The first comprehensive cultural history of North America's largest and most inclusive labor organization of the nineteenth century. Shelton Stromquist of the University of Iowa notes, "This is a book we badly need. It should be an important influence in redirecting historians back to the Knights and the centrality of their culture to the formation of the nineteenth-century working class." The Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor was founded in 1869 as a secret fraternal order committed to the goal of uniting American labor. At its height in 1886, the Knights claimed the allegiance of perhaps one million workers.
        Despite a host of local studies by the new labor historians of the 1970s and 1980s, there has been no general study of the Knights since Norman Ware's 1929 book, and no one has ever attempted a comprehensive study of the culture of the organization. In BEYOND LABOR'S VEIL, Robert E. Weir presents a fascinating cultural product of the Knights across regions, covering the years 1869 to 1893. From the start, the Knights of Labor was an unusual organization, equal parts fraternal order and labor organization. It was the only nineteenth-century labor organization to make a comprehensive effort to organize African Americans, women, and unskilled workers on an equal basis with white craftsmen.
        Weir goes beyond the rhetoric of public pronouncements and union politics to consider the real influence of the Knights--in communities and homes as well as in the workplace. Weir explores the many cultural expressions of the Knights--ritual, religion, poetry, music, literature, material objects, graphics, and leisure. Although the Knights barely survived into the twentieth century, Weir concludes that the creative cultural expressions of the Knights enabled it to do as well as it did in the face of powerful oppositional forces. What emerges is a rich, detailed description of the Knights as its members adapted to the confusion and contradiction of America's Gilded Age.

        BEYOND LABOR'S VEIL can be ordered from Penn State Press by mail (820 North University Drive, University Park, PA 16802), by telephone (1-800-326-9180), or by sending an e-mail message to Alison Reeves in marketing and sales at ADR3@psu.edu Click here to return to Rob's home page.
 

Here is an exerpt from Chapter One: "The Knights in Ritual: A Culture of Fraternalism:"

        In 1874, a 25-year-old machinist attended an anti-monopoly convention in Philadelphia. He took comfort in the presence of like-minded men and was honored when William Fennimore invited him to his room for what he assumed would be a social evening. Thus he was surprised when Fennimore locked the door and asked him to kneel. He did so in anticipation of prayer, but was instead queried on a variety of questions concerning capital/labor relations. Fennimore then asked him to join the Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor. He agreed, took an oath and was told never to utter or write the name of the Order in public.

        The young man returned to his home and job in Scranton, and heard little of the Knights of Labor until September 6, 1876. On that night, a shopmate invited him to attend a labor lecture. The two met at the designated time and place, only to confront a masked figure in a black gown. They were questioned and taken into a room with other robed men. An elaborate ceremony ensued filled with symbolic allusions to death and rebirth. After endless questions, lectures, oaths and mystical allegories, the young man was officially welcomed into the Knights of Labor and was given over to the Venerable Sage to learn secret handshakes, signs and rituals necessary to be a fully functioning Knight.

        The machinist's name was Terence Vincent Powderly, and in fewer than three years he headed the KOL. His wistful ex post facto recollections of his initiation seem odd, given that he used his power to erode KOL ritual. Powderly explained,
 

   Traveling slowly, building carefully, and working silently, it would take many years to build an organization of sufficient strength or importance, numerically or otherwise, to command attention on the part of workers or employers. When you reflect that each man had to be sought out, questioned, or sounded as to his views, and then balloted for separately before being admitted to membership, you will realize that the battlements of the fortress of organized greed were in no immediate danger of crumbling before the assaults of organized labor.2
 

            Many of the successes the Order later achieved, as well as problems with which it wrestled, came from an organizational style and identity partially forged in its formative years. If the KOL had a dominant feature, it was its inclusiveness. All manner of races, creeds and ethnic backgrounds passed through the veils of KOL assembly halls. Alone among American labor organizations until the 20th century, the KOL even entertained the idea that the unskilled, African-Americans and women were the equals of white craftsmen. Such notions cannot be divorced from ideas of "Universal Brotherhood" that infused the Order's rituals. Those same rituals shaped the Order's rhetorical style, one peppered with terms such as "honor," "manhood" and "nobility." Ritual was a key element in what the KOL called "education," the effort to communicate an understanding of the political economy to members, and it formed the basis by which novices were socialized. Likewise, it was connected to many of the KOL's organizational values, as well as its idiosyncracies. The anti-partisan political stance with which members often quarreled was rooted in ritual.

            So too was a quasi-religiosity which simultaneously gave Knights a sense of righteous superiority, and guaranteed repeated clashes with Gilded Age clerics. In a related vein, ritual defined "Knighthood" as an exalted model of personal behavior that dictated how members related to each other and how they encountered the outside world. Put directly, ritual behavior was important to Gilded Age workers, fraternal experience bonded diffuse interests and its mysteries had profound meaning for those who practiced it. Much of the KOL's organizational history involved ritualism and secrecy. A secret, fraternal model made sense when the KOL was founded; indeed, it may have been the most-logical of all choices. From 1869 through 1878, it offered protection for members at a time in which most labor organizations withered, and it provided ideals and practices that sustained hope and allowed for modest growth. As the Order expanded, some members began to debate the wisdom of secrecy. That discussion--one that began in earnest in 1877--culminated in the decision to make the KOL a public order in 1882. Once secrecy and ritual were no longer inextricably linked, modification of the latter became inevitable.

            This was not easily accomplished. The period between 1881 and 1890 saw numerous changes to the ritual, many of which exacerbated tensions and factionalism among Knights. "Traditionalists" thoroughly inculcated with both the form and ideals of ritual arose to defend it against "modernizers," while a host of malcontents found ritual a useful tool in building oppositional power coalitions. In the KOL's crucial period of growth, activity and decline, it was an open question as to whether ritual would serve to unify or divide Knights. In the end, it did both. Many African-Americans, for example, were drawn to the ritual, while it probably hampered the effort to organize women. From 1886 through 1893, the ritual was simplified, timing that coincided with the KOL's apex, steady contraction and efforts at revitalization. In retrospect, simplification was a spectacular failure that served mainly to rob the ritual of its symbolic power and reduce it to the hollow triteness claimed by its harshest critics. That phase gave way to another beginning around 1893, when the hemorrhaging Order tried to staunch its wounds by returning to the prelapsarian days of the 1870s. In 1895, the Knights of Labor returned to complete secrecy with a complex ritual and retained both for the rest of its days.

            In the pages that follow, I intend to take ritual fraternalism and early KOL history seriously and to demonstrate the connections between ideals and practice. I will also highlight the way in which the KOL never resolved the tensions between private and public cultural pursuits, or those between rhetoric and behavior. Above all, though, I wish to demonstrate that ritual was at the core of KOL identity, not some quaint quirk that passed when the leadership torch passed to a Scranton machinist.

BEYOND LABOR'S VEIL can be ordered from Penn State Press by mail (820 North University Drive, University Park, PA 16802), by telephone (1-800-326-9180), or by sending an e-mail message to Alison Reeves in marketing and sales at ADR3@psu.edu Click here to return to Rob's home page.