Founded in 1869 in Philadelphia as a secret society of workers, the Holy Order of the Knights of Labor first appeared in Maryland in 1878, both in Baltimore and in the coalfields of the western panhandle. The ideology of the national organization and the structure of its local units ("assemblies") differed substantially from those of the state's traditional trade unions.

Ideology and Structure
The national leaders of the Knights envisioned a cooperative society in which workers would own the factories, thus eliminating oppressive capitalist middlemen. They opposed the use of strikes in labor disputes in favor of arbitration. Membership in local assemblies was open to anyone except bankers, stockbrokers, gamblers, and liquor dealers with the proviso, however, that workers always constitute at least 75 percent of the membership. Local assemblies were initially organized geographically rather than by trade. All workers within a certain neighborhood, skilled or unskilled, were grouped together, theoretically for mutual support. An extensive lecture program attempted to educate workers in political economy and reveal to them their true condition.

Two aspects of this structure and ideology contributed to the eventual demise of the Knights of Labor in Maryland in the mid-1890s. First, workers were unwilling to give up the use of strikes, their weapon of last resort, and the national organization's stubborn failure to provide financial support during strikes led to much local resentment. Second, skilled and unskilled workers preferred organization by trade rather than by neighborhood and soon forced reluctant national leaders to permit the organization of trade assemblies. As a result, the Knights entered into a losing struggle with the established trade unions for predominance in labor affairs.

District 25 of the Knights—Maryland's Coal Region
As the nation emerged from the severe depression of 1873-1877, the Knights of Labor established District 25 comprising several assemblies with a total of 500 members who worked in the coalfields of Allegany and Garrett Counties. Contrary to the usual pattern, these assemblies were trade assemblies from the beginning. In late 1879, with support from unorganized miners, District 25 struck the coal operators and gained a substantial pay increase of ten cents a ton. A further strike in 1882, however, led to the importation of strikebreakers into the area. After five months without financial support from the national organization, the miners centered on Lonaconing began a piecemeal return to work on the companies' terms. Those centered on Frostburg, who wanted to hold out longer, thereafter believed that the Lonaconing men had betrayed their trust. The resulting resentment helped prevent any lasting or effective labor organization in the coalfields for the rest of the century. The Knights continued to claim members in the region for a time but gradually faded away.

District 42 of the Knights—Baltimore
Opposition by the Catholic Church impeded substantial growth in Baltimore until the Knights dropped their secrecy and quasi-religious trappings in the early 1880s. James Cardinal Gibbons of Baltimore aided by persuading the Vatican to tolerate the Knights, and Catholic workers increasingly joined the movement.

Slow but steady growth continued until 1886, a year marked nationally by a great labor upheaval. The Knights had won a strike against the railroads of financier Jay Gould, and unorganized workers, especially the unskilled, flocked to an inspiring new champion able to negotiate on an equal footing with one of the nation's most powerful capitalists. The Knights increased their membership from 100,000 to 700,000 in the nation, and labor organizations in Baltimore increased fourfold.

Both the Knights' and the trade unions' principal goal in 1886 was a reduction of the typical workday from ten to eight hours. Strikes were frequent, and while only a few unions and assemblies gained an eight-hour day, thousands of workers gained a reduction to nine hours. A cross-class alliance of assemblies, unions, clergy, state officials, middle-class politicians, and such businessmen as Enoch Pratt, forced a bill through the legislature reducing the workday of Baltimore's suffering streetcar workers to twelve hours from a typical day of thirteen to eighteen hours. Another cross-class alliance of merchants and store clerks started a short-lived movement for early closing of the city's stores.

Ominously for Baltimore's workers, the two largest strikes for an eight-hour day ended in defeat for the furniture workers' and carpenters' assemblies. Some black-listed furniture workers then established a worker-owned cooperative furniture factory that survived for about two years. Despite the ideological predilection of the national leaders for worker-owned factories, experiments by the city's Knights-in cooperative production of tinware, glassware, cigarettes, barrels, garments, and a German-language newspaper all failed.

In the fall of 1886, the Knights shifted from strikes to independent labor politics. Their Industrial Party went down to defeat in the city council elections, however, with a scant 18 percent of the vote in wards where their candidates did not receive the endorsement of the city's minority Republicans. Never again did Baltimore's workers stake their hopes on independent labor politics.

Failure of another strike against Jay Gould's railroads in late 1886 led to desertion of the Knights by most unskilled workers and many skilled workers. The Knights' only major accomplishment thereafter was a successful campaign in 1890 for a law mandating secret ballots in political elections. In the mid-1890s, the weakened Knights, under the leadership of Jacob G. Schonfarber, unsuccessfully struggled with the unions over representation of workers in Baltimore's important men's clothing industry, including the city's sweatshops. In the early twentieth century the Knights ceased to exist in Maryland and in the nation.

Harvey, Katherine A. The Best-Dressed Miners, Life and Labor in the Maryland Coal Region, 1835-1910. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1969.

Weir, Robert E. Beyond Labor's Veil: The Culture of the Knights of Labor. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996.