The Idea of an Essay, Volume 3

Research Writing 187 eight-hour workday strikes (Kemmerer 219). However, even with its prominent leaders opposed to the Federation of Trade and Labor’s tactics, both laborers and the press often confused the Knights of Labor, the most well-known union of its day, with other, lesser- known labor organizations agitating for the eight-hour workday (Phelan 1). Summarizing this confusion in his autobiography, Powderly wrote, “Men were rushed into the order so rapidly … that they, in many instances, did not know that the Federation of Trades and the Knights were [not] identical” (143). Kemmerer and Wickersham postulate that this confusion contributed to the organization’s surging growth in the 1880s (219). Just as rapid as the organization’s rise to prominence was its precipitous fall. On May 4, 1886, the Knights of Labor were involved in a series of protests inChicago. Near the end of a rally inHaymarket Square, police arrived to disperse the crowd (Messer-Kruse et al 39). As the crowd of workers began to dissolve, an unidentified individual threw an explosive device at the oncoming police officers. The square erupted into chaos as the police attempted to assess the situation and the panicked crowd fled the area. By the end of the night, seven police officers were dead and several more had been wounded (39). In the following weeks, the police arrested several members of an anarchist group in connection with the bombing. The newspapers and political figures of the day generally associated the Knights of Labor with the incident, although the organization was in no reasonably discernable way connected to the anarchists. As the fallacious stories of the Knights’ anarchist tendencies spread, thousands of workers abandoned the metaphorically sinking ship. Under attack by business interests, and plagued by internal power struggles and dissension, the organization began to lose popularity among workers. Powderly’s notable charisma was ultimately not enough to keep the Knights together as the organization began to disintegrate in the 1890s (Phelan 230). Just as it was the misconception of the Order as the organization behind the eight-hour workday strikes that first propelled the Knights into the spotlight of the labor movement, it was the misconception that the Knights were part of an anarchist movement that caused its downfall. Thus, almost poetically, the eventual demise of the Knights of Labor came at the very hands that delivered it into fame. The Knights of Labor, which Uriah Stephens began as a small organization in 1869, became famous through the leadership