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The Songs of the Knights of Labor

From the 1870s, the Knights of Labor knew the power of song to knit together a movement. The Knights reported joyous singing scattered throughout its meetings. Glee clubs, bands, and quartets made up significant components of the local unions, uniting workers across the bounds of literacy. Songbooks, broadsides, and clippings testify to the role music played in union building and solidarity. The Knights’ first songbook appeared in 1886. In the lyrics are found the values and virtues of fraternalism and the significance of the Order. Songs focused on corruption, greed, hypocrisy, tyranny, and workers’ need to unite to bring things right. These early songs form a part of America’s legacy of social protest.

DOCUMENT 1

“Storm the Fort”

This rousing anthem, written in 1882 by Thomas W. “Old Beeswax” Taylor and sung during the Homestead lockout, became the trademark song of the Knights of Labor. It lays out the Knights’ vision of a new economic landscape in which the producers have replaced the idle rich and created a new political and social order.

Chorus

Toiling millions now are waking,

See them marching on:

All the tyrants now are shaking,

Ere their power is gone.

Chorus

Storm the fort ye Knights of Labor,

Battle for your cause;

Equal rights for every neighbor

Down with tyrant laws!

Lazy drones steal all the honey

From hard labor’s hives;

Bankers control the nation’s money

And destroy our lives.

Chorus

Do not load the workman’s shoulder

With an unjust debt;

Do not let the rich bondholder

Live by blood and sweat.

Chorus

Why should those who fought for freedom

Wear old slavery’s chains?

Working men will quickly break them

When they use their brains.

Source: Robert Weir, Beyond Labor’s Veil: The Culture of the Knights of Labor (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), 103.

DOCUMENT 2

“The Noble Knights of Labor”

The Knights celebrated its history in song, going back to its founding in 1869 and celebrating Uriah Stephens, the Order’s first leader. By using song as oral history, the Knights kept its origins alive.

In the year of sixty-nine they commenced to fall in line,

The great Knights, the noble Knights of Labor.

Like the good old Knights of old, they cannot be bought or sold.

U.S. Stephens was the man this great order once began

The great Knights, the noble Knights of Labor.

And he started what they say is the strongest band today

The great Knights, the noble Knights of Labor.

Bless the mind that gave them birth, they’re the finest men on Earth.

Source: Philip S. Foner, American Labor Songs of the Nineteenth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975), 148.

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DOCUMENT 3

“The Knights of Labor Song”

Kansas Knight Francis Goodwin penned this rousing song. Exhorting workers to organize, the Knights of Labor sang of vanquishing its foes and achieving justice. The song underlines the radical vision of the Knights, who wanted, in the words of a recent historian, “not just a larger piece of the pie, but a new recipe for a different kind of pie.”

Ye valiant Knights of Labor, rise,

Unfurl your banners to the skies,

And go to work and organize.

Until the world is won.

See the lordly nabobs* quake,

See the politicians shake,

Labor now is wide awake.

Justice will be done.

*The rich.

Source: Weir, Beyond Labor’s Veil, 111–12.

DOCUMENT 4

“Organize the Hosts of Labor”

Will Minnick, a coal miner from Iowa, wrote in this song about the universality of the Knights’ cause. Note that he includes industrial laborers, miners, and farmers as brother toilers who will organize and depose the nonproducing owners.

Organize the hosts of labor

In one common brotherhood

He who drives the locomotive

And the one who turns the sod.

Those who dig the dusky diamonds,

And produce the shining gold.

Those in factory and in workshop,

Bring them to the shepherd’s fold. . . .

Give them through united effort,

Organize and drill with care

In the tactics of our Order

Knighthood teaches everywhere.

Moving on in one direction,

Labor’s cause to guard and guide

By the wise and wholesome council

Each assembly shall provide.

Source: Weir, Beyond Labor’s Veil, 112–13.

DOCUMENT 5

“Only the Working Class”

The Knights of Labor employed Leonora Barry to organize women workers. At its peak, there were 50,000 female Knights. But male attitudes toward manliness and the fraternal ties that bound workers clashed with the women’s belief in class over gender solidarity. An Ontario “sister” argued in the following lines that women made good Knights and had a key role to play in the struggle to liberate the working class.

It is not any woman’s part

We often hear folks say,

And it will mar our womanhood

To mingle in the fray.

I fear I will never understand,

Or realize it quite,

How a woman’s fame can suffer

In struggling for the right.

Source: Weir, Beyond Labor’s Veil, 184.

Questions for Analysis

Consider the Context: How did the Knights of Labor address the vast disparity of wealth in the Gilded Age?

Recognize Viewpoints: Who is the enemy the Knights want to overthrow? What specific goals or perspectives are addressed in the song lyrics?

Analyze the Evidence: In what ways is the vision of the Knights of Labor political and social as well as economic? What role do women play in the Knights?