The Knights Of Unity Summary

“The Bonds of Unity: The Knights of Labor in Ontario, 1880-1890”
Written by: Gregory S. Kealey and Bryan D. Palmer
Reviewed by: Cindy Kambeitz

This article is presented as a thorough history of the Knights of Labor in Ontario, Canada's most industrialized province, in the late nineteenth century. It examines the rise and fall of the Knights, an organization which embodied a late nineteenth century working class vision of an alternative to the developing industrial capitalist society. Surveying the massive organizational successes of the knights of Labor in Ontario, it argues that for a brief moment in the mid 1880s the Knights built a movement culture of resistance to industrial capitalist society that held out the notion of a different form of social organization. One built on co-operation, democracy and producers power. As such, Kealey and Palmer claim the movement influenced the working class culture of that time like no other.
Through general remembrance statements, the article attributes the “enthusiasm” for the Knights of Labor movement in part to the fascination in ritualism, secrecy and symbolism surrounding the order.
The movement’s structure is explained to have given the worker a feeling they were involved in more of a cultural crusade than a conventional trade union, denoting a feeling of brotherhood and change. Or as noted by John Peebles, former mayor of Hamilton “a crusade for purity in life generally”.1 The article examines the various occupations involved in the movement as the Knights drew a range of workers together, increasing their bargaining power and providing them with a pride in their work. Examples of their traditions were analyzed - secret societies and fraternal brotherhoods, using pageantry and oaths to strengthen their
influence.
The article does indeed present the Knights as representing a movement culture, in that they articulated a social alternative, based around “qualitative shift in the orientation of the working class. The order took the raw material of a class culture – ambiguous, fragmented and unfocused – and moulded it into a movement culture of opposition and alternative”.2 Not only that, this alternate social vision managed to swiftly build a strong cultural base, with Palmer claiming (although with very little evidence) that it is entirely possible that the Knights drew “20-40 per cent of all employed workers” in large industrial cities .3 The Provicial Workmen's Association also had influence during that time, however, was much more closely tied to its roots in mining, and was nowhere near as successful in recruiting the range of different workers than the Knights did.4 Perhaps most importantly, the Knights produced a mass front – cultural, social, political and militant – that analyzed the lives of working people in terms of class.
This article was an exhaustive survey of the Knights history and would have benefitted from some editorial pruning to invite the reader's close attention. Despite Kealey & Palmer's extensive historical review, the full extent of the good that has been done by the Order of the Knights of Labor can never truley be known. However, their successes and failures surveyed in this article had significant influence in shaping the rights of today’s working class employees.

Notes
1. Gregory S. Kelley and Bryan D. Palmer, The Bonds of Unity: The Knights of Labor in Ontario, 1880-1900, Histoire Sociale- Social History XIV, No. 28 (November 1981): 369-411.
2. Kealey & Palmer, The Bonds of Unity: 391
3. Kealey & Palmer, The Bonds of Unity: 388
4. Frank, David & Kealey, Gregory S. Labour and Working Class History in Atlantic Canada: A Reader (St. John's, 1988).