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

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 working-women 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 :he 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...