1. Daniels, Newell. “Report of I.G.S. at the First Grand Lodge Meeting, held at Rochester, New York, in 1868”. K.O.S.C. Monthly Journal: Devoted to the Interests of the Knights of St. Crispin. 1873 Jan; 1(4):[97]-105 .
    Notes: Daniels, the driving force behind the creation of the Knights of St. Crispin, a national union of shoemakers which was founded in 1867 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, provides details here on the founding of the union; based on this account by Daniels’, Frederick Merk (in his “The Labor Movement in Wisconsin During the Civil War”) explains that at the time of the union’s founding, the Milwaukee factory shoemaking system predominantly employed shoemakers of Irish extraction, while custom shoemaking in the city was mostly done by shoemakers of German heritage, resulting in Lodge No. 1 of the new union being formed by Daniels and his fellow Irish factory shopmates, and that then “Daniels induced the German Custom Shoemakers’ Union of Milwaukee to … join the order as Lodge No. 2” (p. 180); Merk also identifies the eleven additional Wisconsin lodges as having been organized at: Racine, Waukesha, Janesville, Kenosha, Watertown, Fond du Lac, Green Bay, Sheboygan, LaCrosse, Portage, and Oshkosh.

    This issue of the K.O.S.C. Monthly Journal also appears as item L 822 in the microfilm set, Pamphlets in American History: Labor.

  2. Lescohier, Don D. “The Knights of St. Crispin, 1867-1874: A Study in the Industrial Causes of Trade Unionism”. Bulletin of the University of Wisconsin: Economics and Political Science Series. 1910; 7(no. 1 (also published separately in May 1910 as no. 355)):1-102.
    Notes: Founded in 1867 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, through the enterprising efforts of Newell Daniels (a recent transplant to Wisconsin from Massachusetts), this union for shoemakers went on to become a national union, growing by 1870 to eleven Wisconsin “lodges” in addition to the Milwaukee lodge, as well as many outside of the state and with an overall national membership of 50,000. The organization became powerful enough to win several strikes around the country, but collapsed over the short period from 1872 to 1874, due to a number of factors, including changes in the markets and in mechanical methods used in the trade. Lescohier concentrates in his work on telling the national story of the union. Frederick Merk, in his “The Labor Movement in Wisconsin During the Civil War,” identifies the eleven additional Wisconsin lodges as having been organized at: Racine, Waukesha, Janesville, Kenosha, Watertown, Fond du Lac, Green Bay, Sheboygan, LaCrosse, Portage, and Oshkosh.