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The order pursued legislative and political means to undermine the “money power,” banks and monopolies, and favored the legislation of an eight-hour day, equal pay for equal work, abolition of child labor and convict labor, and public ownership of utilities. On the other hand, in the midst of major third-party movements, the Knights struggled, usually without success, to remain aloof. Largely to placate the active hostility of the hierarchy of the Cath-olic Church, the leadership of the Knights explicitly denied an interest within the order in more radical politics.
These contradictions gave the Knights great power, yet largely predisposed the order to use its power in an uncoordinated and chaotic fashion. Railroad workers in the Knights in 1883 launched a series of strikes against the widely hated railroads that came to fruition in the southwestern strike of 1885 against the Jay Gould inter-ests. Powderly and the Knights successfully organized na-tional boycotts in support of the strike movements. As a result of the consequent publicity and the temporary de-mise of third-party politics, the Knights expanded to mas-sive proportions, attaining 110,000 members by July 1885 and over 700,000 members by October 1886. By then, the movement embraced virtually every current in the American labor movement. Some thought the strike, wage agreements, boycott, and cooperatives were sufficient. The order avoided support of the 1886 eight-hour-day strike movement and remained ambiguous about nonpolitical means of attaining its goals.
Members of the trades assemblies, including printers, molders, cigar makers, carpenters, glassworkers, ironwork-ers, and steelworkironwork-ers, combined into the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions (FOTLU) in 1881. Although initially cooperative with the concerns of these trade unionists, the leadership of the Knights became in-creasingly cautious even as their successes inspired intense opposition, and the FOTLU reorganized as the American Federation of Labor (AFL) in 1886. Membership in the Knights quickly fell to 100,000 by 1890, and neither its dalliance with populism nor interventions by the Socialist Labor Party kept it from plummeting during the twen-tieth century.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Voss, Kim. The Making of American Exceptionalism: The Knights of Labor and Class Formation in the Nineteenth Century. Ith-aca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993.
Weir, Robert E. Beyond Labor’s Veil: The Culture of the Knights of Labor. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996.
Mark A. Lause
See also American Federation of Labor–Congress of
Indus-trial Organizations; IndusIndus-trial Workers of the World; Labor; Strikes.
KNIGHTS OF THE GOLDEN CIRCLE. The
Knights of the Golden Circle (KGC) was a pre–Civil War,
pro-Southern secret society founded in Ohio in 1854 by George W. L. Bickley, a Virginian, who soon moved the KGC to the South. Members were known as Copper-heads. Wishing to extend slavery into Mexico and to form a country that surrounded the Gulf of Mexico, a “golden circle,” they opposed abolition and fought for secession. KGC was reorganized in 1863 as the Order of American Knights, and again in 1864 as the Order of the Sons of Liberty. Republicans tried to discredit Democrats by as-sociating them with the KGC; their efforts failed, making themselves look bad instead.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Crenshaw, Ollinger. “The Knights of the Golden Circle: The Career of George Bickley.” American Historical Review 47, no. 1 (1941): 23–50.
Klement, Frank L. “Ohio and the Knights of the Golden Circle: The Evolution of a Civil War Myth.” Cincinnati Historical Society Bulletin 32, nos. 1–2 (1974): 7–27.
Milton, George F. Abraham Lincoln and the Fifth Column. New York: Vanguard, 1942.
Mary Anne Hansen
See also Slavery.
KNOW-NOTHING PARTY, or American Party, organized as the political expression of nativism, hostility directed against German and Irish Roman Catholics, who immigrated heavily in the 1840s and 1850s. Nativism first impacted politics in the form of election-day riots pro-voked by secret fraternal organizations such as the Order of the Star Spangled Banner, organized in New York in 1849. When questioned about this order, members re-plied, “I know nothing.” By 1854 the “Know-Nothings” achieved national prominence and had an estimated mem-bership of a million. From 1854 to 1856 Know-Nothing candidates won local, state, and congressional offices across the nation. The Know-Nothing platform reflected the party’s political and moral conservatism. It included calls for extension of the immigrant naturalization period from five to twenty-one years; restriction of the right to vote to citizens; restriction of office-holding to native-born citizens; prohibition of the manufacture and sale of al-cohol; and requirement of the reading of the King James Bible in schools.
Know-Nothings drew from both the Democratic and Whig Parties, but most heavily from the latter, whose traditional makeup of middle-class and skilled working-class Protestants was susceptible to nativist appeals. The Whigs, already damaged by division over the slavery is-sue, were dealt a mortal blow by Know-Nothing defec-tions in 1854–1855. Know-Nothings occasionally found support among antislavery groups, although most aboli-tionists and Free Soilers denounced nativism as a form of bigotry and as a distraction from the main goal of restrict-ing slavery. Moreover, the Know-Nothrestrict-ings themselves became divided over the slavery issue. Still, the effects of
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Know-Nothing Party. An 1844 campaign ribbon of the
secretive anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic organization.䉷 corbis
the Know-Nothing Party were to pave a transition from Whiggery to Republicanism. In 1856 Know-Nothings in the Northeast supported the Republican candidate John C. Fre´mont. The Republican Party was primarily an an-tislavery party but it absorbed and reflected the nativism of the Know-Nothings well into the twentieth century. BIBLIOGRAPHY
Anbinder, Tyler G. Nativism and Slavery: The Northern Know Nothings and the Politics of the 1850s. New York: Oxford Uni-versity Press, 1992.
Gienapp, William E. The Origins of the Republican Party, 1852– 1856. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. Argues the rise of the Republican Party was a response to nativism. Osofsky, Gilbert. “Abolitionists, Irish Immigrants, and the
Di-lemmas of Romantic Nationalism.” American Historical Re-view 80 (1975): 889–912. Evaluates immigrants’ ambiva-lence over antislavery as a result of nativist hostility.
Timothy M. Roberts
See also Nativism; and vol. 9: American Party Platform.
KNOX, FORT. In 1918 an army camp named Camp
Knox, for General Henry T. Knox, was established in Kentucky, thirty-one miles southwest of Louisville. Made permanent in 1932 as Fort Knox, the post became the main repository of U.S. gold in 1937. More than 140 mil-lion ounces of gold, worth bilmil-lions of dollars, are kept in the U.S. Bullion Depository, a two-story granite, steel, and concrete vault managed by the Treasury Department. The 109,000-acre army installation at Fort Knox also in-cludes an artillery training school, the Godman Army Air Field, and the Patton Museum.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Truscott, Lucian K., Jr. The Twilight of the U. S. Cavalry: Life in the Old Army, 1917–1942. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1989.
Andrew C. Rieser
See also Army, United States; Currency and Coinage;
Forti-fications; Mint, Federal; Treasury, Department of the.
KOREA, RELATIONS WITH. In August 1866, the
American merchant W. B. Preston dispatched the General Sherman, a merchant ship, to a port in northern Korea demanding trade unilaterally, a private endeavor that did not officially involve the U.S. government. The entire crew died when the Hermit Kingdom had the ship set on fire. In two retaliatory campaigns during 1871, U.S. naval ships bombarded Korean forts, killing some 250 Koreans. The undeclared hostilities were settled by a treaty of com-merce and amity in 1882. Yet military and diplomatic en-counters failed to develop further as Korea soon became a target of Chinese, Japanese, and Russian imperialism. In 1910, it fell prey to Japanese military rule. Full-scale
