Report of the Pennsylvania Commission On Old Age Pensions: March, 1919
(This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)
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James H. Maurer was an American labor leader and socialist.
Background
James Hudson Maurer was born on April 15, 1864 in Reading, Pennsylvania. He was the third of four sons (the second of whom died in infancy) of James R. and Sarah (Lorah) Maurer. Both parents came of Pennsylvania German stock and belonged to the Lutheran Church. The father, whose forebears had emigrated from Alsace-Lorraine about 1755, was a shoemaker by trade, but worked for a time as a policeman; he died of smallpox when James was eight. His mother soon remarried, but James's stepfather proved harsh and ill-tempered.
Education
The family was poor, and at ten James went to work in a hardware plant. He could neither read nor write his total schooling amounted to just ten months--and in his early years he spoke only the "Pennsylvania Dutch" dialect. His youth had some lighter moments. With a friend who had a skill in magic he got up a variety act and secured a few engagements. His fascination with show business later led him to stage several melodramas. When he was nearly sixteen, Maurer became an apprentice in a local machine shop. There he was befriended by a fellow worker, Thomas King, an active member of the Knights of Labor, who taught him to read and introduced him to books on economics and the labor question.
Career
Maurer joined the local assembly of the Knights and after several months was elected "worthy foreman" (vice-president). He also joined the Greenback party and, later, a Single-Tax Club. In 1881 he left home and found work in a boiler making plant in Pottstown, Pa. Continuing in the Knights, he became head of his local assembly and then District Master Workman for the Schuylkill Valley. After working as a steamfitter in Coatesville and Royersford, Pa. , Maurer returned to Reading, where in 1891 he and a brother went into business as machinists and steamfitters. The firm prospered for a time, but eventually failed, according to Maurer because his vigorous support of the Populist party had alienated prominent citizens. He next (1895) founded a short-lived Populist weekly, the Reading Kicker. While in the plumbing business in nearby Hamburg in 1899 he organized a local of the Socialist Labor party. That party split nationally over the question of supporting trade unions, and Maurer, ever loyal to the unions, shifted in 1901 to the newly organized Socialist party. Working intermittently for a small machine shop in Reading, Maurer thereafter centered his activity in the socialist and labor movements. As a member of the Plumbers and Steamfitters Union, he was elected in 1901 a delegate to the Central Labor Union of Reading. He later helped organize the city's Building Trades Council. Maurer ran unsuccessfully as Socialist candidate for city controller in 1901 and for the state legislature in 1902. The following year he was elected to the party's state executive committee and in 1904 to the national executive committee. He was the Socialist candidate for governor of Pennsylvania in 1906 and polled nearly 26, 000 votes. Meanwhile the Reading branch of the party was steadily building up political strength, and in 1910 Maurer became the first Socialist elected to the Pennsylvania legislature. He was defeated in 1912, but reelected in 1914 and 1916. His political effectiveness was enhanced in 1912 by his election as president of the Pennsylvania State Federation of Labor, a post he held for the next sixteen years. He worked for industrial health legislation, regulation of child labor, and pensions for widows and orphans. He was especially active in the movement for old age pensions, and from 1917 to 1919 headed a state commission concerned with this question, for which he secured the young economist Abraham Epstein as executive secretary. He was the Socialist party's vice-presidential candidate on tickets headed by Norman Thomas in 1928 and 1932, and in 1930 its candidate, once more, for governor of Pennsylvania. He also served from 1921 to 1929 as the first president of the Workers' Education Bureau of America, which he had helped organize at the New School for Social Research in New York. Stirred by the plight of the unemployed during the depression, Maurer in 1933 helped found and served as chairman of the United Workers' Federation of Pennsylvania, an organization of the jobless. In 1934, in his last bid for elective office, he ran as a Socialist for United States Senator. When, two years later, the Socialist party advocated a united front with the Communists, whose disruptive tactics Maurer disliked, he resigned from the national organization. Living on in Reading, he died there of heart disease in 1944 at the age of seventy-nine. He was buried in West End Cemetery, Pottstown, Pennsylvania.
(This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)
Politics
An avowed pacifist, Maurer opposed United States participation in World War I. He was one of the leaders of the People's Council of America for Democracy and Peace, organized in May 1917 to seek an early, negotiated peace, and traveled widely speaking against the war. His stand brought him into conflict with Samuel Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labor, who countered by forming a prowar group of labor leaders and reformers, the American Alliance for Labor and Democracy. Prowar labor leaders sought to oust Maurer from the presidency of the Pennsylvania State Federation of Labor in 1918, but he was reelected by a wide margin. During the 1920's Maurer continued his political activity. In 1927 Reading's Socialists, closely linked to the labor movement, swept the municipal elections, sending Maurer to the city council. The next year he stepped down from the presidency of the Pennsylvania Federation of Labor.
Views
Attracting new members and ousting entrenched conservatives, Maurer made the Federation an important pressure group for labor legislation. No doctrinaire, he recognized that the Federation had to support legislators favorable to its program regardless of party, and he was popular both as a lobbyist and as a legislator. Within the legislature Maurer gave effective support to a variety of labor and reform measures.
Connections
He married a Pottstown girl, Mary J. Missimer, on April 15, 1886. They had two children, Charles and Martha.