Section 1: The Knights Go to Paris

The road that led the Knights of Labor to the Paris Exposition began in 1884, through the window-glass workers of the Order's Local Assembly 300. Their powerful organization operated a closed shop throughout the United States, and American glassworkers feared that employers would use immigrant workers to break that closed shop. To regulate the immigration of glassworkers to the United States they sent representatives to Europe in 1880 and, more successfully, in 1884, to organize their fellow craftsmen so that they could be more easily dissuaded from threatening union power in America. Their agitation soon led to the Universal Federation of Window Glass Workers in 1884, which brought together workers in the trade from the United States, England, Belgium, Italy, Germany, Portugal, and France and promised its affiliates financial assistance so long as they agreed to limit the international movement of their members. English and Belgian glassworkers then formed their own assemblies of the Knights of Labor, with help from LA300's representatives, and the Order spread among local workers in other trades.Footnote ¹¹ The Belgian Knights, located exclusively in the French-speaking part of the country, numbered thousands of members by 1886 among the coal miners, glassworkers, and ironworkers of Charleroi and some of the luxury trades of Brussels.Footnote ¹² As we will see, they soon began to attract the attention of journalists and working-class figures in neighboring France.

The Knights of Labor were soon thrust into even greater prominence in Europe. After Jesuits in Quebec refused the sacraments to Catholic Knights in the mid-1880s, and after other clergy condemned the Knights for their supposed Masonic and communistic tendencies, Terence Powderly conducted secret negotiations with leading bishops in Canada, the United States, and England to lift the ban and have the Vatican recognize the Order as a legitimate organization for Catholics to join. Powderly, with the help particularly of Cardinal Gibbons of Baltimore and Cardinal Manning of London, won that argument. After that victory, the Chicago Daily Tribune declared in June 1887, “The Knights of Labor Have Grown Famous in Europe.”Footnote ¹³

The train of events that most brought the Order to European attention was the Great Upheaval, between 1885 and 1887. That period of unprecedented social conflict, with thousands of strikes and hundreds of independent working-class campaigns, remains an important chapter in nineteenth-century American history. But the Great Upheaval also sent shockwaves around the world. The campaign for the eight-hour day, which ended in May 1886 with a bomb thrown at police in Chicago and the arrest and conviction of eight anarchists who became known as the Haymarket martyrs, generated a global campaign that resulted in the celebration of May Day as an international workers’ festival. Most European observers had hitherto viewed American workers as lacking the class consciousness of their European counterparts.Footnote ¹⁴ Now they were astounded to see the United States, in the words of the French socialist Jules Guesde, sounding ‘the tocsin for the social revolution […] in all the civilized world.”Footnote ¹⁵ Frederick Engels penned a new preface for the first American edition of his Condition of the Working Class in England in 1887, which broadly agreed with Guesde's conclusions.Footnote ¹⁶ Even five years later, Eleanor Marx and her partner, Edward Aveling, could write lines that seem incredible today. “The example of the American working men will be followed before long on the European side of the Atlantic,” they wrote. “An English or, if you will, a British Labor Party will be formed, foe alike to Liberal and Conservative.”Footnote ¹⁷

And in all of these evaluations the movement that Europeans most identified with the Great Upheaval was the Knights of Labor. Engels, for instance, hailed the Knights as “the raw material out of which the future of the American working-class movement, and along with it, the future of American society at large, has to be shaped.”Footnote ¹⁸ Michael Davitt, the Irish nationalist who was soon to speak on behalf of Knights in England, told the Order's 1887 General Assembly that “the spectacle which the Knights of Labor organization presents to European workingmen is […] one of singular interest and expectancy.”Footnote ¹⁹ In Belgium and England, where glassworkers had established assemblies before the Upheaval began, the tumultuous events taking place in the United States—especially the unprecedented victory in 1885 of American railroad workers over the Southwestern railroad system owned by Jay Gould, one of the most infamous financiers of the age—encouraged hundreds and then thousands of members to the Knights over the course of the 1880s.Footnote ²⁰ The Knights also spawned imitators in parts of Europe. Several organizations based on the Order's name and/or principles, the Sons of Labor, the Yeovil Knights of Labor and the British United Order of the Knights of Labor, arose in Britain between 1886 and 1888.Footnote ²¹ According to the Times, in 1886 police arrested scores of workers in Italy who had joined an organization “resembling the American ‘Knights of Labor’” that planned a series of strikes and demonstrations.Footnote ²²

One American newspaper also claimed that French glassworkers’ unions stood on the verge of affiliation with the Knights in 1886.Footnote ²³ This did not happen, mainly because French legislation, enacted after the fall of the Paris Commune and designed to stop the First International from operating in France, prevented French citizens from affiliating with a foreign labor organization. Albert Delwarte, a Belgian Knight and secretary of the Universal Federation, lamented in 1888 that French glassworkers’ enthusiasm for the Order was still constrained by that law.Footnote ²⁴ But the Great Upheaval also attracted French workers beyond the window-glass trades. An apprentice bookbinder from Annonay wrote to Terence Powderly in late 1886 or early 1887 seeking membership of the Order and advice on how to establish an assembly in his town. Plans for an assembly were thwarted by the same legislation that held back the window-glass workers, but Powderly ensured that Belgian Knights initiated the bookbinder as a full member of the Knights of Labor.Footnote ²⁵

The Great Upheaval and the growth of the Belgian assemblies likewise caught the attention of parts of the French press. The Revue Générale ran a long article on the Knights in 1887, which provided a short history of the Order, mentioned its growth in Belgium, and even referenced the first of Powderly's promises to organize assemblies of Knights of Labor in Europe—although the author argued that Powderly's conservative views would not find favor with the atheist and anarchistic workers of Europe.Footnote ²⁶ Others were more optimistic. The Philadelphian correspondent of the Nouvelle Revue sent Powderly a telegram containing a message of support for the Order in 1886.Footnote ²⁷ The Moniteur des Syndicats Ouvriers, a Parisian newspaper dedicated to reporting on the French labor movement, began to reprint speeches from leading Belgian Knights at the end of 1887.Footnote ²⁸ Its editors, F. Veyssier and Abel Davaud, sent a letter early in the next year to Charles Lichtman, the Order's general secretary, asking for more information about the Knights of Labor. Lichtman promptly replied, enclosing the Order's Preamble and Declaration of Principles for good measure. The first steps toward the first French assembly had begun.

Veyssier and Davaud wrote at a critical time in the history of the French labor movement. The long shadow of the Paris Commune, and its extirpation in fire and blood by soldiers loyal to the government in Versailles, still hung over the Third Republic more than fifteen years later. The law banning French workers from affiliating with an international organization was proof of that legacy. The Le Chapelier law of 1791, which made the task of organizing into unions very difficult, remained in force until 1884. Two interrelated developments after 1879, however, caused many liberal republicans, the “Opportunists,” to rethink their distrust for organized labor in general. The first was the revival of socialism and anarchism in France in the decade after the defeat of the Commune. The second was the revival of French unions, and their turn in a socialist direction at a congress at Marseilles in 1879.

To counter this, in 1880 the Opportunists subsidised a new federation of liberal and radical republicans, the Union des Chambres Syndicales Ouvrieres de France, led by the republican journalist Jean Barberet. At the same time the Opportunists began to provide material and other assistance to parts of the cooperative movement. In 1884 the Opportunist minister of the interior, Rene Waldeck-Rousseau, scrapped the Le Chapelier laws and legalized trade unions, provided that they submit the names of their officials to the authorities and limited themselves to economic demands. He hoped that this coalition of republican trade unionists and cooperators would prevent the socialists and anarchists from taking over the French labor movement for their own ends.Footnote ²⁹ Yet for all the complaints of the socialists and anarchists that the new regulations left them open to state repression, Michel Dreyfus argues, these new laws gave new impetus to all trade unions and not merely those sympathetic to the government.Footnote ³⁰

Waldeck Rousseau's hopes were finally and totally shattered at a large congress of trade unionists at Lyon in 1886. That meeting brought together the representatives of workers from across the country, with most shades of political opinion, from liberal republicans to socialists, in attendance. The socialists carried the day and the Union des Chambres soon faced serious problems. Yet the “socialist” tag disguised splits and factions on the left as well. Supporters of the aging revolutionary Auguste Blanqui vied for influence within the unions with the Parti Ouvrier of Jules Guesde, which called for social revolution and looked askance at what Guesde saw as the economism of the unions but nevertheless took every opportunity to win them over. The “possibilists,” led by Paul Brousse, a former anarchist, called instead for the election of party members to municipal office, and called for alliances with radical republicans where necessary to advance their reformist brand of socialism. To this was added the anarchists, who advocated a revolutionary general strike as the means of labor's deliverance. From the end of the 1870s until the First World War, as Dreyfus has written, the history of the French labor movement was dominated by this three-sided struggle between the reformist republicans, the socialists, and the anarchists.Footnote ³¹

Veyssier and Davaud fit very much in the republican camp. Not so much is known of Veyssier, except that by the late 1880s he was old and in poor health, and had served as a delegate for “various unions” at the French labor congresses of 1880 and 1886 as a supporter of Barberet.Footnote ³² Davaud, on the other hand, became such a frequent contributor to the Journal of United Labor that the Journal ran a lengthy biography of him in March 1889. Born in 1828, Davaud was a cooper who had participated in the 1848 Revolution and then, during the Second Empire that followed, immersed himself in the cooperative movement and served as the editor of a number of that movement's journals in the 1860s and 1870s. In the 1880s he sponsored a new association of cooperative enterprises, the Chambres consultative, and became an accountant for a cooperative society that made eye glasses and land surveying equipment and won admission to the French Academy in 1889 for his services to that society.Footnote ³³ The paper that both men edited, the Moniteur des syndicats ouvriers, had in fact begun in 1882 as the organ of the Union des Chambres and benefited from the tolerance, and perhaps the subsidy, of the Opportunist government.Footnote ³⁴

The Union des Chambres, however, had suffered from that political connection over the course of the 1880s as much as from the inroads of the socialists and anarchists. Veyssier and Davaud certainly rejected any alliance with the latter. They abhorred the “dishonest […], rude and unmannerly” tactics that socialists used against each other and concluded to the Journal of United Labor that “the bringing together of the various socialistic parties is quite an impossibility.” They despaired of the strikes that socialists encouraged at every opportunity, and gave as one example the strike of Parisian navvies in 1888, which had led to a lengthy closure of the city's Bourse du travail or Labor Exchange. They opposed the revolutionary rhetoric that animated much of the left and demanded parliamentary reform instead. Yet they also declared that “never was union more necessary,” and asked “how to gather in the same fold, under the same flag, elements so little disposed to offer the hand of friendship to each other?”Footnote ³⁵

Caught between the decline of their own movement, and their unwillingness to submit to the socialists, Veyssier and Davaud found their solution in the Knights of Labor. That Order, Davaud argued, “has finally given the true formula of association of all the working classes.”Footnote ³⁶ The stated determination of the Order's constitution to enact their program through legislation and not violence, Veyssier claimed, placed Knights “on the only practical ground for the working man.” The Knights “placed themselves completely outside of politics”—socialist politics, at least—and would grant “the affiliated groups their complete independence as to their interior administration.”Footnote ³⁷ If French workers adopted the Order's “economic principles,” they could “resist injustice and oppression first, and then create co-operatives of all kinds.”

Nonsectarian, keen for federalism and local autonomy, committed to parliamentary means, against intemperate strikes, and thoroughly committed to cooperative enterprises as an alternative to corporate capitalism—Veyssier and Davaud saw the Knights as the perfect antidote to what they saw as the diseases holding back the French labor movement. The sheer size of the American Order attracted them as well. If French workers could achieve anything like the numbers of the Americans, Veyssier told the Journal of United Labor,

Veyssier and Davaud no doubt thought that attaching their faction to a powerful foreign movement would give them the prestige and resources to push back against their more successful socialist and anarchist rivals.

The beginning of this essay touched on the set of ideas that American historians call labor republicanism. That commitment to a democratic Republic in which the producing classes and not the monopolists and financiers would rule, established on cooperative rather than competitive principles, and based on a fraternal and sometimes religious understanding of brotherhood and solidarity, infused the Knights of Labor from start to finish. The “mutualist” or “associationist” tradition, dominant within the French labor movement for most of the nineteenth century, ran on almost identical lines. Strong loyalty to the Republic, dating back to the Jacobins of the French Revolution, met an equally strong commitment to the cooperative principle and overlapped to some degree with the Masonic movement.Footnote ³⁹ Many French cooperators thought that their principle might gradually replace capitalist enterprises and allow, in the words of Robert Stuart, “their new social order” to “ripen within the dissolving body of the old.”Footnote ⁴⁰

Mutualists, Christopher Ansell writes, hoped to “forge a populist producers’ alliance that would link the urban working-class to the broader Republican tradition.”Footnote ⁴¹ The exact same words could describe the goals of the Knights of Labor. Given that Veyssier and Davaud remained part of this tradition, it is no surprise that they contacted the Order once they became aware of its principles and success. The road—or perhaps the sea-lane—that led the Knights to Paris was in part due to the popularity, or maybe infamy, that they achieved around the world thanks to their role in the Great Upheaval and their concordat with the Catholic Church. But it was also due to the weakness and fractious nature of the French labor movement and the fact that some figures in the republican wing of that movement recognized an affinity with the Knights that went beyond the obvious—that the Order was successful and their organization was not. The representatives of American labor republicanism met representatives of the French associationist tradition, and even though they did not share a language, they found—not entirely to their surprise—that their two traditions shared most important points in common. The “American-ness” of the program and guiding ideas of the Knights of Labor were no hindrance to their expansion into Europe.

Section 2: Assemblies and Expositions

Between 1888 and the start of 1889, Veyssier and Davaud set about creating the first assembly of the Knights of Labor in France. Along with some of the Order's other European enthusiasts, they also set about convincing American Knights to send representatives and an exhibit to the upcoming Exposition in Paris. They succeeded in both respects. The core of the first assembly was formed. Leading Knights, including Powderly, promised to visit Paris, and the national headquarters organized a large collection of flags, banners, photographs, and other objects to represent the Order at the Exposition. Between 1888 and 1889, in other words, American Knights gradually raised the hopes of Veyssier and Davaud and raised their own hopes that assemblies would soon exist in Paris and then spread throughout France, as they had throughout much of Belgium. These hopes, as we will see later, would not be realized. But the events surrounding these preparations for the upcoming Exposition do show that the fall of the Knights of Labor was not a simple, linear process—and that the last years of the 1880s were a time of growth and even optimism for some Knights as well as a period of defeat and decline for many others.

As Veyssier and Davaud brought together the nucleus of what might become the first assembly of the Knights of Labor in France, legal obstacles still remained in their path. In addition to the prohibition on affiliation with foreign organizations, the 1884 law that legalized unions still banned organizations that brought together workers of different crafts and trades in a single unit. The Opportunist ministers responsible for the law had set these criteria in the hope that the legal unions would restrict themselves to economic questions and stay out of politics. Whatever the intentions of the lawmakers, their law raised questions about the mixed assemblies—that is, assemblies that organized workers by locality rather than by trade or industry—of Knights that Veyssier and Davaud wanted to introduce to France. American Knights suggested through their correspondence that their French followers set up the first assembly and use it as a test case. They hoped that the government would permit them to operate regardless of the law, and perhaps even consider repealing the offending part of that law as well as the one banning affiliation with foreign organizations. Veyssier, however, remained sceptical about the chances of the French government repealing either one in the near future.

Nevertheless, both of the Order's French enthusiasts pressed forward with their attempts to form the nucleus of the first French assembly so that it would be ready to operate straight away if the laws changed. Powderly had told the 1888 General Assembly of the Knights of Labor that “the inquiries which come to us from France concerning the Order are numerous, and those who report the doings of the coming year will show that the seed already sown will be up and flourishing on the soil of France a year hence.”Footnote ⁴² By February 1889, as Veyssier informed Powderly and the Order's new general secretary-treasurer, John Hayes, he and Davaud held the first meeting of Parisian workers interested in becoming part of the Order's first French assembly.Footnote ⁴³ Powderly sent Veyssier an organizers’ commission in the following month.Footnote ⁴⁴ In the meantime they lobbied the minister responsible for trade union legislation in an attempt to speed up repeal of the offending laws. The first French assembly had almost arrived.

Veyssier and Davaud now argued that the most important step that American Knights could take to spread their Order throughout France was to send an exhibit and, if possible, Powderly and some of the Order's other leaders, to the Paris Exposition in 1889. Its Section on Social Economy, organized with help from the French government but driven forward mainly by liberal economists with some or few direct ties to the various ministries, gave working-class organizations of all kinds the chance to advertise their activities to a wide audience.Footnote ⁴⁵ Veyssier and Davaud were not the first or the only ones to make this suggestion. Victor Delahaye, a French trade unionist who visited the United States in 1887, had suggested to Powderly in that year that the Knights attend the Exposition and, in particular, an international labor congress to be held alongside it.Footnote ⁴⁶ Jules Corcodal, an Italian trade unionist who actually formed several assemblies of the Knights of Labor in Turin in 1888 and 1889 after his own visit to the United States during the Great Upheaval, likewise implored the Journal of United Labor that the Order must be represented at the Exposition. “With your wonderful organization,” Corcodal wrote in 1888:

Veyssier and Davaud became equally vocal advocates of the Order's participation in the Exposition. Davaud had an unusually powerful reason for stressing its advantages. In 1888 he was elected as one of the organizers of the Section on Social Economy and stood on the jury that would award prizes to the best exhibits. Davaud argued that the presence of the Knights in Paris would have three major effects: “1. It will spread throughout Europe a complete and accurate knowledge of your principles and laws. 2. It will reflect great credit and universal esteem upon your Order. 3. It will wipe out forever the false notions and misrepresentations that have been the rule so far on your Order.”Footnote ⁴⁸ American Knights saw the promise of hundreds, even thousands, of new members in France behind each of these points.

It was not certain whether the Knights would be able to meet the expectations of their European supporters. The heady days of 1885 and 1886—when the Order organized somewhere in the region of a million Americans, and when those members threatened to reshape the American industrial and political scenes—came to an end. The decline of the American Knights of Labor started then. By 1890, only 100,000 Americans were still Knights.

Yet we should be wary of rendering the fall of the Knights of Labor with a straight line. Assemblies still continued to open in all parts of the United States throughout the 1880s, and there is evidence that the number of assemblies actually increased for several years after the 1886 peak. Indeed, the Knights continued to expand into different parts of Canada and the United States, especially among the farmers and rural workers of the South and West, into the 1890s. Their expansion also rolled on in other parts of the world, with assemblies appearing in Australia and New Zealand in 1888 and those in Britain and Belgium still growing in number and size. The events that led the Knights to the Paris Exposition give us further proof that the Knights remained dynamic, capable of expansion on an international scale, even as their numbers fell away at home. Their ideas and methods, as we have seen, made an excellent fit with those of their French enthusiasts. Veyssier and Davaud certainly did not think that the Order they hoped to introduce to France was on the verge of irrelevance or disintegration.

Powderly and many other Knights also seized on the chance to show that their Order had life in it yet. What better way to do this than to establish a foothold in the largest republic across the Atlantic? At the 1888 General Assembly, Powderly suggested that the delegates take Veyssier and Davaud's advice and select one of their number to attend the Exposition. His recommendation was approved by a committee appointed to address that suggestion. The Assembly at large voted that the general master workman himself be directed to go to Paris, some delegates doing so out of loyalty to their chief, others probably out of a desire to get rid of him for a while in order to further their own ends.Footnote ⁴⁹ The New York Sun derided this “paid vacation of several months, with all expenses paid,” as a “play spell” in Europe.Footnote ⁵⁰ Veyssier and Davaud were much more enthusiastic. “We are waiting for his coming,” they wrote in the Moniteur des Syndicats Ouvrier, “with the greatest impatience.”Footnote ⁵¹

On their urging, Powderly and General Secretary-Treasurer Hayes now made arrangements for the Knights to send an exhibition to Paris, which would give visitors to the Section on Social Economy some idea of the Order's principles and history. In February 1889, Hayes issued a notice to all assemblies, through the pages of the Journal of United Labor, to send to the Order's headquarters in Philadelphia all “flags, banners and other insignia they would like to exhibit in the capital of our sister Republic.”Footnote ⁵² In the same month, B. Maurice, the French-speaking Knight who translated all of the correspondence between Francophones and headquarters, received news of where the Order's exhibit was located within the Exposition. He also made preliminary arrangements for Powderly's accommodation while in Paris and informed the general master workman of the many congresses and debates organized by the Section on Social Economy, on subjects ranging from working-class housing to profit-sharing and temperance, that he might wish to attend while in the city.Footnote ⁵³

In May, the Journal of United Labor predicted that “the Order in France will have thousands of new members before the close of the Exposition.”Footnote ⁵⁴ At a time when little went the Order's way, the Exposition promised at least some grounds for the optimism of American Knights, and even more for the Order's French acolytes. Success at Paris might possibly become the greatest victory that Knights could hope to win anywhere in 1889—and would give further encouragement to American Knights seeking to halt their decline at home.

Section 3: Bureaucratic Nightmares

Yet what followed demonstrated more than just the vitality and appeal of an Order that was supposed to be well past its prime. As Veyssier, Davaud, and their confreres made the necessary preparations for the arrival of their adopted Order's exhibit and its representatives, they were exposed to the structural deficiencies, bureaucratic ineptitude, poor leadership, and factional infighting that bedeviled the Knights at home in the United States. A combination of these problems, as the events surrounding the Exposition make clear, led ultimately to the failure of what might have been a great victory for the Knights in Paris.

The Order, as William Birdsall and Robert Weir have explained, did not possess the most effective organizational structure. On first examination, that structure seemed clear enough. At bottom lay the local assembly. Ten or more local assemblies in the same geographical area made up a district assembly. Local and district assemblies sent representatives to the state assembly, one for each American state, and they all provided delegates for the General Assembly, the national convention of Knights that met on an annual basis. But no Knight knew exactly where power lay in this hierarchical pyramid. The leaders of local and district assemblies spent valuable time engaging in jurisdictional disputes, few of which could be handled by a national leadership burdened with more than enough problems of its own. Coordination between different assemblies, whether at the same level or at different levels, was often entirely absent. When local or district assemblies did not want to accept rulings from the national leadership, they simply ignored them. To make matters worse, the Knights established their headquarters in Philadelphia even as Powderly remained in his hometown of Scranton, around two hundred kilometers away. The “actual working of bureaucracy” within the Knights, Robert Weir argues, more resembled a “nightmare” than a “well-oiled machine.”Footnote ⁵⁵

The story of the Knights of Labor and the Paris Exposition illustrated the Order's organizational problems all too clearly. At the same time that Powderly made preparations to visit Paris, and as Secretary-Treasurer Hayes gathered together the various parts of the Order's exhibit at the Exhibition, two other groups of Knights made their own travel preparations for Europe. The first group planned to go as part of a delegation of American trade unionists organized by the Scripps Newspaper League, whose directors, according to one of their circulars, wanted American workers to observe and report back on the latest innovations showcased at the Exposition.Footnote ⁵⁶ Hugh Cavanagh, a long-time Powderly loyalist, and Leonora Barry, a young widow who became the Knights’ most famous woman leader and the Order's first investigator for women's work, were among those chosen as part of the delegation. The second group—made up of William S Waudby, a socialist, Knight, and member of the (American) International Typographical Union who received a commission from Powderly to organize assemblies in Britain en route to France, and Paul Bowen, a paper-hanger and representative of District Assembly 66 of Washington, DC—decided to go to Paris not to visit the Exposition, but to participate in one of the two international labor congresses taking place alongside it.

Powderly and Hayes were certainly aware of the first groups’ plans to attend the Exposition. The general master workman corresponded with the Scripps League, and Cavanagh kept him informed of his impending journey to France. Powderly and Hayes knew little of Waudby's plans while in Europe, although they opportunistically granted him an organizers’ commission, and they knew nothing of Bowen's.Footnote ⁵⁷ Powderly also announced to Veyssier and Davaud that Barry would carry with her the charter for the first French assembly of the Knights of Labor. The Journal of United Labor repeated this promise in May, and it was reprinted in parts of the American and international press.Footnote ⁵⁸ Aside from this, however, nothing was done to coordinate the activities of the various Knights all set to descend on Paris in the summer of 1889. Their lack of coordination now threatened to rob the Knights of the golden opportunity afforded to them by the Exposition.

Veyssier and Davaud, oblivious to these problems, began to arrange the Knights’ exhibit in the two rooms given to them by the organizers of the Section on Social Economy. At the center of the larger room, Veyssier wrote Powderly, he placed a framed portrait of Uriah Stephens, the Order's founder, and arranged drapes radiating out from the portrait which referred, Veyssier explained, “to the different power or rays of the Order of K of L.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Portraits of Powderly, Hayes, Leonora Barry, and the Order's General Executive Board flanked Stephens’ picture. The many flags and banners loaned to the exhibit from assemblies across the United States adorned the walls. Veyssier placed bound copies of the proceedings of the General Assemblies and the Journal of United Labor on tables in the hall. Tens of thousands of copies of the Order's Declaration of Principles also awaited visitors to the exhibit.Footnote ⁶⁰ At the same time, Veyssier and Davaud went through with their plans to found the first French assembly, after first securing authorization from the Minister of the Interior for exemption from the legislation that had previously prevented the Order from organizing in France.Footnote ⁶¹ Local Assembly 489 of the Knights of Labor, named the “Social Union,” opened its doors in June 1889 with Veyssier as master workman and C. Deville as its secretary.Footnote ⁶²

French Knights had succeeded in bringing their adopted Order to France, in more ways than one. Yet their American cousins did not seem to reciprocate their enthusiasm. Powderly soon developed cold feet. After the 1888 General Assembly elected Powderly to attend the Exposition, the general master workman promised not only Veyssier and Davaud, but also Albert Delwarte, the leader of the Belgian Knights, Michael Davitt, the Irish nationalist, and a variety of English Knights that he would visit them on a grand tour of western Europe in the summer of 1889.Footnote ⁶³ These were rash promises to make. Powderly faced mountains of correspondence that daily piled up in his study. Failed strikes, such as the one against the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad in February 1888, required attention from him and the General Executive Board. Leaders disaffected with Powderly and the others, such as William Bailey and Thomas Barry, set up rival bodies, such as the Provisional Committee of the Knights of Labor and the Brotherhood of United Labor, that leached support away from the Order. Even as Powderly corresponded with Veyssier and Davaud, the coal miners, crucial players in the rise of the Knights of Labor, began to desert them and move to what, in January 1890, became the United Mine Workers of America.Footnote ⁶⁴

Powderly was equally consumed by the task of holding the various factions of the Order together and, just as importantly, maintaining his place at the top of it. Factional fights had always played an important role in the Order's history. The most famous of those factions was the Home Club, a secret group originally composed mainly of socialist Knights from New York. The Home Club spread to assemblies across the United States from 1882 onward and fought with Powderly for control over the Order—and nearly won. When Powderly beat back these challenges and splits after 1886, he formed his own secret group, “The Governor,” made up of supposed loyalists to keep his position secure from future rivals. Yet one member of that clique, John W. Hayes, began to assert control over the Order after he became General Secretary-Treasurer in 1887 and concentrated its administrative and financial affairs in his own hands. Hayes and Powderly soon went from nominal friends to real enemies. In the midst of this intrigue, Powderly could not devote his full attention or time to the Order's enthusiasts in other parts of the world. Certainly he could ill afford a long trip to Europe while his enemies and some of his supposed friends hatched plans to take the leadership of the Knights of Labor for themselves.Footnote ⁶⁵

In June 1889 Powderly began to express doubts about making good on his promises to the Europeans. None of the organizers of the Exposition, he told B. Maurice, had provided him with the dates when he was supposed to attend events in Paris, or whether he was obliged to attend either of the two international labor congresses also meeting in the city.Footnote ⁶⁶ In the following month he completed his U-turn with a long, apologetic letter to Veyssier. “What I wished to do,” Powderly explained to his French acolyte, “was to meet with my French brothers on the soil of France and mingle with them in their meetings and listen to their voices, even though I could not understand them, so that we might at least know each other and touch hands as brothers in a common cause.”Footnote ⁶⁷ But his poor health, which had been a feature of his life since childhood, prevented him from coming to Paris.Footnote ⁶⁸ He told Veyssier that an extreme form of seasickness had nearly taken his life once before and his doctor forbade him from taking the risk of a long voyage across the Atlantic. “Had I been assured earlier that I could not go,” he assured Veyssier, “I would have communicated with you before.”Footnote ⁶⁹

Veyssier and the small band of French Knights had hardly digested this news when they received further shocks from their American cousins. Hugh Cavanagh and Leonora Barry, as part of the Scripps League delegation to the Exposition, embarked on a tour of Britain and Ireland, which Barry described in several dispatches to the Journal of United Labor before they arrived in Paris.Footnote ⁷⁰ In Birmingham, the home of many of the Order's British assemblies, Barry even met with local Knights who formed part of a welcoming committee organzed by the Birmingham Trades Council.Footnote ⁷¹ Veyssier and the members of Local Assembly 489 eagerly awaited the same opportunity to meet Barry and Cavanagh in lieu of their general master workman. Barry, after all, was meant to personally deliver to them their official charter.

Yet neither she nor Cavanagh made any attempt to make contact with them during their stay in Paris. Barry had some excuse. After spending the first half of 1889 on a harrowing investigative tour of the Southern states, only to contract malaria, she then ran into opposition from the general secretary-treasurer. Hayes wanted to get rid of her, and the women's investigative department that she headed. He was not above using a combination of bullying and cajoling to force her hand.Footnote ⁷² By the time she took the steamer across the Atlantic she had little touch with Hayes or Powderly, although she wrote long reports on her journey for the Journal of United Labor. Cavanagh, on the other hand, remained a Powderly loyalist until the very end and kept in regular contact with the general master workman. We do not know whether Powderly told him about his correspondence with Veyssier and Davaud and forgot or did not bother to follow up on it, or whether the fault lay with Powderly. Perhaps they were so intent on enjoying what must have been a once-in-a-lifetime holiday that they preferred to spend their time on pleasure rather than business. In any case, the French Knights were left to hear of their arrival in the city through the local press.

Their paths only crossed when Abel Davaud, in his capacity as an organizer of the Section on Social Economy, met them by chance at a banquet called by the municipal government to welcome the Scripps delegation. Davaud, as Veyssier later related to Powderly, introduced himself to the American Knights and invited them to a meeting of Local Assembly 489 on the following evening. They accepted the invitation verbally and then in writing. Veyssier returned to Paris from a restful spell in the countryside and made feverish preparations for Barry and Cavanagh's visit to the assembly. “The day came,” Veyssier wrote:

The members of the Social Union cared about their adopted Order; their Order, it seemed, did not much care for them.

The arrival of Paul Bowen and William S. Waudby in Paris only made matters worse. Like the Scripps delegation, both of them visited Britain before they landed on the Continent. Bowen even took the opportunity to call on Friedrich Engels at his house in London. Bowen and Waudby arrived in Paris not to visit the Exposition but to attend the “Possibilist” Congress, an international gathering of more moderate socialists and trade unionists than the “Marxist” Congress, which also met in Paris at the same time. Moderate or not, the Congress brought them into contact with the very socialist groups that Veyssier and Davaud had hoped that the Knights might someday shoulder aside in France. Here instead they witnessed their American cousins fraternizing with their stated enemies.

As with Barry and Cavanagh, neither Bowen nor Waudby attempted to contact Local Assembly 489 during their time in the city. As with Barry and Cavanagh, moreover, the French Knights only heard about their presence in Paris through the press. They were incandescent. “The Social Union of Paris,” its secretary, C. Deville, told Secretary-Treasurer Hayes,

Veyssier leveled his own questions at B. Maurice:

Veyssier probably knew the answer to that question by now. There is no evidence that Powderly, Hayes, Maurice, or anyone else at the Order's headquarters had so much as mentioned to Bowen and Waudby that an assembly existed in Paris, or that they should try to make contact with Veyssier and Davaud once they arrived there.

French Knights were slowly becoming aware that their Order suffered from serious problems. Coordination between the different groups of Knights was absent. None, even close friends of Powderly, such as Cavanagh, appeared to have any knowledge of the correspondence between the French Knights and Philadelphia. The broken promises of their general master workman were matched by those of Cavanagh and Barry. Where Veyssier and Davaud originally saw the Knights as a vast, efficient, centralized organization, they now began to see a different side to the Order: as a disjointed set of local and regional movements barely held together by an insufficient number of national leaders who were, in any case, preoccupied by their problems and rivalries at home. This poor organizational model had not stopped the enormous growth of the American Knights in 1885 and 1886 and only emerged as a major problem after employers battered them relentlessly in the years that followed. It now, however, threatened to abort their expansion into France.

Section 4: The End of a Dream

The final stages in the story of the Knights of Labor and the Paris Exposition only further underlined these shortcomings. As Veyssier, Davaud, and the other charter members of Local Assembly 489 developed doubts about the efficacy and enthusiasm of their adopted Order and its leaders, those same leaders wiped their hands of the whole affair and failed even to recompense their French supporters for the money and time they had put into the Order's exhibit, and into their new assembly.

The role of bureaucratic incompetence in the failures that followed should not be underestimated. American Knights were undone by one of the great antiunion repressions of all labor history. That was not the case in France. Knights there may have been constrained by legislation preventing their affiliation with a foreign movement, but they also possessed friends in the Opportunist administration and never faced any kind of sustained opposition from employers. As a small, fledgling movement they were vulnerable to the kind of mismanagement that would hurt but not seriously damage a larger and more established movement. Their decision to abandon the Order arose out of their feeling that their Order had betrayed and abandoned them. The final stages in the story of the Knights of Labor and the Paris Exposition serve as a warning to present-day trade unionists who wish to organize across national borders. Maintain clear lines of communication, make sure you reciprocate the enthusiasm of your foreign supporters, and make sure to put the necessary resources in terms of people and money into your venture—or risk dissipating all the enthusiasm and support that led your movement abroad in the first place.

As the Exposition came to an end in the autumn of 1889, the leaders and members of Local Assembly 489, Veyssier chief among them, now tried to deal with the disappointments of the summer. In July, Veyssier had confided in Maurice his disappointment that Powderly had only told them at the last minute about his decision not to go to Paris, especially after his French enthusiasts had spent so much time making sure that the general master workman was given honorary titles at and invitations to a variety of events surrounding the Exposition. C. Deville echoed these sentiments in a letter to Hayes.Footnote ⁷⁵ Veyssier raised further questions about Powderly's no-show in another letter to the general master workman in August. Not only had Powderly told him of his absence at the last minute, Veyssier wrote, but “we had been informed that you would be accompanied by several other persons, especially by Messrs John Hayes, [former General Secretary Charles] Lichtman and by our compatriot B. Maurice. These gentlemen had not the same motives as you to hold them back.”Footnote ⁷⁶ The fact that the general paster workman failed to send others in his absence, Veyssier continued, caused serious problems for the Order's activities in France. “You are not unaware,” he wrote,

The “laconism” of Powderly's letter explaining his absence from Paris, Veyssier added, had “very much cooled down” the enthusiasm of his fellow Knights in Local Assembly 489.

Powderly's reply only made things worse. Miscommunications between him and Maurice, he told Veyssier, meant that he never received a number of invitations to various events in Paris, and the distance between his office in Scranton and headquarters in Philadelphia meant that translated copies of correspondence from French Knights often never reached him or only reached him much too late. “You were deceived,” he added, “by whoever told you that I would be accompanied by Mess. Hayes, Lichtman and Maurice.” The general master workman then claimed ignorance of the “alluring promises” that Veyssier claimed American Knights had given him over the past year: “By whom were they made? Not by me certainly and not with any knowledge of mine. It was unfair to you to make promises and not acquaint me of it before making them. I can easily see how you were deceived but it was through no fault of mine.”Footnote ⁷⁷

This evasive reply, which blamed Maurice for all the mishaps of the previous year, gave French Knights yet another window upon the muddles of their Order's general office.

Financial squabbles cooled their enthusiasm still further. The Knights of Labor suffered throughout its history from a succession of monetary woes that on several occasions came close to splitting or even destroying the Order. Some of these woes stemmed from incompetence. Charles Lichtman nearly bankrupted them in 1880 when he plunged the Order's savings into the new Journal of United Labor and then found that the income needed to pay for all of it never materialized.Footnote ⁷⁸ The General Executive Board sank $20,000 into a coal mine in Indiana that never turned a profit, and then sold it at a loss.Footnote ⁷⁹ In other cases, leading Knights took funds from the treasury for their own use, and Secretary-Treasurer Hayes even boasted to some of his colleagues at headquarters that the money that he stole from the Order would launch his career as a successful businessman.Footnote ⁸⁰ Collecting contributions from local and district assemblies also caused problems, especially when assemblies that were vainly trying to hold on to their members still required assistance even as they asked the General Executive Board to exempt them from the monthly per capita levy. Thanks to these problems the Knights teetered on the edge of insolvency throughout their history. Yet money only became a burning issue for American Knights after the employer counter-offensive of the late 1880s had robbed them of most of their strength. These financial shortcomings had a much more decisive effect on the small nucleus of members that Veyssier and Davaud had amassed in Paris.

Monetary woes certainly held the Order back in France. Secretary-Treasurer Hayes had organized the collection of all the flags and banners that American assemblies sent to headquarters to be included in the Order's exhibit at the Paris Exposition, and American Knights paid to ship them and other parts of the exhibit to France. From there, however, Hayes left Veyssier and his small cadre of supporters to pay for the arrangement of the exhibit out of their own pockets. In July 1889, Veyssier told Maurice, this sum already amounted to 187 francs and 60 centimes, in addition to all the time and labor that French Knights spent setting the exhibit up and securing invitations for Powderly at all the different meetings and social events. Veyssier himself had paid all expenses himself and now needed American Knights to pay him back. “I should have preferred to settle with you at Paris,” Veyssier explained to Maurice, “but the letter which I have received from M. Powderly no longer leaves me a single hope on this subject.”

In October 1889, with a month of the Exposition still to go, Hayes, presumably unaware of the correspondence between Powderly and the French Knights, sent a brusque message to Veyssier asking when the American assemblies could have their flags and banners back. The rules of the Exposition prevented the removal of exhibits before November 9, and so Veyssier arranged, after some arguments with the US Commissary General in France, for the contents of the exhibition to be sent by rail to Le Havre and then by ship to Philadelphia. He then asked Hayes to send him a note of thanks and to repay him for these and the earlier expenses. “I absolutely claimed only the reimbursement of the money which I had advanced,” he told Powderly in February, 1890, “and that I considered the time spent and the many steps taken for the service of your exposition, as a gratuity and a simple service rendered.” Hayes did not reply. “Not only have these thanks not come,” Veyssier added,

Correspondence between Powderly and Veyssier, at least, ceased after that final letter.

This many-sided fiasco soon led to real-world consequences. Deville and Veyssier expressed doubts about the Order as early as July. In August, Veyssier referred in oblique terms to the obligation that French Knights felt “to take another departure.” By September, Veyssier worried that the upcoming French election would return reactionary candidates who would uphold the legislative restrictions that had delayed the Order's growth in France for so long. In this uncertain political climate, he informed Powderly that French Knights had “decided to create an institution which shall hold to the beliefs of the K of L and of the old Trade-unions.” This did not mean, he assured the general master workman, “that we abandon the hope of propagating in France and there developing the Order of the K of L […] Later, if we succeed and if circumstances permit it, we shall strive to bind to your Association the principle which we wish to found.”Footnote ⁸² By the time that Veyssier penned his last letter to Powderly in February 1890, however, even that promise was not renewed. Each time the general officers failed even to acknowledge any of these frantic attempts to get advice and recompense for services delivered, they snuffed out the last remaining enthusiasm of their former admirers in Paris.

Recriminations now took place back at headquarters in Philadelphia. Relations between Powderly and Maurice had been reasonably warm until at least March 1889.Footnote ⁸³ Once Powderly began to receive letters of complaint from Veyssier and the French Knights, however, the mood of their correspondence soon changed. Powderly blamed Maurice for making all kinds of promises to the French Knights without clearing them with him first, and in a long screed in June 1889, he characteristically absolved himself of any responsibility for the fiasco in Paris and placed all of it on Maurice's shoulders, just as he later did in his letter to Veyssier in August. To further complicate matters, Hayes, who contemptuously referred to Maurice as an “old fossil,” fired him along with several other clerks at headquarters in May on financial grounds. Maurice and his wife then presented Powderly with a three hundred dollar bill for services rendered in relation to the Paris Exposition. Powderly argued, with some merit, that he had no control over the hiring and firing of secretaries and that the Order, not he, should foot the bill.Footnote ⁸⁴ The issue remained unresolved, except in the sense that Maurice left the general office as the scapegoat for its failings in France.

All that remained was for Powderly to explain his absence from Paris to the 1889 General Assembly, which a year earlier had directed him to attend the Exposition. He repeated the excuses he gave to Veyssier about his seasickness before adding some more details that had not reached the Knights in France. “To cross over and visit the Exposition would be very pleasant,” he told the Assembly, “but it would leave whoever went open to the charge of going on a junketing tour, and there are those who would be uncharitable to make such remarks.” The New York Sun, among others, had already offered proof of that. Yet Powderly also made a claim that must have astonished Veyssier and Davaud. “The vote of the General Assembly was that I attend the World's Fair only,” he said, “and I could not see that any gain would accrue to the Order on either side of the Atlantic from such a step.”Footnote ⁸⁵ Having already absolved himself of any blame, Powderly now trivialized the whole affair and moved on to pressing American business instead.

The Knights salvaged precious little from the wreckage. Barry, Cavanagh, and the rest of the Scripps League returned to the United States and compiled a report on the techniques and wares that they observed at the Exposition. Within a year, however, Barry, who had already been hounded out of her role as investigator for women's work by Hayes before she left for Paris, remarried and left the Knights for good soon afterwards.Footnote ⁸⁶ Only Paul Bowen seemed to have really benefited from his time in Europe. Along with representatives from the British Social-Democratic Federation, Bowen made speeches and introduced resolutions at the Possibilist Congress attacking monopolies and, according to a report in the Times, “declared that it was impossible to prevent their formation, but that the working classes ought to organize, so as to take over these trusts and work them for the benefit of the entire community.”Footnote ⁸⁷ The Congress elected Bowen as its cochairman for the third day of proceedings.Footnote ⁸⁸ Upon returning to the United States, Bowen spoke to his district assembly in glowing terms of his time in Paris. He claimed that delegates at the Possibilist Congress were disappointed that Powderly could not join them. But having initially viewed his trip to Paris as “a foolish notion and useless expense, from which nobody but myself could derive profit,” Bowen's experience of the Congress convinced him that the journey represented “true sagacity and a good investment.”Footnote ⁸⁹

Even Bowen, however, struck a note that must have jarred with any of the Journal of United Labor’s remaining French readers. “I am confident that the platform and methods of the Knights of Labor,” he told District Assembly 66, “would capture France if properly explained and not prevented by laws against secret societies.” There is no better symbol of the lack of communication between different parts of the Order than this pronouncement, uttered even as Local Assembly 489 collapsed and French Knights turned their energies in other directions. And even Bowen's exploits, moreover, occurred at the Parisian labor congress that has been largely forgotten. It was not the Possibilist but the Marxist Congress that became known as the inaugural meeting of the Second International, the famous body which brought together the working-class and socialist movements of Europe and the Americas until the outbreak of the First World War. The Possibilist Congress amounted to very little in the long run. Perhaps it is fitting that the Knights of Labor, themselves approaching the end of their history as a movement of national and international stature, should have been embroiled in a debacle where even their successes highlighted the fact that they represented the past, and not the future, of the American and the international labor movement.

Conclusion: From Paris to Chicago and Back Again

Four years after the Paris Exposition marked the centenary of the Bastille, the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition celebrated an even more distant milestone, albeit a year late—four hundred years since Columbus first landed in the New World in 1492. The organizers of the Chicago events, like their Parisian predecessors, contacted labor organizations all over the world and invited them to attend a series of meetings and congresses held on the grounds of the Exposition.Footnote ⁹⁰ In September 1889, even as the Knights drained the last enthusiasm out of their French acolytes, Powderly called on the American labor movement to use the Chicago Fair to make their mark on the world stage.Footnote ⁹¹ The general master workman soon became one of the main boosters of the Fair within that movement. In 1891, the Fair's organizers even convinced him to approach as many French labor representatives as possible to participate in what was already being billed as the Chicago Labor Congress.Footnote ⁹² We do not know whether Powderly appreciated the irony of this request. We do know, however, that any hopes that he harbored for the Labor Congress as a boon to the Knights of Labor were misplaced. The Columbian Exposition opened its doors in May 1893 with the Order already in terminal decline and with Powderly about to lose his place as its general master workman. Events at Chicago made no difference to the downward spiral of the Knights of Labor.

Events four years earlier at Paris, on the other hand, had raised and then dashed hopes that the Order would set firm roots in French soil. The story of the Knights of Labor and the Paris Exposition must be told in least four different parts precisely because the Order's unwieldy structure led to frequent communication breakdowns and to poor or no coordination between Powderly and headquarters, Veyssier and the French Knights, and Waudby, Bowen, Barry, and Cavanagh, respectively. The wider financial problems of the Knights of Labor left, in this case, Veyssier and Local Assembly 489 angry and out of pocket. Powderly's characteristically bold promises generated great enthusiasm among his French admirers; but when these promises were followed with silences and equivocation, their enthusiasm turned to disillusionment. Hayes’ rudeness accelerated this process still further.

In France, Knights could not blame antiunion employers or rival trade unions for their failures. Those were due instead to the mistakes of a national leadership, preoccupied with maintaining their own position and undermining each other even as they tried to keep the Order afloat. Simple miscommunications and incompetence were made worse by uncertain divisions of authority between the national officers and between the various local, district, state, and national assemblies who sent representatives to Paris. These failures should remind us of the importance of the Order's internal problems, as Robert Weir has done, as well as the external blows from business and government that beat it out of the mass industries and have rightly dominated most recent accounts of its decline and fall. In the United States, the Knights’ internal problems caused serious problems only after state-sanctioned employers had already beaten them back in the course of their “counter-offensive.” In France, what might seem to us like relatively trifling mistakes for a large movement to make—rudeness, miscommunication, the failure to show any gratitude (or financial support) for work done on its behalf—loomed much larger to Veyssier, Davaud, and their small number of confederates. Ultimately, those mistakes proved fatal.

Yet that episode also draws our attention to the popularity and appeal that Knights generated at home and abroad, even after they are supposed to have fallen into irretrievable decline. In 1888, when the reverses that they had suffered must have become apparent to observers on the other side of the Atlantic, the Order still attracted a sizeable contingent of Parisian workers to its ranks without any prompting from the Knights themselves. This contingent felt such enthusiasm for the Knights that they spent a great deal of time, labor, and money to ready their exhibit for the Exposition, lobby ministers of state for permission to bend the letter of French law so that they could organize Local Assembly 489, and lay the groundwork for the future spread of the Order throughout France. Veyssier and his comrades only abandoned these plans after a long series of broken promises, unpaid bills, and bureaucratic incompetence on a grand scale.

How do we account for this appeal? The answer lies partly in the simple fact that the Knights, heterogeneous as they were, appeared as a powerful movement that could unite the political fractious and relatively weak French labor movement, or at least strengthen Veyssier and Davaud's wing of it. Their Union des Chambres Syndicales Ouvrieres de France had been compromised and weakened by its association with the liberal Opportunists. They seized on this American success story as an alternative. The other part of the answer concerns the great overlap between the broad American tradition of labor republicanism, and the still potent French tradition of mutualism. Powderly, Veyssier and Davaud shared the same broad belief in the efficacy of legislative reform, cooperative enterprises as the solution to the ills of Gilded Age capitalism, and a coalition of all producers—wage earners or not—to defend the Republic from the overweening power of big capital. This combination of weakness at home, the success of the Order abroad, and a shared working-class republicanism in France and the United States, almost led the Knights to success in Paris. That conclusion should provoke further research into working-class alternatives to socialism and anarchism around the world. These alternatives have been overshadowed by the socialist Internationals, and to some extent by the international trade union federations as well. The overlap and convergence of French mutualism and American labor republicanism suggests that they might form part of a wider, global tradition that historians have yet to fully explore. The story of the Knights and the Paris Exposition is a sign that this current merits further examination.

The connection between France and the Knights of Labor did not, in any case, end with the Exposition. Powderly continued to receive fresh inquiries about the Order from French journalists and labor leaders well into the 1890s—as late as 1899, the Musée social ran a long feature on what was by now a movement on the brink of dissolution.Footnote ⁹³ In 1894 a combination of American socialists and Belgian Knights even managed to succeed where Powderly and Veyssier had failed. The first breakthrough came at the Columbian Exposition, where a group of visiting French workers met with Lucien Sanial, a French-born Knight and member of the American Socialist Labor Party, and discussed plans to form assemblies of the Knights of Labor at home. Some of them met with Powderly at his home in Scranton, and after returning to France they sought out Jean Callewaert, the leader of the Belgian Knights, who opened their first assemblies and initiated their first recruits. French workers had to travel all the way to an Exposition at Chicago to do what they had not achieved at the Exposition in Paris. To further deepen the irony, they based their new French Order on the same socialist principles that Powderly—and indeed Veyssier and Davaud—had always opposed, or supported only in part.Footnote ⁹⁴

The Knights of Labor, as Maurice Dommanget makes clear, operated in France as a secret organisation for the rest of the nineteenth century and for several years into the twentieth.Footnote ⁹⁵ As one of their contemporaries wrote in 1899, they remained small and “never developed.”Footnote ⁹⁶ They never managed to do what Veyssier and Davaud hoped the Knights might do and bring workers of different political stripes together in one organization. That task, to some extent, fell to the Confederation generale du travail, formed in 1895. Yet the story of the Knights and the Paris Exposition does at least contain some lessons, or perhaps suggestions, for labor movements that hope to organize outside their home country. The most obvious of these, and the most difficult to enact, is that the surest way to success abroad is to win victories at home. Another is that clear lines of authority and communication may not be the most important factors in an international campaign, and they are certainly not the reasons why a movement becomes attractive to workers overseas. However, if communication breaks down, and incompetence reigns at the central office, then the right message and a great amount of appeal will not count for much. A well-working bureaucracy is not a sufficient condition for successful organizing, but it is a necessary one. Powderly, Hayes, Veyssier, and Davaud learned that lesson only too well between 1887 and 1890.