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“The Chivalry of Modern Knights”
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This Harper's Weekly cartoon by Thomas Nast criticizes the large
labor union, the Knights of Labor, for boycotting a small business
establishment, Mrs. Gray's Bakery.The Knights of Labor were founded
in 1869 as a secret craft union for garment workers in Philadelphia and
Camden, New Jersey. Although many unions collapsed during the
economic depression of the mid-1870s, the Knights survived and went
public in 1878, with a transformed agenda. They promoted
themselves as a national union for the working class regardless of
occupation, religion, race, nationality, or sex, and called for a more equitable
industrial system.
Among the reforms they urged were an eight-hour workday, worker-run
cooperatives, abolition of convict and child labor (for those under 14),
equal opportunities and wages for women, and a government agency to
collect labor statistics (established in 1884). Contrary to the
mission statement, Knights of Labor in the West refused to allow Chinese
workers to join their unions and lobbied for the Chinese Exclusion Act
(1882) and other discriminatory measures.
Under the leadership of Terence V. Powderly, the Knights of Labor
experienced tremendous growth from 1879-1886, ultimately reaching
700,000 members. The Knights, however, did not attract much
attention until the period of labor unrest in 1885-1886, often termed
"the Great Upheaval of 1886" by labor historians. In
late 1885, the union won a victory for railroad workers in the Southwest
against Jay Gould. It was at this time that the Knights gained
their biggest boost in membership, the rapidity and extent of which
brought internal dissension.
Local leaders were primarily responsible for organizing a massive
series of strikes in 1886 to agitate for an eight-hour workday, which
culminated in the Haymarket Riot of May 1. Powderly objected
to the strikes and denounced the rioters. The public frenzy in the
wake of the Haymarket Riot, and defeat by Jay Gould during a second
railroad strike, led to a sharp decline in the membership of the Knights
of Labor. They were quickly replaced as the dominant voice of
organized labor by the American Federation of Labor (AFL), a group of
craft unions headed by Samuel Gompers, which was committed to working
within the existing economic system. The weakened Knights hobbled
along until 1917, when the union formally dissolved itself.
Harper's Weekly stood opposed to what they saw as the bullying
tactics of both organized labor and organized capital, although editor
George William Curtis considered the latter to be a more serious threat
to the American way of life. Nast's cartoon depicts a boycott
which a local unit of the Knights of Labor called in 1886 against Mrs. Gray's
Bakery in New York City. The union claimed she refused to allow
her workers to organize; Mrs. Gray insisted that the workers freely
chose not to join. The cartoonist presents the Knights as disheveled
rubes engaging in conduct contrary to the chivalrous code of their
medieval namesakes. The boycott is made to seem more ludicrously
inappropriate by the protester's comparison of the kindly-looking woman
to Jay Gould, the railroad mogul.
Robert C. Kennedy
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