478 Chapter 17 An Industrial Giant Emerges
The Labor Union Movement
At the time of the Civil War only a small percentage
of the American workforce was organized, and most
union members were cigarmakers, printers, carpen-
ters, and other skilled artisans, not factory hands.
Aside from ironworkers, railroad workers, and min-
ers, few industrial laborers belonged to unions.
Nevertheless the union was the workers’ response to
the big corporation: a combination designed to
eliminate competition for jobs and to provide effi-
cient organization for labor.
After 1865 the growth of national craft unions,
which had been stimulated by labor dissatisfaction
during the Civil War, quickened perceptibly. In 1866 a
federation of these organizations, the National Labor
Union, was founded and by the early 1870s many new
trades, notably in railroading, had been unionized.
Most of the leaders of these unions were vision-
aries who were out of touch with the practical needs
and aspirations of workers. They opposed the wage
system, strikes, and anything that increased the
laborers’ sense of being members of the working
class. A major objective was the formation of worker-
owned cooperatives.
Far more remarkable was the Knights of Labor,
a curious organization founded in 1869 by a group of
Philadelphia garment workers headed by Uriah S.
Stephens. Like so many labor organizers of the
period, Stephens was a reformer of wide interests
rather than a man dedicated to the specific problems
of industrial workers. He, his successor Terence V.
Powderly, and many other leaders of the Knights
would have been thoroughly at home in the labor
organizations of the Jacksonian era. Like the
Jacksonians, they supported political objectives that
had no direct connection with working conditions,
such as currency reform and the curbing of land spec-
ulation. They rejected the idea that workers must
resign themselves to remaining wage earners. By
pooling their resources, working people could
advance up the economic ladder and enter the capital-
ist class. “There is no good reason,” Powderly wrote
in his autobiography, The Path I Trod, “why labor
cannot, through cooperation, own and operate
mines, factories, and railroads.” The leading Knights
saw no contradiction between their denunciation of
“soulless” monopolies and “drones” like bankers and
lawyers and their talk of “combining all branches of
trade in one common brotherhood.” Such muddled
thinking led the Knights to attack the wage system
and to frown on strikes as “acts of private warfare.”
If the Knights had one foot in the past, they also
had one foot in the future. They supported some star-
tlingly advanced ideas. Rejecting the traditional
grouping of workers by crafts, they developed a con-
cept closely resembling modern industrial unionism.
They welcomed blacks (though mostly in segregated
locals), women, and immigrants, and they accepted
unskilled workers as well as artisans. The eight-hour
day was one of their basic demands, their argument
being that increased leisure would give workers time
to develop more cultivated tastes and higher aspira-
tions. Higher pay would inevitably follow.
The growth of the union, however, had little to
do with ideology. Stephens had made the Knights a
secret organization with an elaborate initiatory ritual.
Under his leadership, as late as 1879 it had fewer than
10,000 members. Under Powderly, secrecy was dis-
carded. Between 1882 and 1886 successful strikes by
local “assemblies” against western railroads, including
one against the hated Jay Gould’s Missouri Pacific,
brought recruits by the thousands. The membership
passed 42,000 in 1882, 110,000 in 1885, and in
1886 it soared beyond the 700,000 mark. Alas, sud-
den prosperity was too much for the Knights. Its
national leadership was unable to control local
groups. A number of poorly planned strikes failed dis-
mally, and the public was alienated by sporadic acts of
violence and intimidation. Disillusioned recruits
began to drift away.
Circumstances largely fortuitous caused the col-
lapse of the organization. By 1886 the movement for
the eight-hour day had gained wide support among
workers, including many who did not belong to
unions. Several hundred thousand (estimates vary)
were on strike in various parts of the country by May
of that year. In Chicago, a center of the eight-hour
movement, about 80,000 workers were involved, and
a small group of anarchists was trying to take advan-
tage of the excitement to win support.
When a striker was killed in a fracas at the
McCormick Harvesting Machine Company, the anar-
chists called a protest meeting on May 4, at Haymarket
Square. Police intervened to break up the meeting, and
someone—his identity was never established—hurled a
bomb into their ranks. Seven policemen were killed
and many others injured.
Terence Powderly at Knights of Labor Convention
atwww.myhistorylab.comThe American Federation of Labor
Although the anarchists were the immediate victims
of the resulting public indignation and hysteria—
seven were condemned to death and four eventually
executed—organized labor, especially the Knights,
suffered heavily. No tie between the Knights and the
bombing could be established, but the union hadView theImage