the Knights approved only as a last resort), and feared worker activism would trigger violence.
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Not all Church leaders thought like Taschereau and Healy, however. James Cardinal Gibbons, the influential Archbishop of Baltimore, sympathized with the Knights's plight and worked with several bishops to prevent their condemnation in the United States. Gibbons and other Church leaders worked with Powderly, who was himself Catholic, to change aspects of the Knights that did not sit well with the Church on the one hand, while making the case for the Knights to Church authorities in Rome on the other. In the end, Gibbons' argument that the Knights had a right to exist, and that the Church would lose a considerable portion of its flock in condemning the order was accepted and the Knights were not condemned by Rome.
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When the Church's decision was made in 1888, however, the Knights were already in decline. A second strike against Gould's railroad in 1886 was unsuccessful, causing a decline in membership. The Knights suffered another blow that same year when they were associated with the tragic Haymarket Affair, a bombing in Chicago that took place during a workers rally in the city's Haymarket Square. Finally, the founding of the American Federation of Labor by Samuel Gompers in 1886, drew skilled workers into its ranks, and away from the Knights. By 1889 Knights of Labor membership had fallen to 120,000, and Powderly resigned as Master in 1893.
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The documents on this website are intended to offer insights into how the Knights of Labor evolved into a national, predominantly Catholic, 700,000 strong union with immense, though fleeting, power in the late nineteenth century. The site focuses on the role of Knights' charismatic leader, Terence V. Powderly, in the rise of the organization as well as the organization's relationship with the Catholic Church.
Working Hard or Hardly Working: Labor and Unions in Today's Economy (Top of Page)
Before examining the documents on the website, it might be useful to have another look at the Starbucks unionization effort
- 1. How would you decide whether or not a fellow
worker might be excited about a union?
- 2. Read "Step 2." Why do the authors recommend that
workers not let management know about their organizing efforts?
- 3. According to what you've read, how might
contacting the union help a particular group of Starbucks workers
organize the store?
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