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.