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Knights across the Atlantic: The Knights of Labor in Britain and Ireland by Steven Parfitt

2018; Duke University Press; Volume: 15; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/15476715-7127539

1558-1454

Paul Buhle,

Labor Movements and Unions

The Knights of Labor, until recently studied largely if not exclusively in the US and Canadian context, is now belatedly gaining a much-needed global framework. Famed for its mass membership of up to a half million in the mid-1880s, across large parts of the United States, and also lauded for its inclusion of women and (at least some) African Americans, the Knights’ record is also notorious for its rapid downfall. Generations of labor historians including Gerald Grob, working from a “John R. Commons” framework, had an easy answer: only the “pure and simple” business unionism of Sam Gompers and the AFL could possibly succeed. American prosperity or at least generational and geographical mobility, according to the theory, militated against any other possibility.The generation of historians entering the field during the 1960s and 1970s, prominently including Leon Fink and Peter Rachleff, perceived the flaw in this deeply conservative set of conclusions. Interest in gender and race, a certain revival of scholarship on the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and a fresh look at the cost of institutional conservatism to American working people at large—not to mention the impoverished of the world suffering from the global role of AFL supporting US policies—had already changed the intellectual context of study. Here and there, an existing set of fairly discrete studies on labor in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand pointed to contracts and influences in all directions. The further globalization of study, if perhaps not especially for the Knights, offers more food for thought and further research.Knights across the Atlantic advances our understanding in ways both small and large. To take one of the former, the Irish, Scottish, Welsh, and English workers awaiting the arrival of Terrence Powderly in the late 1880s and 1890s were destined to be disappointed: his proclivity toward seasickness would hamper regular visitation! Moving to the big issues, we learn about the many ways in which the Knights made sense, enlarging the scope of unionism beyond the craft union level, and actually preparing the way for the more inclusive “new unionism” to come.The details are not so much devilish as fascinating and contradictory. The Knights of the United Kingdom, to take a single example, did not encompass workingwomen in any great numbers. Nor did they much follow the teetotalism of Powderly and his intimate followers, choosing instead to meet and greet in taverns, as the safest place to hide from the watchful eyes of factory owners’ agents. If the Knights in the United States were infamously, in some places overwhelmingly, of Irish stock, interacting with sentiment (and even plots) for Irish independence, the movements across the Atlantic tended toward a blurring of the “national question.” Perhaps most of all, the British and Irish Knights lacked a monumental enemy, a personage like Gompers, who ran roughshod over his rivals within the new AFL but also freely broke the strikes, in combination with employers and often the police, of rival federations and independent unions.The undramatic defeat of those Knights across the Atlantic, then, was more piecemeal and localized, a slippage from some early gains in scattered localities, an inability to win masses of workers across any region, and a stifled sense of anything like momentum. If this seems less than monumental, Parfitt offers wonderful details, often drawn out of local newspapers. In doing so, he offers a fascinating formulation about the US effect and its lasting consequences. Early on, British unionists and reformers had viewed the seemingly less class-ridden American society admiringly, as offering the social and political framework for democratization in their own lands. Later on, as the deep conservatism and exclusionary perspectives of Gompers and the AFL sunk in, British and Irish unionists took note: the United States was not such a model after all.There are many other qualities of Knights across the Atlantic that make this book an appealing source for scholars. Most crucial is the sheer bibliographical richness of the references far and wide. Robert Weir’s Down Under: The Knights of Labor in New Zealand (2009), for instance, had not caught up with me. Alongside the new references, Parfitt provides an almost overwhelming bibliography of older and other newer works, not only monographs, but also book chapters and dissertations. It seems to me as if the effort involved in the Knights of Labor conference organized by Herbert Gutman in 1978 has been vindicated: the subject will never again slip far from labor historians’ attention.One might complain that the political implications for socialist and radical movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries occupy a small role here. In the United States especially, the IWW not only drew on similar inspirations as the Knights, but some of the same gendered industries (women workers in textiles, for instance) found a new generation of activists—occasionally even the same activists—in the field forty years later. What is true for the United States, in this regard, is true for the United Kingdom and Ireland (also New Zealand) in other respects. Prone to odd bouts of sectarianism, the British and Irish socialist movements, when successful, emphasized “solidarity” in place of craft divisions, and alongside solidarity, education, a collective self-improvement with a commitment the former Knights and their supporters could readily share. James Connolly, the Irish agitator, IWW devotee, scholar, and romantic poet, would bring that legacy into the twentieth century. In short, there could be no industrial radicalism without the saga of the Knights, as there could be none without opposition to political conservatism and narrow nationalism of Gompers and his British counterparts. Our thanks go to Steven Parfitt for his important contribution to labor history.