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Beyond the veil: The culture of the Knights of Labor
Abstract
The Knights of Labor was 19th century America's largest and most successful labor organization, yet historians have given it scant attention. Much of the work that has been done concentrates on the Knights' decline and seeks to justify its demise. Aside from several superb community studies, few works have analyzed the Order's achievements or given it credit for the legacy it bequeathed to future working class movements. The last national survey of the Knights of Labor was completed in 1929. My study seeks to address the imbalance. The Knights organized more than a million workers in the 1880s and 1890s. What made it so successful? What were the experiences of those who joined? What did future organizers learn from the Knights? To answer these questions, I have turned to manuscript sources, the labor press, memoirs, 19th century commentary, and a variety of 20th century scholars and theorists. In the pages that follow I sketch a portrait of Knights' culture from both a local and a national perspective. I find that the Knights' rich culture--embracing ritual, ideology, music, poetry, fiction, material objects, leisure activities, and religion--defined the essence of Knighthood, and was an element of the Order's success. I identify five overlapping phases of Knights' cultural development, each of which was an amalgam of working class and popular cultures. Ultimately, though Knights of Labor culture was creative and strong, it could not overcome two larger problems facing the Order, internal factionalism and external oppression. Though the Knights of Labor faded quickly after 1890, it left a brilliant legacy upon which future working class movements were able to build.
Subject Area
American history|Cultural anthropology
Recommended Citation
Weir, Robert Eugene, "Beyond the veil: The culture of the Knights of Labor" (1990). Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest. AAI9022757.
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI9022757