640 ★ CHAPTER 16 America’s Gilded AgeThe Knights of Labor and the
“Conditions Essential to Liberty”
The 1880s witnessed a new wave of labor organizing. At its center stood the
Knights of Labor. The Knights were the first group to try to organize unskilled
workers as well as skilled, women alongside men, and blacks as well as whites
(although even the Knights excluded the despised Asian immigrants on the
West Coast). The group reached a peak membership of nearly 800,000 in
1886 (making it the largest labor organization of the nineteenth century) and
involved millions of workers in strikes, boycotts, political action, and educa-
tional and social activities.
Labor reformers of the Gilded Age put forward a wide array of programs,
from the eight- hour day to public employment in hard times, currency reform,
anarchism, socialism, and the creation of a vaguely defined “cooperative com-
monwealth.” All these ideas arose from the conviction that the social conditions
of the 1880s needed drastic change. Americans, declared Terence V. Powderly,
head of the Knights of Labor, were not “the free people that we imagine we are.”The Strike, an 1886 painting by the German-born artist Robert Koehler, who had grown up
in a working-class family in Milwaukee. Koehler depicts a confrontation between a factory
owner, dressed in a silk top hat, and angry workers. A woman and her children, presum-
ably members of a striker’s family, watch from the side while another woman, at the center,
appears to plead for restraint. The threat of violence hangs in the air, and a striker in the
lower right-hand corner reaches for a stone. The painting was inspired by events in Pitts-
burgh during the Great Railroad Strike of 1877.