Against Masters and Money Power

Abstract

This chapter illustrates how the Knights of Labor used Civil War memory to construct organizational culture and promote specific workplace campaigns. Believing the issue of “slavery” (economic domination) unsettled, Knights saw themselves as the rightful heirs of the abolitionists and Radical Republicans. They established affiliate groups for worker-veterans, including the Blue and Gray Association of the Knights of Labor, and expanded the use of antislavery metaphors. Yet the order’s labor republicanism, and the turn by some members toward radicalism, alienated veteran-labor auxiliaries from mainstream veterans’ organizations, notably the Grand Army of the Republic.