Disposition Is Not Action: The Rise and Demise of the Knights of Labor

Abstract

Recent theoretical and historical studies of working-class formation have raised important doubts about standard interpretations of the American working class. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the renewed debate over “American exceptionalism,” that unexpected combination of political conservatism and weak working-class institutions in the nation that underwent the modern world's first democratic revolution. Once it was popular to argue that American workers felt no need for collective action, either because of a classlessness that was firmly rooted in the psyche of the first new nation or because of an innate job consciousness that was able to attain full flowering only in the United States, that most bourgeois of countries. But two decades of social history have documented such a rich diversity of militant working-class activity that such explanations are now rarely invoked.