In 1886, approximately 20 percent of United States workers belonged to the Knights of Labor, a labor-activist fraternal order. Nonetheless, soon after reaching this peak, the Knights membership began a rapid decline, and the organization never regained its national prominence. This collapse had wide-ranging repercussions: subsequent worker organizations took a less active and less broad-based organizational approach. The Knights' defeat demoralized those who championed radical reform and the organization of workers as a class, while empowering those who promoted a less inclusive strategy.

Current scholarship has tended to attribute the Knights calamitous decline to two factors: persistent tension between skilled and unskilled workers, and fierce opposition from employer associations, which used extralegal means to undermine unions. Voss examined both factors and found that employer associations' opposition, not conflict among the Knights, led to the Knights' rapid decline. But Voss's account fails to explain why the Knights succumbed so easily when other union movements thrived. It seems that the Knights' particular organizational structure prompted factional disputes among members and, more important, that competition from rival trade and fraternal organizations lured members away. While dissension within the order might not itself have sufficed to cause its demise, the profusion of organizational alternatives during this period induced mass defection, and, subsequently, the transformation of the American labor movement.