The People's Songbag

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31089, 18 June 1966, Page 5

The People's Songbag

Knights Of Labour

(Specially written for “The Press” by DERRICK ROONEY)

In the year of ’69 they began to fall in line The great Knights, the noble Knights of Labour; Now in numbers mighty strong, gaining fast they march along, The great Knights, the noble Knights of Labour. This broadside, in the collection of the American Antiquarian Society, recalls one of the most eccentric organisations in the history of the Labour movement: the Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labour, or, as it was known officially for its first decade of life, the •*♦**. Founded in 1869 by a garment cutter from Philadelphia named Uriah Stephens, it grew in two decades to an organisation with more than 700,000 members: but because of Stephens’s idiosyncratic philosophy it never had much hope of achieving anything. Stephens was, for example, opposed to strikes on the ground that they were an inefficient method of achieving the Socialist commonwealth of the United States in which he hoped to abolish the wage system and other Capitalist ideas. But he offered no workable alternative to strikes, and on several occasions was forced to support strikes which began because he was unable to control impetuous branch leaders. The aims of the Knights, in Stephens’s view, could be achieved only by the applica-

tion of three principles: secrecy, education and cooperation. The principle of secrecy was applied in the form of a ban on all discusssion of the union’s activities—indeed, of any mention of the union —outside the meeting house and an elaborate initiation ceremony for new members: but it soon had to be dropped because the Roman Catholic Church’s opposition to secret societies kept away many potential members. The other two principles were never expounded. Stephens bowed out as Grand Master Workman in 1879, to be succeeded by Terence V. Powderly, an equally eccentric man who believed the major issue in the liberation of the working classes was temperance. The end for the Knights came in 1886. A year earlier a strike which began on Jay Gould’s Wabash line had spread quickly throughout the south-west railway system and Gould, for once unprepared, had assented to the Knights’ demands.

The wily Gould built up strength, goaded the Knights into striking again, and crushed them. The failure of another strike in the Chicago stockyards the same year completed the process of destruction. By 1893 the membership was down from 700,000 to 7500; not long afterwards it was none.