This Day in Labor History: December 28, 1869. The Knights of Labor were founded in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The organization grew slowly, but by the late 1870s, the Knights had become the nation’s largest labor union, remaining so until 1886. Let's talk about the Knights!
Labor was at a crossroads in post-Civil War America. The Civil War helped spur the growth of large factories and capitalists like John D. Rockefeller began expanding their economic reach into what became the monopoly capitalism of the Gilded Age.
Workers found the ground caving under their feet. Working-class people began criticizing the new economic system, but it took several decades for modern radicalism to become a common response for the working classes.
All sorts of ideas were floated out there. Henry George had his single tax. Edward Bellamy wrote Looking Backwards and Americans were deeply taken with the work.
As Leon Fink notes in his classic treatise on the Knights of Labor, Workingmen’s Democracy, labor was not in 1869 nor in 1885 at a point where revolutionary consciousness was really on the table for most workers.
They were essentially pre-Marxist critics of the growing wage labor system. They rejected that system, but also called for the operation of “natural law” in the marketplace and did not reject the idea of profit.
They believed in an idea of balance between employer and employee, but recognized that this balance had been thrown out of whack by the massive aggregation of capital into the hands of the few.
These were people who had come of age during the Civil War and the rhetoric of slavery was strong with them. So terms like “wage slavery,” which the South had used effectively to critique northern labor relations in the 1850s, meant a lot to working people in the early Gilded Age
They felt they had become involuntary servants to wage labor and thus the system needed to be abolished like African slavery during the war.
This does not mean that Knights were not radical for their time.
Fink makes a strong case that they indeed were radical in their own terms, rejecting the fundamental economic relationship of their time for a vision of the “nobility of toil” and a respectable working-class life that encompassed everyone who “worked” in their view.
This was basically all but bankers, speculators, lawyers, liquor dealers, and gamblers. These were the groups feeding off the blood of the working man either financially or morally.
Capitalism itself meant not a system of economic gain based upon profit, but the systematic exploitation of working-class people. Which meant that you could be a business owner and be a workingman if you treated your labor with respect.
The Knights were essentially a working-class fraternal organization in its first years. But in 1879, Terence Powderly took over the organization.
The mayor of Scranton, Pennsylvania, Powderly was as unclear as many workers on how labor should fight the growth of monopoly capitalism. He opposed strikes, even though he did occasionally engage in them as the Knights grew.
He was however a superb organizer and could keep this unwieldly organization alive in the first years of its rapid growth, though his actual authority over what chartered locals did was very limited.
Powderly eschewed electoral politics despite his own history, noting the failure of the Greenback-Labor party in the late 1870s and the extreme corruption of Gilded Age life.
This led Powderly and other Knights leaders to believe that electoral politics was a dead-end for the working class.
But the huge growth of the Knights after the Panic of 1883 led to a rethinking of this idea precisely because the organization grew so large that many wondered if it could take over American political life.
By 1886, the Knights began running labor tickets for office around the country, winning many races. This fell apart soon after due to the Haymarket backlash and infighting, but suggested the power of labor to transform American life if it were organized.
By the mid-1880s, new elements were entering the American working class. The rapid growth of European immigration after 1880 brought new ideas into the Knights, ideas that did not make people like Terence Powderly comfortable.
The simple and eloquent platform of the 8 hour day galvanized working-class people across the country, many of whom joined the Knights for this reason but sought to make the organization their own.
This included anarchists, a political ideology new to American shores at this time.
These immigrants flocked to an organization that supported their dream of an 8-hour day. Given the decentralized nature of the Knights, anarchists could have significant power with workers even if Powderly directly opposed their ideas.
In Chicago, the growing immigrant and anarchist communities played a major role in the 8 hour movement. In response to the killing of two striking McCormick Harvesting Machine workers, the increasingly radical Chicago movement called for a large demonstration
Although turnout was small, it became one of the most important events in American labor history when an unknown anarchist (still unknown today) threw a bomb into a crowd of police officers. The police then fired into the crowd. 8 people died that day.
Leading anarchists were arrested, thrown in jail, convicted, and 4 executed.
The Knights declined precipitously after Haymarket. Powderly was not ideologically prepared for mass violence nor for radical ideologies. And the anarchist who threw the bomb hijacked a legitimate movement for his own purposes, not what Powderly expected!
The crushing of the Knights and the 8 hour movement after Haymarket left Powderly without much direction on where to take the organization and workers left it as quickly as they had joined the year before.
The American Federation of Labor would soon rise to become the dominate working-class organization in America, but its conservative bent excluded the mass of unskilled and often foreign-born industrial labor that lent such immediacy to the 8 hour day campaign of 1886.
These workers would fight and die for another half-century before successfully unionizing.
Powderly remained active in labor issues throughout his long life. Although he had headed the first large radical organization in the United States and was mayor of Scranton on the Greenback-Labor ticket, he was fundamentally conservative and became a Republican.
He opposed immigration and had supported the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. On the other hand, he and Mother Jones were best friends for life.
He and William McKinley became close; McKinley named Powderly U.S. Commissioner General of Immigration in 1897 and he remained a high-profile immigration official until 1921 with the exception of a few years in the mid 1900s.
Back Thursday to discuss the Federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Act of 1969.

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
 

Keep Current with Erik Loomis

Erik Loomis Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @ErikLoomis

27 Dec
This Day in Labor History: December 23, 1831. The Baptist Rebellion began in Jamaica. This slave rebellion of up to 60,000 people, put down over the next couple of weeks, also was the final straw that moved the United Kingdom toward outlawing slavery in its colonies!!! Image
By the early 1830s, the slave system in the British colonies was under attack from a number of fronts. First, there was a large abolitionist movement in Britain, led by William Wilberforce. This was known to slaves in the Caribbean.
Second, the British religious denominations had engaged in large-scale missions among the slaves in the previous decades.
Read 28 tweets
12 Dec
This Day in Labor History: December 12, 1957. The AFL-CIO evicted four unions from the federation for corruption, most notably the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. Let's talk about corruption in mid-century unions.
This moment to fight the corruption that gave organized labor a bad name was indicative of the frequent problem of power leading to corruption, even in organizations designed to empower workers.
The reality is that corruption has always been a part of some labor unions, just like any powerful institutions with access to money can have corruption.
Read 31 tweets
11 Dec
This Day in Labor History: December 11, 1886. The Colored Farmers’ Alliance was established in Lovelady in Houston County, Texas. Let's talk about the struggle for Black farmer independence and the whites who crushed it.
This organization may have accomplished little in concrete gains, but it represented the brave attempt of black farmers to avoid tenancy, sharecropping, and other forms of white controlled labor.
It also as played an important role in the broader farmer movement to protect themselves from the rapacity of Gilded Age capitalism.
Read 34 tweets
10 Dec
This Day in Labor History: December 10, 1789. Moses Brown, a Rhode Island businessman, hired Samuel Slater to build an English-style factory in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Let's talk about the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution in the United States!
Samuel Slater was a farmer’s son in England who started working in an early cotton mill in 1778 at the age of 10. At the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, there was room for fast learners to rise rapidly.
Slater became close to the mill’s owner, who trained him in its various workings. As the British developed this mill technology, it sought to protect its advantages by banning the transporting of this knowledge outside of its borders.
Read 24 tweets
5 Dec
This Day in Labor History: December 5, 1894. Alabama repealed its child labor law in order to convince Dwight Manufacturing Company, a textile corporation, to move its mill operations from Chicopee, Massachusetts to its state. Let's talk about how the race to the bottom started!
Dwight did this, settling in Gadsden.
This incident is an early incident in the history of capital mobility, a phenomenon that plagues workers today, and also shines a light into how the apparel industry was a pioneer in breaking labor resistance through simply closing up and moving operations to a non-union state
Read 39 tweets
4 Dec
This Day in Labor History: December 4, 1907. Theodore Roosevelt ordered federal troops to the gold mining town of Goldfield, Nevada to bust a strike of workers affiliated with the Industrial Workers of the World and Western Federation of Miners. Let's talk TR, unionbuster.
This event shows both the potential of the IWW to win actions and the extent to which the government would participate in crushing what it saw as a radical threat to American institutions.
The Industrial Workers of the World formed in 1905 to organize all the nation’s and even the world’s workers into One Big Union that would bring an end to the oppression of workers. But in its first years, it effectively did nothing at all, riven by internal dissent.
Read 31 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!


This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Too expensive? Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal

Or Donate anonymously using crypto!

Ethereum

0xfe58350B80634f60Fa6Dc149a72b4DFbc17D341E copy

Bitcoin

3ATGMxNzCUFzxpMCHL5sWSt4DVtS8UqXpi copy

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us on Twitter!

:(