The Knights of Labor Civil War
A bitter internal dispute within the local Knights of Labor spills into the courts as a libel suit.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
The trouble between Robert Bridges and J. E. Crawford, antagonistic spirits among the local Knights of Labor, has culminated in an information charging criminal libel being filed against Crawford. This was done at the instance of Bridges, who charges that Crawford sent a letter to Local Assembly, No. 3,413, with the intent to provoke him to wrath and to expose him to public hatred, contempt and ridicule. The letter accuses Bridges and his supporters of being a 'gang of political prostitutes' and claims they live on 'fraud and deception'.
“This gang of political prostitutes who hang to the chariot of R. Bridges... would sell their god for a few peaces of gold.”
Internal organizational conflict and ideological purges are common in labor movements, but the use of criminal libel to silence dissenters is a stark reminder of the era's legal weaponization of speech, a precursor to later eras of political repression in Seattle.
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