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Anti-caste and Darwinian liberalism were not the only important civic discourses in late 19th-century America. Another important alternative was producer republicanism, which argued that the new form of corporate capitalism that had developed in the wake of the Civil War had so undermined the economic bases of citizenship that it threatened to destroy the foundation of the American republic. The rapid growth of corporate capital, republicans asserted, had divided American society into two great classes marked by enormous disparities of wealth and power. Within the labor movement, an organization known as the Knights of Labor represented producer republicanism's most powerful expression, particularly during the Knights' period of greatest strength in the early to mid-1880s. Its most important counterpart in the agrarian sphere was Populism. Although neither the labor nor the agrarian movement was able to attain national political power and implement the majority of the legal and policy reforms that they advocated, their size and prominence nonetheless made them an important part of late 19th-century American politics.

The successive collapses of the Knights of Labor and Populism during the 1880s–90s officially ended producer republicanism in the United States. In particular, the presidential election of 1896 supported the development of three institutional arrangements that played a primary role in creating a more unequal society and a more constricted political universe: the dominance of the highly conservative American Federation of Labor within the labor movement, the establishment of Jim Crow segregation and the “solid South”, and the contraction of the popular bases of electoral politics. Through these primary mechanisms, the scope and aspirations of American liberalism were dramatically contracted. Although the ensuing Progressive Era would achieve some important reforms, this triumph of Darwinian liberalism reinforced the cultural and political dominance of a newly differentiated form of racial hierarchy, a broad endorsement of social and economic inequality, and a narrow and exclusionary conception of citizenship.

This chapter explores the later decades of the 19th century, when women's factory labor was no longer a novelty, and industrial and class tensions were becoming increasingly the focus of reforming writers. While working women continued to seek lives that satisfied the needs of body and spirit, middle-class women novelists and male fiction writers for the Knights of Labor offered them literary models of religious sublimation rather than the more secular salvation of intellectual culture. Educated and more affluent women, like Rebecca Harding Davis, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and Louisa May Alcott — who sympathized keenly with working women's material deprivation, and who struggled to vindicate their own creative ambitions — nevertheless recommended Christianity and its otherworldly rewards rather than the mental and artistic subjectivity they were themselves trying to assert. One notable exception to the consolations of religion was Marie Howland's utopian and communitarian novel, The Familistere (1874), which challenged not only religious piety as a female virtue but also conventional attitudes towards sexuality, capitalism, and private property. In doing so, she anticipated some of the more radical working-class attitudes of the generation of immigrant women who followed her.

This chapter examines the rise of the Central Labor Union (CLU) and Henry George's ascendant influence among workers in New York City. In the fall of 1882, George set sail for New York City. He would soon discover that his most enthusiastic following in the United States was among poor, urban workers. As soon as word spread that he was returning to the city, the CLU held two separate receptions upon his arrival in an attempt to lay claim to George and his message. This chapter considers the CLU's initiatives designed to promote working-class republicanism, including the invention of Labor Day, carefully orchestrated testimonies before the traveling Senate committee, and the formation of an independent labor party called the United Labor Party, along with education, union building, and strikes and boycotts. It also discusses the CLU's efforts to reassert labor's place within the republican polity, focusing on three critical realms of state oppression: the police, the courts, and the New York State Legislature. Finally, it looks at the rise of the Knights of Labor in New York.

This chapter discusses the alliances formed by the people of the New South. Of particular importance was the Patrons of Husbandry with almost a quarter of a million members. They were also known as the Grange. Some of their most active offshoots were the Agricultural Wheel and the Brothers of Freedom from Arkansas which later joined to form the group called the Wheel. Other groups were formed called the Farmer's Alliance and Knights of Labor which became dominant alliances during that time. This chapter discusses the effects that these alliances had on the New South. Farmers wielded more power due to such alliances. The newspapers had a big hand in aiding alliances by publishing the reforms and statements of importance, thus, making it foremost in the minds of the members.

This chapter focuses on the regional leadership networks that enabled coal miners of Central Pennsylvania to pursue their activism during the years 1875–1882. After the strike and trial of 1875, Central Pennsylvania's coal miner activists searched for more legal, or at least more safe, forms of power. This chapter considers how Central Pennsylvania's coal miners shifted their day-to-day labor activism from pit committees to broader fields of endeavor, particularly by turning to small, secretive Local Assemblies of the Noble and Holy Knights of Labor and to the Greenback Labor Party in the 1878 election. It examines how coal miners refined their roles as regional leaders and as intermediaries between miners and operators that both sides could trust. It also discusses the strikes of 1880 and 1882 in which coal miners sought to coordinate wages across the Maryland and Pennsylvania coalfields.

This chapter charts the conflicts that erupted between those unions and British branches of the Knights of Labor. Between 1884 and 1894, an American working-class movement named the Knights of Labor set up more than thirty branches across Britain and Ireland. In that time the Knights organised more than ten thousand members, and contributed to epochal changes in the British trade union movement and in British labour politics. They also faced serious opposition from British unions that resented the Knights’ incursion into their trades and industries. Knights suffered first from battles with craft unions, and then, after the so-called “new unionism” brought large numbers of hitherto unorganised workers into the British union movement, from battles with many of the “new” unions. This chapter argues that the Knights lost these battles because their organisational model, and their reliance on help from an ailing movement in the United States, cut against the sweeping changes that transformed the British labour movement in the late nineteenth century – the growth of national unions and local labour federations in particular. In some cases, the Knights were undone by the very organisations that they had inspired or helped to create.

By the mid-point of the Gilded Age, Chicago’s working-class communities had become hotbeds of alternative Christianities. To be sure, many wage earners were faithful churchgoers who eschewed class activism. But what had begun in the 1860s and 1870s as a narrow stream of working-class discontent with the institutional churches widened during the Great Upheaval of the mid-1880s into a churning river. Throughout those turbulent years surrounding the incident at Haymarket Square, trade unionists, radicals, and Knights of Labor challenged the cozy ties between the city’s Christian and industrial elite. Championing more egalitarian readings of the gospel, in which Jesus, a carpenter, stood in judgment over industrial modernity, they sustained and elaborated a growing tradition of working-class social Christianity. Church leaders continued to shrug off wage earners’ criticisms. But as the chorus of dissent grew louder in the years leading up to the century’s end, even the most recalcitrant of divines would be forced to take heed.

In only ten years the Knights of Labor helped to reshape the British labour movement and won several major successes at a local level as well. The conclusion addresses their achievements, and the wider significance of the Knights of Labor within global labour history. The Knights represented an alternative, and a powerful one at that, to the subsequent development of international working-class movements such as the Second International and the International Trade Secretariats. Yet the Knights themselves, especially through bodies such as the Universal Federation of Window-Glass Workers, contributed as well to the development of those movements. The conclusion ends by locating the Knights as part of a long transatlantic radical tradition that still has its representatives today.

This chapter focuses on the period 1870–1930 in Birmingham, Alabama, which was marked by industrialization and the rise of organized labor. The newly created industrial complex in Birmingham attracted thousands of men and women who comprised the cheap labor force from which local capitalists could make their fortunes. Yet the city's proletariat was by no means docile, with many having some experience of organizing. The Knights of Labor and the Greenback-Labor party, for instance, established a tradition of militant, interracial unionism among Birmingham coal-miners. The United Mine Workers of Alabama (UMW) were able to organize Birmingham workers until the body was crushed during the coal miners' strike in 1894. Late in the decade, the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) reinvigorated organized labor in Alabama's coal mines and began a campaign to rebuild the union.

The vast majority of longshore laborers in Portland in the twentieth century were Irish and Catholic. As such, the Roman Catholic Church and the hierarchy in Portland would play a significant role in labor relations in the city. Bishops Healey, O'Connell, and Walsh, all Irish themselves, each insinuated himself and the authority of the church into labor relations in Portland and beyond. Of particular local interest is the confrontation between Bishop Healey and Terence V. Powderly, leader of the Knights of Labor. Also, the Longshore Strike of 1921 involved Bishop Walsh directly with the union. The rise of Nativism, and the Ku Klux Klan in particular, is addressed here.

In this chapter Deborah Beckel reconsiders historians' analyses of the Knights of Labor in Gilded Age North Carolina. Based on new research, it reframes interpretations of labor's role in the rise of Populism. Reevaluating race, class, gender, and power relations within and among the Knights of Labor, Farmers' Alliance, and People's Party movements, it shows how black and white men and women, including Ellen Williams, shaped interracial, cross-class, and cross-gender activism. It reexamines the ways that grassroots African-American leaders communicated with state and national leaders, including Marion Butler, Elias Carr, and John Hayes. The chapter rethinks the roles of the Knights of Labor and the Republican Party in North Carolina's fusion coalition. It reassesses the meanings of the Republican-Populist political victories of the 1890s.

This chapter examines the labor unrest that rocked the United States in 1886 and prompted Henry George to wonder whether the country was “in danger of revolution”. The year 1886 unfolded as one of the most tumultuous in American history. The number of strikes that year was nearly triple the average of those that took place in the years 1881–1885. The number of boycotts imposed likewise exploded. In early March of that year, 200,000 workers, most of them affiliated with the Knights of Labor, commenced a massive railroad strike against the lines owned by Jay Gould, one of the nation's most notorious capitalists. Workers across the country then participated in the largest protest in the nation's history. It was a protest for the eight-hour workday, culminating in the Haymarket Square riot in Chicago. George hoped the mounting crisis would force political leaders to pay some attention to his single tax solution. Taken as a whole, these events transformed the often abstract ideas and ideological tenets of working-class republicanism into a cold, harsh reality.

This chapter considers Philadelphia's transit workers: their daily work, their relations with the system's owners, and their early efforts at unionization. Transit workers faced harsh conditions on the job and for their efforts received low pay and little respect. To improve their lot, they turned to organized labor, first with the Knights of Labor and then the Amalgamated Association of Street and Electric Railway Employees—“the Amalgamated,” a member of the American Federation of Labor (AFL). Overall, Philadelphia's transit workers found strong support among working-class residents of the city, but they lived in a difficult era marked by widespread class conflict, state repression, and organized corporate power embodied most conspicuously by the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM).

This chapter examines the compromise between coal operators and coal miners of Central Pennsylvania that enabled them to achieve prosperity and ideological consistency—two things that the railroads, the Knights of Labor, and national federations of miners had promised but failed to deliver. In particular, it considers how the coal operators and coal miners attempted to create a limited set of associations and agreements separate from the railroads in 1886. It also provides an overview of the Great Upheaval of 1886, a year characterized by violence, class conflict, and transition as well as national strikes for the eight-hour day, urban unrest, mass protest, and the bombing at Chicago's Haymarket Square. Finally, it explores mass labor activism in Central Pennsylvania between 1883 to 1886 and the steps taken by coal operators to challenge railroad power, including the formation of a Central Pennsylvania coal operators' organization, the Seaboard Coal Association, and giving recognition to limited coal miner associations.

This chapter explores the practices and ideologies of food co-ops established prior to the Great Depression. Before the Civil War, most buying clubs and food co-ops were formed by workingmen's associations to resolve unfair working conditions and wages as well as high food prices. After 1865, labor groups such as the Knights of St. Crispin, the Knights of Labor, and the Sovereigns of Industry renewed their interest in cooperatives, hoping to replace capitalism with cooperation. Their working-class solidarity fostered their hope for economic democracy through the creation of co-ops. This interest in food cooperatives occurred alongside the growth in grocery chain stores nationally. In most cases, grocery chain stores outsell smaller stores and co-ops in ethnic neighborhoods through lower prices and customer selection. But in other cases, members remain loyal to their co-ops.

This chapter is an introduction to the community, culture, and class relations of Greater Kensington. It delineates its history, the development of industries and institutions, the different people who migrated to the area, and the interactions among them. The chapter serves to situate the hosiery industry within the textile industry, and the hosiery union within the larger community and within the context of its long, transnational labor relations. It discusses the origins of the union within the Knights of Labor.

Proponents of social evolution blurred boundaries between commerce and Christianity after the Civil War, championing Christian work as a means to economic growth, republican liberty, and national prosperity. Meanwhile, workers invoked Christ to condemn patronizing attitudes toward labor, and by organizing labor unions to hold capitalists accountable to Pauline ideals of social membership. Influenced by organic theories of social organization that traced modern corporations to medieval institutions, U.S. courts began recognizing corporations as natural persons protected by rights guaranteed in the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which had originally be crafted to protect the rights of African Americans.