Knights Unhorsed: Internal Conflict in a Gilded Age Social Movement

In the late nineteenth century, workers were faced with dim economic realities and labor strikes were a commonplace occurrence in America. America had finally resolved its slave labor system and its citizens were rapidly growing disconcerted with the inequalities of its wage labor system. In 1869, the Knights of Labor began as a fraternal and labor organization in Philadelphia with a platform embracing everything from abolition of the wage system to the establishment of cooperative enterprises and social harmony. Seventeen years later, representing more than three-quarters of a million workers, the Knights of Labor rapidly declined and officially
disbanded in 1917.

For many decades historians have treated the Knights of Labor as an appendage to history, an organization that showed brief promise, then collapsed, leaving the better adapted American Federation of Labor to carry labor's torch. Labor historians in particular considered the Knights as an organization dominated by an autocratic leader, Terence V. Powderly, the Knights president from 1879
to 1893. Knights Unhorsed examines the internal conflict and external pressures that drove one of America's most promising labor organizations into obscurity less than a half a century later.

Through his analysis of conflicting personalities and the organizational structure of the Knights, Robert Weir reveals its complexity and casts severe doubt on the autocracy thesis. Each chapter offers a biographical focus of individuals expelled from the Knights of Labor and the various plots, pressure groups, overlapping hierarchies, and the innumerable disputes that plagued the order. Weir draws upon numerous sociological case studies, newspapers, pamphlets, organizational records, and scrapbooks to reconstruct the history of the Knights of Labor. This book will interest scholars and students of labor history, nineteenth century studies and American studies.