Order of the Knights of Labor

Participation in the union was certainly not allowed:

1. lawyers, so that the union does not become an instrument of their political aspirations;
2. doctors, as people who are often ignorant, but who take a lot of money for healing;
3. bankers as monopolizers of money and credit;
4. all involved in the production of alcoholic beverages and in their trade, because of the harm to their profession for folk morality.

Thus, in theory, the order of the Knights of Labor differed from unions specifically of workers, professional , national, religious and political. In practice, however, he was:

1. general work, since in reality it consists mainly of people of the working class, and according to the charter of the order, it was required that in every newly formed local assembly at least ⅔ members be workers;
2. national, because, being entirely a product of North American conditions, it was purely North American in nature.

The goals pursued by the union were expressed in a declaration (preamble) adopted at the first general meeting on January 3, 1878. They can be divided into final and immediate.

The ultimate goals are to ensure the working class a fair participation in the use of the wealth of leisure it creates for the development of intellectual, moral and social abilities and, in general, active participation in all the benefits brought by progressive civilization.

Immediate goals that could be achieved by law. At the level of individual states and communities, the goals were: the establishment of a bureau of labor statistics, the adoption of measures in favor of protecting the life and health of workers, the establishment of remuneration for the harm caused to them during work, the prohibition of labor of minors under the age of 15, the reduction of working time, the introduction of 8- hour working day, the establishment of the law of the weekly payment of wages in cash, the prohibition of private entrepreneurs to use the labor of prisoners in prisons, the termination of the delivery of public works under private contracts entrepreneurs, the preservation of public land for actual settlers and the cessation of distribution to railway companies and speculators, taxation of land already at the disposal of the latter, at a true value. The objectives of the union government were: the redemption of all telegraph, telephone and railway communications to the treasury, the arrangement of postal savings banks, the introduction of a national monetary system without the help of private banks, the abstention from the state of any assistance to private banks and credit societies, the introduction of a progressive income tax, the prohibition of importation contracted foreign workers. Immediate goals that could be achieved by influencing the entrepreneurs themselves: increase wages, establish equal pay for both sexes, reduce the working day to 8 hours (pending legislative resolution of the issue). Immediate goals that could be achieved through initiative on the part of the workers themselves: the device of the largest number of productive and consumer cooperative institutions and the gradual, in this way, replacement of the modern system of exploitation of wage labor by a cooperative system.

The means used by the Order of the Knights of Labor to achieve their intended goals can be divided into peaceful and military. Peaceful - elimination of internal competition among workers by involving as many of them as possible as members of the union, persuading employers to voluntarily meet the demands of workers and transfer the consideration of disputes to arbitration, influence on political figures by casting votes for them only if they make a promise to seek legislative implementation of the requirements of the order. Military means - strikes and boycotts.

The organization of the order rested on two basic principles: on broad freedom in relation to the form of unity of local assemblies and on the concentration of the main leadership in the hands of one person. The whole order was composed of a set of small local unions. Members of the order who lived in any locality formed one or more local assemblies (Local Assemblies, usually denoted by the letters L. A.), which could consist of persons of the same profession (Trade Assemblies) or different (Mixed Assemblies), by nationality, race, gender and so on. Above the local assemblies were district assemblies (District Assemblies, D.A.), which were sometimes geographical, sometimes professional, but, in any case, had nothing to do with state administrative units. They were formed from representatives from local assemblies, one deputy per 100 members, and should cover at least 5 such assemblies. Only some of the local congregations reported directly to central authorities. Local and district assemblies differed, like Masonic lodges, by number; only a few of them bore the name of the famous economist Henry George, and some of the women's collections took poetic or mystical names.

Above all local organizations stood the General Assembly, which met annually. It gave permission to open new local and district assemblies, sent organizers to various working districts, discussed political issues, drafted bills and could change the constitution of the order. The main management of the affairs of the union was in the hands of the great master (General Master Workman), who was assisted by a bureau of 12 secretaries; his powers were very significant. In addition, under the central control there was a supervisory committee that controlled the amount of the union, monitored compliance with the charter, etc.

The appearance of the order dates back to the late 60s of the XIX century. It was a time when, with the end of the civil war, industry began to flourish in the United States and independent organizational trends began to emerge among American workers, until then known almost exclusively to immigrant elements. The invention of the latest machines and the widespread development of the division of labor have increased the contingent of simple, inexperienced workers; labor unions, which included predominantly trained workers, were insufficient to eliminate internal competition for labor markets in the bowels of the working class. Hence the urgent need for the formation of a general labor union, embracing all branches of labor and defending the interests of the latter in general. Among these conditions, the founder of the order, the tailor worker Uriah Stephens grew up in Philadelphia. He was formerly a member of the Masonic Order and the Philadelphia Tailoring Workers Union, which had begun to disintegrate by then. Having come to the conclusion that it is necessary to form a universal labor union for the liberation of labor, Stephens convened, in December 1869 , eight of his friends in a secret meeting, where, at his suggestion, they signed the act on the formation of the “Order of the Knights of Labor” (“Noble Order” of the Knights of Labor ").

The order, despite the full legitimacy of its goals, was declared secret, like a Masonic one, in order to hide the goals, forces and plans of the union from entrepreneurs, as well as to impress the minds of the working masses and attract a larger number of members by the mystery of the activity and the solemnity of the ceremony. Each newcomer had to take an oath of complete silence in the Bible; it was forbidden to pronounce the very name of the order, it should be designated only by the sign of 5 stars *****. Stephens was elected the first great master. The union, as a secret, existed for about 9 years and grew rapidly; by the second half of the 70s, he began to consider its members tens of thousands.

The rumor about the mysterious "Five Stars" ("Five Stars") and its power has become universal. However, due to its mystery, he was considered communist and revolutionary, which scared away a lot of him. In general, the mystery that brought benefits during the childhood of the union became a brake on him during his maturity. The decision to make it public was made at the first general meeting in Giding, in 1878, at which the charter of the order was finally worked out. At the same time, the union's press organ appeared: Journal of the Knights of Labor. Stephens resigned as a great craftsman and ceded it to mechanical worker Terence Powderley.

At a general meeting in New York in 1882 , strikes were recognized as one of the most effective means of protecting the interests of the working class, but it was decided to resort to it only as a last resort. In 1883 , there were 52,000 members of the union, in 1884 - 71,000, in 1885 - 111,000, at the beginning of 1886 - 200,000, and by July 1 of the same year it reached 752430, but by July 1, 1887 it decreased until 585127, and by July 1, 1888 - until 425038. 1886, when the union reached the highest point of its development, it was a year of ardent movement in favor of an 8-hour working day, an explosion in Chicago, the process of anarchists and an intensified organizational movement among ordinary , artless workers; when the excitement of minds diminished, ordinary workers in large numbers left the union organizations. In the same 1886, the order of cooperative institutions was also the most successful. The Union opened a number of its own stores for the sale of products manufactured by associations. Local assemblies were instructed to ensure that members of the order made purchases in these stores. ⅓ the net profit earned in the latter should go to the general cash desk of the union, ⅓ to the special cash desk of the cooperative institution itself, and ⅓ in favor of the people working in it. According to the delegate of the order at the world exhibition in Paris in 1889 , the total number of participants in his cooperative institutions at that time reached 30 thousand, and the number of monthly sales amounted to $ 500,000,000. The cooperatives, however, did not transform working conditions, and faith in their strength was undermined.

A rush of masses of new members brought controversy into the union’s environment and increased the number of opponents of central organ tactics. Many strikes began to arise without his consent. The great master and his assistants were opposed to strikes and sought to avoid them, thereby causing displeasure. Many began to speak in favor of grouping by profession; Mixed assemblies have become unpopular. Professional meetings of the order on wages, strikes, etc., often received completely different instructions from above than independent labor unions. The Order, by persuasion and even violence, and partly by concessions, tried to make unions abandon their characteristics and merge with it. For its part, the trade unions accused the order of accepting members of their competitors and thereby weakening their strength in the struggle against the common enemy; these complaints began to be heard among the local organizations of the order itself. There were more and more socialist-minded members of the union.

The order began to decline; by 1893 there was a deficit at the box office, reserve capital was affected; the number of members fell by 1894 , according to some sources, to 200,000 people, according to others - to 150,000 people, according to the third - even to 65,000 people. In 1895 , a significant part of the members separated from it, forming a special order of the Independent Knights of Labor (Independent Knights of Labor). Socialist members also stood out and formed the Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance. Due to disagreements in the union, Powderley refused the title of great master. In his place was elected, with significant assistance from the socialists, D.R. Sovereign. After these events, the main forces of the order were concentrated in the states of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana and New York; its branches were in Canada, England, Belgium and some other states.

A characteristic feature of the union and the main reason for its immense success in the 80s of the 19th century was the lack of an aristocratic tendency in it, characteristic of trade unions, that is, the desire to unite only skilled workers; he tried to recruit as many simple, inexperienced workers as possible, which gave him, in the words of Professor R. Ely , the nature of the organization of the “fifth estate” (Fifth Estate) and, with the increasingly crowding out of skilled labor by machine and simple, promised the order an even wider field of distribution.

Later, the Order was headed by D.N. Parsons (until 1899), D.W. Hayes (since 1899), and others.

• Knights of Labor // Encyclopedic Dictionary of Brockhaus and Efron : in 86 volumes (82 volumes and 4 additional). - SPb. , 1890-1907.
• R. T. Ely, “The labor movement in America” ( 1890 )
• T. Powderly, “Thirty years of Labor” (1889)
• Mc. Neill, The Labor Movement (1887)
• C. D. Wright, “Historical sketch of the Knights of Labor” (in the Quarterly Journal of Economics , June 1887)
• Edw. a. Eleanora Marx Aveling, “The working-class movement in America” (1888)
• A. Sartorius v. Waltershausen, Die nordamerikanischen Gewerkschaften unter dem Einfluss der fortschreitenden Productionstechnik (1886)
• A. Sartorius v. Waltershausen, Der moderne Socialismus in den Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika (1890)
• W. Liebknecht, Die Ritter der Arbeit (1888)
• E. Levasseur, "L'ouvrier américain" ( 1898 ).