Terence V. Powderly

He was the 11th of 12 children born to Irish parents in Carbondale, Pennsylvania, and scarlet fever left him deaf in one ear before he was grown. At 13 he threw switches for the Delaware and Hudson Railway, then examined and repaired cars, then braked. At 17 he apprenticed as a machinist to James Dickson, who had himself been apprenticed to George Stephenson, so the line from the first locomotives ran into his hands. He joined the Machinists and Blacksmiths union in November 1871 and was running his local within two years. After the Panic of 1873 the railroad let him go, and the master mechanic told him why: he was president of the union, and dismissing him would head off trouble. He spent that winter in Canada shoveling snow.

Scranton elected him mayor in 1878 on the Greenback-Labor ticket and kept him for three two-year terms. He had joined the Knights of Labor in 1874, and in 1879 he inherited an order of roughly 10,000 members. By 1886 the rolls carried 729,677 across 5,892 local assemblies, among them some 60,000 Black members in 400 all-Black locals and, within a year, about 65,000 women. He wanted arbitration, producer cooperatives and the eight-hour day rather than walkouts, and he worked with Bishop James Gibbons to get Rome to lift its ban on Catholics joining. Victory over Jay Gould's Wabash line in 1885 made the Knights famous. The next year Powderly stepped into the Southwest railroad strike and the Chicago packinghouse strike and shut both down, and historians have argued ever since that labor could have won them.

At the Knights' 1886 general assembly in Richmond he had a Black member introduce him from the platform, a deliberate affront to the city's segregation codes. In the same years he told the order that non-European immigrants took American jobs and drove down wages, and he urged the West Coast assemblies to campaign for the Chinese Exclusion Act. Knights on that coast went past campaigning, and in November 1885 a branch drove the Chinese residents of Tacoma out of the city. When the Haymarket bomb went off in May 1886 and two of the men condemned for it turned out to be Knights, Powderly disavowed them while local assemblies elsewhere protested the arrests. His central office was too small to know what the locals were doing, and he forbade the order to run candidates of its own.

The Knights turned him out in 1893 and he opened a law practice. Then the man who had led the largest labor organization in the country spent 25 years administering federal immigration: commissioner general under William McKinley from July 1897, removed by Theodore Roosevelt in 1902, then special inspector, then chief of the Division of Information, then a member of the Board of Review in 1921. He died at his house in Petworth, Washington, on June 24, 1924, and lies in Rock Creek Cemetery. Richard Oestreicher, weighing the collapse against what anyone else managed, called him the first American labor leader to become a media superstar, and noted that nobody did much better over the next 40 years.

Terence V. Powderly's life against the full span of the corpus.

• The Organization of Labor article
  North American Review — the cable-and-strands argument for combination 1882
• Alien Contract Labor Law law
  Banned importing workers under prepaid contracts. His influence is credited with its passage 1885
• Thirty Years of Labor, 1859-1889 book
  His own history of the movement, and of himself in it 1889
• Ellis Island commission of inquiry other
  Ordered as commissioner general. Eleven employees were dismissed 1900
• The Path I Trod book
  His autobiography, published 16 years after his death 1940

• August 1, 1866 aged 17 Begins a machinist apprenticeship at 17 His master, James Dickson, had apprenticed to George Stephenson.
• November 21, 1871 aged 22 Joins the Machinists and Blacksmiths International Union
• 1873 aged ~24 Fired and blacklisted after the Panic for leading the union He spent the following winter doing odd jobs in Canada.
• 1874 aged ~25 Joins the Knights of Labor
• 1878 aged ~29 Elected mayor of Scranton on the Greenback-Labor ticket He served three consecutive two-year terms.
• 1879 aged ~30 Becomes Grand Master Workman of the Knights of Labor The order had roughly 10,000 members when he took it.
• May 4, 1886 aged 37 The Haymarket bomb, and the collapse begins Two of the condemned anarchists were Knights. Powderly disavowed them and membership fell away.
• 1893 aged ~44 Defeated for re-election as Master Workman He opened a law practice the following year.
• July 1, 1897 aged 48 Sworn in as U.S. Commissioner General of Immigration Theodore Roosevelt removed him from the post in 1902.

• Samuel Gompers 1850–1924
  Founding leader of the American Federation of Labor who established durable craft-union organization. outmaneuvered by
• Jay Gould 1836–1892
  Controlled major railroad and telegraph systems through aggressive stock manipulation. struck against
• Henry George 1839–1897
  Argued for the single tax on land values in Progress and Poverty. endorsed his single tax
• Mother Jones 1837–1930
  Organizer whose militant campaigns for miners and against child labor made her an icon of American labor. organized under him
• Eugene V. Debs 1855–1926
  Socialist Party leader who ran for president five times from prison and championed labor rights. inherited the fight
• Theodore Roosevelt 1858–1919
  26th President known for progressive reforms, conservation efforts, and assertive foreign policy. removed him from office