ABSTRACT
Robert E. Weir suggests in Beyond Labor’s Veil: The Culture of the Knights of Labor (1996) that there was racism behind the K of L’s puzzling decision not to accept Chinese members, and there is certainly something in that. Restrictive laws against Asian immigrants were introduced in the U.S.A. in 1875, 1882 and 1892, and G.G. Rupert’s emblematic, Christian dystopian The Yellow Peril, or the Orient vs. the Occident as viewed by modern statesmen and ancient prophets (1911), a kind of precursor to Samuel P. Huntington’s 1990s theory of “the clash of civilisations”, appeared a few decades later. At the same time, the racist Sinophobia went completely against the K of L’s talk of “universal brotherhood” and inclusion of blacks. 1
