Knights of Labor

Bread platter, 1876. Bakewell, Pears, & Co., Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Museum Purchase, 96.053. Photograph by David Bohl.

In 1869, Uriah S. Stephens (1821-1869), founded the Knights of Labor in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The organization, first named the Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor, replaced the unsuccessful Garment Cutters Union of Philadelphia. Historians recognize it as one of the largest labor organizations in America in the 1880s. In the beginning, the group chose members very selectively. At the time, the Order was sometimes called the “secret society of tailors.”

The Order was both a fraternal order and a labor union created to protect its members. The Order supported an eight-hour day, abolition of child labor, equal pay for equal work, and political reforms including the graduated income tax. The group was one of the first unions to advocate for all emerging industrial working class, such as women, some immigrant groups, and African Americans.

The Knights of Labor enjoyed immense popularity in the 1880s and reached 700,000 members by 1886. After some unsuccessful unionizing campaigns, deadly labor union rallies, and government efforts to impede labor organizing, members lost faith in the effectiveness of the Order as a labor union. Membership decreased by the late 1890s. The American Federation of Labor largely replaced the group by the early 1900s.

 This pressed glass bread platter in the Scottish Rite Masonic Museum & Library collection commemorates the Knights of Labor during the height of their popularity. The platter, probably manufactured by the Bakewell, Pears, & Co. of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1876, features symbols of industry and agriculture―a farmer with a sickle and sheaf of wheat, train and engine, horse, and ocean steam vessel. At center is a man with a hammer shaking hands with a knight, and the phrase “United We Stand, Divided We Fall.”

Bread platters like this one were an extremely popular form of tableware in the Victorian era. Glass manufacturers produced platters that commemorated or memorialized political figures, organizations, or events. 

Do you have any objects related to the Knights of Labor? Tell us about them in the comments section below. 

 

 

The Order of Railway Conductors and American Freemasonry’s Influence upon Labor Unions

One of my favorite objects in the collection of the Scottish Rite Masonic Museum & Library is this minute book from the Order of Railway Conductors (ORC), Lincoln Division, No. 206. Besides being one of my first acquisitions as the newly appointed Archivist for the Museum and Library in October of 2014, my research for this object provided me with a new appreciation for the work performed by railway conductors and in the role that these men played in the development of fraternalism.

Order of Railway Conductors Minute Book, Lincoln Division, No. 206, 1941-1960.		As I learned from this online exhibit by the National Museum of American History, the job of railroad conductor in the mid-nineteenth-century was much more difficult and important than I had originally imagined. In addition to collecting tickets, the conductor served as the train’s “captain.” He supervised the train’s crew and determined when a train “could safely depart” the station. He also was the person “in charge during emergencies,” such as train derailments. The conductor’s role was the equivalent of a ship’s captain in many ways, and many of the first men to become railway conductors in the “1830s had previously worked as steamboat or coastal packet captains.” In addition to the many duties mentioned above, a conductor’s workday was extremely long, highly dangerous, and offered little pay, and it was in response to these hardships that the first “Conductors Union” was formed by a young twenty-two year old conductor, T.J. Wright, in the spring of 1868 at Amboy, Illinois. While Wright’s fledgling organization only lasted a few months, his idea to organize quickly spread across North America, and by November 1868 the Conductors Brotherhood, the original name of the Order of Railway Conductors, was formed in December 1868 at Columbus, Ohio. The new organization “was not a labor union,” in the conventional sense, however, but a “fraternal benefit and temperance society” organized upon Masonic principles as historian Paul Michel Taillon explains in his book, Good, Reliable, White Men: Railroad Brotherhoods, 1877-1917. The typical ORC Division or local lodge was modelled after the Masonic Blue Lodge: An “altar with a copy of the Bible on it stood at the center of the brotherhood lodge room. At the far end of the room sat the lodge master, at his ‘station,’ on a raised platform with a table and gavel.”
Letter to the Members of Lincoln Division, 206, on the Passing of Brother Allton, February 1943.

​While fraternal and beneficial features always remained strong throughout the history of the Order of Railway Conductors, events within and without the organization would change it in significant ways. In the year 1890, the old leadership was replaced, and a “more aggressive program of trade regulation was adopted.” Furthermore, ORC would adopt the strike clause, which had previously been forbidden and punishable by expulsion from the Order. Technological changes in the railway industry also had a great impact upon the Order, which were only delayed by the outbreak of World War II. The conversion to diesel locomotion after the war brought “greater operating efficiency,” a Life Magazine article reported in 1949, and with this operating efficiency came a reduced need for the many men (and trains) that kept America moving. Placed within its historical context, this minute book by Lincoln Division, No. 206, covering the years 1941-1960, captures the postwar decline of the Order, which by 1969 had merged with the several small railway unions to form the United Transportation Union.

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Captions

Order of Railway Conductors Minute Book, Lincoln Division, No. 206, 1941-1960. Museum Purchase. Collection of the Scottish Rite Masonic Museum and Library, FR 200.001.

References

Ehrlich, Leslie, and Bob Russell. “Employment Security and Job Loss: Lessons from Canada's National Railways, 1956-1995.” Labour/Le Travail 51 (Spring 2003): 115-152. 

“Locomotive Graveyard” (1946). Life, December 5. https://books.google.com/books?id=VkEEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA155#v=onepage&q&f=false Accessed: 12 December 2015.

National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution (no date). “Railroad Conductor.” America on the Move: Lives on the Railroad. http://amhistory.si.edu/onthemove/exhibition/exhibition_9_5.html Accessed: 12 December 2015.

Order of Railway Conductors and Brakemen (1968). O.R.C & B., 1868-1968: Serving the Man on the Road for 100 Years. Cedar Rapid, Iowa: Order of Railway Conductors and Brakemen.

Steward, Estelle M. (1936). Conductors of America, Order of Railway. In Handbook of American Trade-Unions, (pp. 253-256). Washington, D.C.: United States. Bureau of Labor Statistics. https://books.google.com/books?id=iCGWrdBpT_8C&dq=%22order+of+railway+conductors%22&q=%22order+of+railway+conductors%22#v=onepage&q=%22Organized%20at%20mendota%22&f=false Accessed: 12 December 2015.

Taillon, Paul Michel (2009). Good, Reliable, White Men: Railroad Brotherhoods, 1877-1917. Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press.

James Green Speaks On "The Experience of Work in the American Industrial Age," Saturday, November 14 at 2 pm. Free

James Green writes, "How do you read this photograph of men working as stevedores on the New Orleans waterfront many years ago, before longshore work was mechanized? What do you see in the men’s eyes, in their posture? Photos like this are the subject of my lecture on Nov. 14 at the National Heritage Museum. They yield no obvious answers, but they do offer us a window into the worlds of work Americans inhabited in years past—worlds that have, in a visual sense, vanished from our national landscape. Scenes like this have not, of course, disappeared from the world scene and are common in many places where the work of commerce and trade, buying and selling, and making a living is still hand work, “stoop labor.” Photos of lost worlds of work are, like artifacts from archeology digs, available for interpretation and more: for adding the visual component to telling what was once called “labor’s untold story.” Historians have now written whole new chapters of that story—tales of working lives such photo can bring to life. Combing knowledge that comes from print documents and recorded testimonies with these images can help us interpret the world of work as previous generations of Americans experienced it, and help us see that in some subtle ways that world has not changed as much as it might seem."

James Green, professor of history and labor studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston, speaks on "The Experience of Work in the American Industrial Age: What Images Call Us to See and Imagine," Saturday, November 14 at 2 pm. He is also a labor activist and the well-known author of Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, The First Labor Movement and the Bombing That Divided Gilded Age America. The lecture complements “The Way We Worked: Photographs from the National Archives” now on view at the Museum. The lecture is free courtesy of the Lowell Institute.

 

Exhibition Images:

“Banana inspection,” ca. 1910.

Unknown photographer.

Courtesy National Archives

"Bib Mill No. 1, Macon, Ga.," 1909. Lewis Hine.
Courtesy National Archives

"The Way We Worked" Exhibition Explores America's Labor History

Work and the workplace have gone through enormous changes between the mid-19th century, when 60 percent of Americans made their living as farmers, and the late 20th century. “The Way We Worked,” a new traveling exhibition opening on June 6, features 86 photographs from the National Archives focusing on the history of work in America and documenting work clothing, locales, conditions, and conflicts. The exhibition is part of a 14-city national tour.

“The Way We Worked” is drawn from the National Archives, home to thousands of photographs of work and workplaces taken by government agencies for many reasons: to investigate factory safety, track construction progress, office training or to emphasize the continuing importance of humans in a technologically modern environment. The images featured in the exhibition, though possibly taken merely for purposes of record keeping, often reveal much more about how social forces such as immigration, gender, ethnicity, class, and technology have transformed the workforce.

The exhibition is divided into five sections:

• “Where We Worked” explores the places Americans worked, from farms to factories, mines to  restaurants, as well as how race and gender often determined roles and status.

• “How We Worked” examines the effects of technology and automation on the workplace with images of people on assembly lines or using their tools of trade.

• “What We Wore to Work” looks at the way uniforms serve as badges of authority and status, and help make occupations immediately identifiable.

• “Conflict at Work” looks back at not just the inevitable clashes between workers and managers over working conditions, wages, and hours, but also how social conflicts, such as segregation, have influenced the workplace.

• “Dangerous or Unhealthy Work” features many of the photographs taken by social reformers hoping to ban child labor, reduce the length of the work day and expose unsanitary workplaces.

Spanning the years 1857-1987, the images in the exhibition cover the entire range of photographs on the topic in the National Archives holdings. The exhibition will also present a video showing a variety of workplaces.

The National Archives and Records Administration serves American democracy by safeguarding and preserving the records of our Government, ensuring that the people can discover, use, and learn from this documentary heritage. Among the billions of records at the National Archives are more than 11 million still pictures in the Washington, DC, area alone. In addition, there are millions of photographs in the National Archives Presidential libraries and thousands more among the records held by regional records facilities.

"The Way We Worked," was created by the National Archives with the support of the Foundation for the National Archives, and is organized for travel by the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service (SITES).

Photos

"Bibb Mill No. 1, Macon GA.," 1909. Lewis Hine. Courtesy National Archives

"Canning Pineapple in Hawaii," 1928. Edgeworth. Courtesy National Archives