Rise and Fall of a Nation of Joiners: The Knights of Labor Revisited.(Statistical Data Included)

The rise and fall of the Knights of Labor has frequently been portrayed as a crucial event in the history of American political development, especially as it relates to the United States' failure to create a full-fledged welfare state, replete with national health insurance, extensive protection for workers, and an abiding social safety net. From this perspective, "American Exceptionalism" stems largely from the failure of several popular political movements of the 1880s and 1890s to implement national health insurance legislation, forge a unified labor movement, or even sustain a labor fraternity as modest and short-lived as the Knights of Labor. [1]

This article elucidates a feature of the Knights movement often overlooked by previous treatments--the impact of external competition on the Knights' ability to retain members. Unlike subsequent American labor groups, the Knights patterned themselves on the fraternal lodge, the predominant organizational form of the era. As such, the Knights stressed ritual, versatility, informal sociability, and "moral uplift and self-improvement." [2]

In the words of Charles and Mary Beard, fraternalism was "a general mania," though the adoption of this model by the nation's first great labor organization had calamitous effects on the labor movement itself. The title of this article is intended to highlight the irony that the very quality often considered to have been America's defining attribute--its extensive tradition of voluntary organization--may also have abetted its failure to establish an enduring social safety net or a viable labor party during the decades before and after the turn of the century. [3]

This article attempts to use both population ecology theories and political theories of civic associationalism to construct a model of what individuals tend to decide when confronted with multiple organizations competing for their membership within the nonprofit sector. Under such circumstances, generalist organizations with broad goals and demanding membership criteria do not appear to recruit as successfully as their more focused and less demanding counterparts. [4]

An important question concerns whether the sheer aggregation of individuals' options may have been responsible for both the formation and the mortality of the many voluntary organizations that arose in the late nineteenth-century United States. Attention to the case of the Knights of Labor reveals that this abundant associationalism may have precluded formation of an active, broad-based workers' political movement. [5]

BACKGROUND AND DEBATE The afl-cio currently represents a smaller percentage of all American workers than did the Knights of Labor in 1886, when as many as 20 percent of all workers were affiliated with them. Nonetheless, soon after reaching its peak, the Knights' membership began a steady and rapid decline, after which the organization never regained its national prominence or stature. This collapse had wide-ranging repercussions for American politics; subsequent worker organizations took a more conservative tack toward labor organization. In Voss' words, "Ideologically, the Knights' defeat demoralized those who championed radical reform and classwide organization while empowering those who promoted pragmatic politics and sectional labor unions. Both the demoralized and the empowered dress lessons from the defeat of the Order, and these lessons made it much more difficult for radicalactivists to persuade workers that inclusive unionism was possible or desirable." Had the Knights of Labor succeeded in organizi ng (or maintaining organization among) a broad swath of the American working class, labor unions in America might well have come closer to matching the achievements of their Western European counterparts. [6]

Current scholarship about the Knights attributes their calamitous decline to two factors: the persistent tension between skilled craftsmen and unskilled workers, and, more decisively, the fierce opposition of employer associations, which used various extralegal means to break down union resistance. Using time-series data on the organizational founding and mortality of Knights' lodges from New Jersey, Voss examined the salience of both arguments in detail. Her data show that opposition from employer associations, not intraclass conflict among the Knights, led to the dissolution of lodges after 1886. Nonetheless, Voss' account fails to explain why the Knights were so easily vanquished when other union movements, namely, the American Federation of Labor (AFL), lived to fight another day. Supplementary to Voss' findings, if not contrary to them, this study argues that the organizational structure of the order prompted factional disputes among its members, but, more important, that competition from rival trade and fraternal organizations lured away members. Dissatisfaction with the order itself would not have been sufficient cause for the Knights' demise; the profusion of organizational alternatives induced mass defection and, subsequently, the transformation of the American labor movement (see Figure 1). [7]