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"Knights of Labor."
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The Great Southwest Railroad Strike and free labor
Focusing on a story largely untold until now, Theresa A. Case studies the \"Great Southwest Strike of 1886,\" which pitted entrepreneurial freedom against the freedom of employees to have a collective voice in their workplace. This series of local actions involved a historic labor agreement followed by the most massive sympathy strike the nation had ever seen. It attracted western railroaders across lines of race and skill, contributed to the rise and decline of the first mass industrial union in U.S. history (the Knights of Labor), and brought new levels of federal intervention in railway strikes.
eBook
South Africa’s Haymarket: the Knights of Labor and political violence in the United States and South Africa, 1886–1892
This article compares and connects two episodes of political violence in the late nineteenth century: the Haymarket Affair in Chicago in 1886 and the bombing of the offices of the De Beers Company, chaired by Cecil Rhodes, at Kimberley on the South African diamond fields in 1891. These episodes were connected by the existence in both countries of an American and then global movement, the Knights of Labor/Labour. The Knights’ American history was shaped by Haymarket. Their South African history was radically altered by the De Beers explosion, which both the Knights and their enemies interpreted through the prism of Haymarket. They drew lessons from it that determined their own conduct and may have contributed to the demise of the South African Knights less than two years later. This article charts those connections and the context to the De Beers explosion, the trial that followed, and the lessons that South African Knights drew from the experiences of their American brothers and sisters.
Journal Article
Why Is There No Labor Party in the United States?
Why is the United States the only advanced capitalist country with no labor party? This question is one of the great enduring puzzles of American political development, and it lies at the heart of a fundamental debate about the nature of American society. Tackling this debate head-on, Robin Archer puts forward a new explanation for why there is no American labor party--an explanation that suggests that much of the conventional wisdom about \"American exceptionalism\" is untenable.
Conventional explanations rely on comparison with Europe. Archer challenges these explanations by comparing the United States with its most similar New World counterpart--Australia. This comparison is particularly revealing, not only because the United States and Australia share many fundamental historical, political, and social characteristics, but also because Australian unions established a labor party in the late nineteenth century, just when American unions, against a common backdrop of industrial defeat and depression, came closest to doing something similar.
Archer examines each of the factors that could help explain the American outcome, and his systematic comparison yields unexpected conclusions. He argues that prosperity, democracy, liberalism, and racial hostility often promoted the very changes they are said to have obstructed. And he shows that it was not these characteristics that left the United States without a labor party, but, rather, the powerful impact of repression, religion, and political sectarianism.
eBook
Grand Master Workman
Reviews I admire this book, Phelan's loving attention to detail, and his challenges to long-held stereotypes...it points us in the right direction for critically reassessing Terence Powderly and the Knights of Labor. This important book brings a much needed, honest, and very well-researched appraisal of Powderly's strengths and weaknesses. American Historical Review
eBook
Labor Rights Are Civil Rights
In 1937, Mexican workers were among the strikers and supporters beaten, arrested, and murdered by Chicago policemen in the now infamous Republic Steel Mill Strike. Using this event as a springboard, Zaragosa Vargas embarks on the first full-scale history of the Mexican-American labor movement in twentieth-century America. Absorbing and meticulously researched,Labor Rights Are Civil Rightspaints a multifaceted portrait of the complexities and contours of the Mexican American struggle for equality from the 1930s to the postwar era.
Drawing on extensive archival research, Vargas focuses on the large Mexican American communities in Texas, Colorado, and California. As he explains, the Great Depression heightened the struggles of Spanish speaking blue-collar workers, and employers began to define citizenship to exclude Mexicans from political rights and erect barriers to resistance. Mexican Americans faced hostility and repatriation.
The mounting strife resulted in strikes by Mexican fruit and vegetable farmers. This collective action, combined with involvement in the Communist party, led Mexican workers to unionize. Vargas carefully illustrates how union mobilization in agriculture, tobacco, garment, and other industries became an important vehicle for achieving Mexican American labor and civil rights.
He details how interracial unionism proved successful in cross-border alliances, in fighting discriminatory hiring practices, in building local unions, in mobilizing against fascism and in fighting brutal racism. No longer willing to accept their inferior status, a rising Mexican American grassroots movement would utilize direct action to achieve equality.
eBook
Greenbackers, Knights of Labor, and populists
Historians have widely studied the late-nineteenth-century southern agrarian revolts led by such groups as the Farmers' Alliance and the People's (or Populist) Party. Much work has also been done on southern labor insurgencies of the same period, as kindled by the Knights of Labor and others. However, says Matthew Hild, historians have given only minimal consideration to the convergence of these movements.
Hild shows that the Populist (or People's) Party, the most important third party of the 1890s, established itself most solidly in Texas, Alabama, and, under the guise of the earlier Union Labor Party, Arkansas, where farmer-labor political coalitions from the 1870s to mid-1880s had laid the groundwork for populism's expansion. Third-party movements fared progressively worse in Georgia and North Carolina, where little such coalition building had occurred, and in places like Tennessee and South Carolina, where almost no history of farmer-labor solidarity existed.
Hild warns against drawing any direct correlations between a strong Populist presence in a given place and a background of farmer-laborer insurgency. Yet such a background could only help Populists and was a necessary precondition for the initially farmer-oriented Populist Party to attract significant labor support. Other studies have found a lack of labor support to be a major reason for the failure of Populism, but Hild demonstrates that the Populists failed despite significant labor support in many parts of the South. Even strong farmer-labor coalitions could not carry the Populists to power in a region in which racism and violent and fraudulent elections were, tragically, central features of politics.
eBook
What did Unions do? The Case of Illinois Coal Mining in the 1880s
This study asks what unions did for Illinois coal miners in the 1880s. It measures the outcomes provided by a traditional union and the Knights of Labor, primarily via difference-in-differences applied to a panel of coal mining counties in Illinois. Neither the traditional union nor the Knights of Labor was able to raise wages, provide benefits, or reduce hours per workday. The traditional union reduced days of work per year. Circumstantial evidence suggests the unions were able to ensure prompt payment of wages due.
Journal Article
Completing the Order's History Down Under: The Knights of Labor in Australia
The rise and fall of an American movement, the Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor, in the Australian colonies between the 1880s and the 1900s is a neglected chapter in labour history. This unusual movement, at once a fraternal order, trade union, political grouping and co-operative enterprise, became the first truly national organisation of American workers. The Knights also became a global movement with branches in England, Wales, Ireland, Scotland, France, Belgium, South Africa, New Zealand and Australia. Scholars have explored the parameters of the Order's North American history in great detail. They have not given anywhere near the same level of scrutiny to the Order's history in other parts of the world, however, and this discrepancy is particularly striking when it comes to their branches in Australia. Australian labour historians have never neglected the American ideas, individuals and institutions that helped to shape the early history of the Australian labour movement. Henry George, Edward Bellamy, Laurence Gronlund, Daniel De Leon and the Industrial Workers of the World, amongst others, all have major studies devoted to their activities and influence in Australia. The Australian Knights of Labor, by contrast, have been the subject of only several pages in a small selection of books and articles. This article provides their future historian with the necessary material to fill this gap in the scholarship and mount a proper study of their history. It provides a narrative of their activities in the various Australian colonies, so far as we can ascertain them, and draws attention to the many holes and unclear parts of that narrative. It then provides a series of questions to inform future research into the Australian Knights, compares with them with the histories of Knights in other non-American countries, and connects them to wider fields of historical scholarship, including imperial and global labour history. This article is, in other words, the first sustained study of the Australian Knights of Labor; it also provides the foundation from which a larger study might hopefully come.
Journal Article