The Knights of Labor were one of the first big national labor organizations in the United States, active mainly in the late 19th century and known for trying to unite a very broad range of workers into one movement.

Who were the Knights of Labor?

  • They were founded in 1869 in Philadelphia as the “Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor,” a secret society of workers created to protect members from employer retaliation.
  • The key early leader was Uriah Smith Stephens; later, Terence V. Powderly became the most famous national leader and helped turn it into a mass organization.
  • By the mid‑1880s they had grown rapidly, reaching several hundred thousand members, with a peak around 800,000 workers across thousands of local assemblies.

What did they stand for?

  • Their core idea was to organize “all who toil,” bringing together skilled and unskilled workers, immigrants, railroad workers, steel and coal workers, and many others in one big organization instead of separate craft unions.
  • They were unusually inclusive for their time: many assemblies admitted women and workers of different races, though practices varied locally.
  • They pushed for an eight‑hour workday, limits on child labor, safer workplaces, and a more democratic economy, often talking about a future “cooperative commonwealth” with worker‑owned enterprises and less power for big monopolies.

How were they different from other unions?

  • At first they were secret, with rituals and signs meant to keep employers from targeting members, but they gradually became more public in the 1880s as they grew.
  • Unlike many later unions that focused on specific trades, the Knights acted both as a broad labor federation and a reform movement, backing cooperatives and independent labor‑oriented political efforts.
  • They officially discouraged strikes—Powderly called them a “relic of barbarism”—but local groups sometimes struck on their own, and a few high‑profile strike victories helped fuel their rapid growth.

Why did they decline?

  • After expanding explosively in the mid‑1880s, the organization’s loose structure made it hard to manage conflicts, local disputes, and negotiations with employers.
  • The Haymarket affair in 1886, when a labor rally in Chicago turned deadly after a bomb exploded, triggered a powerful backlash against the labor movement generally, and public opinion often linked this turmoil—fairly or not—to groups like the Knights.
  • Competition and jurisdictional battles with the emerging American Federation of Labor (AFL), plus internal strain, led to a rapid loss of members; by the 1890s the Knights had largely faded as a major force.

Why do they matter today?

  • Historians often describe the Knights of Labor as the first truly mass working‑class organization in the U.S., a precursor to later unions and labor coalitions.
  • Many goals they championed—like shorter hours, safer conditions, and protections for ordinary workers—helped shape later labor reforms that are now taken for granted.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.