In 1869, the Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor offered a reasonable approach to solve the labor crises in the 1800s. …show more content…
The organization was kept at a hush, for in many areas, the union members were summarily fired. The Knights came up with many different rituals, drawn away from Freemasonry to govern the meetings. By the 1880s, the Knights of Labor group has stretched to all men and women, skilled and unskilled workers, and African Americans. The Knights extended a tradition of republican reform to the immigrant, and unskilled workers. Women workers increased from fourteen percent to twenty percent. About to years later, the women constituted about 95 percent of the work force from Massachusetts to Georgia. The highest percent of women employed remained in Lowell and Lawrence, Massachusetts and Atlanta. Pittsburgh held fewer options for working women. In Chicago, only nineteen percent of the work force was only constituted by women. The Knights gave …show more content…
The movement began in 1877, when Workingmen’s Party in Chicago started a general strike beginning July 25, for the support of the eight-hour movement. But with the busy streets of the Haymarket square in Chicago, thousands of strikers were beaten and attacked into submission by the United States Army infantrymen and police with fixed bayonets. The bloody suppression of of the 1877 strike caused another of the Haymarket martyrs, upholsterers August Spies, to join an armed worker’s self-defense organization. After the the beating of the Workingmen’s Party, a Chicago labor newspaper that day announced: "The Dies Are Cast! The First of May, Whose Historical Significance Will Be Understood and Appreciated Only in Later Years, Is Here!" (qtd, in Elmer) After this announcement, the Haymarket Square Riot was interrupted by a powerful bomb that was thrown as the scuffles broke out. After the bombing, the government started blaming the Anarchists for they are the ones who started the riot and they believed that one of the men from the Workingmen’s Party was to blame. During the Haymarket Trial, one man had this to state to the court, “ We are with you in this work. Working Men and women must form a party of their own, take charge of the government, dispose gilded fraud, and put honest toil in power” (qtd.in Kearney.) Grover Cleveland, the president