Two Views of the Knights of Labor Centennial Symposium, Chicago, May 1979

Abstract

If THERE was a whipping boy for scholars attending the Chicago symposium it was surely Gerald N. Grob, author of the 1961 Workers and Utopia: A Study of Ideological Conflict in the American Labor Movement, 1865-1900. Grob's argument is that for most of the nineteenth century, American labour was trapped by a Jeffersonian ideology that deluded workers into believing that they could escape industrial wage earner status and regain the spirit of indi vidual entrepreneurship by means of a host of reform schemes like agrarianism, greenbackism, and producers' cooperatives. The Knights of Labor was but the last manifestation of this recurrent delusion. According to Grob, only the leaders of the new American Federation of Labor saw that the true path lay in the direction of collective bargaining. After a hard struggle with the backward looking Knights, they set American labour firmly on that course. If Grob was explicitly excoriated, members of the symposium also levelled a good deal of implicit criticism at Gabriel Kolko for the very unflattering portrait of the late nineteenth-century working class contained in his recent Main Currents in Modern American History. His defenceless, polyglot work ers were going nowhere at all. Instead they were constantly buffetted by forces beyond their control, and these forces included most labour leaders. In place of Grob's individualism and Kolko's negativism, the fresh crop of historians offer something new. Clearly forsaking the institutional approach, they search behind the facade of the official Knights and find an authentic working-class culture. It is a culture forged out of the hard experiences of ordinary people in the Gilded Era, native and immigrant, black and white, alike. The strikes and organizations of the period are but a manifestation of this culture. Clearly the inspiration for such an approach is E.P. Thompson, author of The Making of the English Working Class, and his American interpreters, Herbert Gutman and David Montgomery, two of the leaders of the symposium, and, I believe, the mentors of several of those who contributed papers. In general their argument would run something like this. By the mid-1880s, a time of unemployment and cutbacks in wages, the depredations of a rising industrial capitalism had become alarmingly felt by communities of workers the length and breadth of the land. It was felt, not just in economic terms, but in