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The Noble Order of the Knights of Labor was the most ambitious and significant labor organization of the Gilded Age. As the charismatic leader of this group, Terence Powderly was America's first nationally known labor leader, the first to achieve a high degree of recognition from working people, industrialists, and politicians across the continent. To most Americans, Powderly was the Knights of Labor. Based on an exhaustive examination of Powderly's voluminous correspondence, this book offers a critical analysis of Powderly's efforts to oversee the most spectacular experiment in class-wide solidarity ever undertaken. Phelan paints a sympathetic and probing portrait of a complex figure caught...
The author is convinced that there is a ruling class in America today. He examines the American power structure as it has developed in the 1980s. He presents systematic, empirical evidence that a fixed group of privileged people dominates the American economy and government. The book demonstrates that an upper class comprising only one-half of one percent of the population occupies key positions within the corporate community. It shows how leaders within this "power elite" reach government and dominate it through processes of special-interest lobbying, policy planning and candidate selection. It is written not to promote any political ideology, but to analyze our society with accuracy.
The Adelphon Kruptos is the secret ritual manual of the Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor, a working class secret society which grew into the first mass trade union in North America. Founded in 1869, it grew to 800,000 members, 20% of all the workers in America, by its height in 1886. It was notable for including women and men, black, brown and white workers (although, to its lasting shame, not Asian-origin workers). Advancing a co-operative socialism, an ethical and cultural approach rather than a Marxist or class-conflict approach, it was unable to cope with the intensification of class conflict after the depression of the 1880s and collapsed. The ritual manual shows the crossov...
DIVThis ms studies class and race boundaries, and interracial political coalitions, in two significant 19th century social movements--the Knights of Labor and the Populist movement./div
Knights Across the Atlantic tells the story of the Knights of Labor, one of the great social movements of American history, in Britain and Ireland.
An exploration of the ideological conflicts and practical experiences of late-nineteenth-century American workers who pursued "cooperation" as an alternative to "competitive" capitalism. Between 1865 and 1890, in the aftermath of the Civil War, virtually every important American labor reform organization advocated "cooperation" over "competitive" capitalism and several thousand cooperatives opened for business during this era. The men and women who built cooperatives were practical reformers and they established businesses to stabilize their work lives, families, and communities. Yet they were also utopians--envisioning a world free from conflict where workers would receive the full value of...
Newly arrived in New York in 1882 from Tsarist Russia, the sixteen-year-old Bernard Weinstein discovered an America in which unionism, socialism, and anarchism were very much in the air. He found a home in the tenements of New York and for the next fifty years he devoted his life to the struggles of fellow Jewish workers. The Jewish Unions in America blends memoir and history to chronicle this time. It describes how Weinstein led countless strikes, held the unions together in the face of retaliation from the bosses, investigated sweatshops and factories with the aid of reformers, and faced down schisms by various factions, including Anarchists and Communists. He co-founded the United Hebrew ...
Hild shows that the Populist (or People's) Party, the most important third party of the 1890s, established itself most solidly in Texas, Alabama, and, under the guise of the earlier Union Labor Party, Arkansas, where farmer-labor political coalitions from the 1870s to mid-1880s had laid the groundwork for populism's expansion.