The determined attack and stubborn resistance of the employers’ associations after the strikes of May 1886, coupled with the obvious incompetence displayed by the leaders, caused the turn of the tide in the labor movement in the first half of 1887.  This, however, manifested itself during 1887 exclusively in the large cities, where the movement had borne in the purest form the character of an uprising by the class of the unskilled and where the hardest battles were fought with the employers.  District Assembly 49, New York, fell from its membership of 60,809 in June 1886, to 32,826 in July 1887.  During the same interval, District Assembly 1, Philadelphia, decreased from 51,557 to 11,294, and District Assembly 30, Boston, from 81,197 to 31,644.  In Chicago there were about 40,000 Knights immediately before the packers’ strike in October 1886, and only about 17,000 on July 1, 1887.  The falling off of the largest district assemblies in 10 large cities practically equalled the total loss of the Order, which amounted approximately to 191,000.  At the same time the membership of the smallest district assemblies, which were for the most part located in small cities, remained stationary and, outside of the national and district trade assemblies which were formed by separation from mixed district assemblies, thirty-seven new district assemblies were formed, also mostly in rural localities.  In addition, state assemblies were added in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Mississippi, Nebraska, North Carolina, Ohio, West Virginia, and Wisconsin, with an average membership of about 2000 each.

It thus becomes clear that by the middle of 1887, the Great Upheaval of the unskilled and semi-skilled portions of the working class had already subsided beneath the strength of the combined employers and the unwieldiness of their own organization.  After 1887 the Knights of Labor lost its hold upon the large cities with their wage-conscious and largely foreign population, and became an organization predominantly of country people, of mechanics, small merchants, and farmers,—­a class of people which was more or less purely American and decidedly middle class in its philosophy.

The industrial upheaval in the middle of the eighties had, like the great strike of 1877, a political reverberation.  Although the latter was heard throughout the entire country, it centered in the city of New York, where the situation was complicated by court interference in the labor struggle.

A local assembly of the Knights of Labor had declared a boycott against one George Theiss, a proprietor of a music and beer garden.  The latter at first submitted and paid a fine of $1000 to the labor organization, but later brought action in court against the officers charging them with intimidation and extortion.