Thirty Years of Labor. 1859 to 1889. In Which the History of the Attempts to Form Organizations of Workingmen for the Discussion of Political, Social, ... of 1866, the Industrial Brotherhood of...
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Terence Vincent Powderly was an American labor leader and government official.
Background
He was born on January 22, 1849 in Carbondale, Pennsylvania, United States, one of twelve children of Terence Powderly and Margery Walsh. His father and mother came from County Meath, Ireland, in 1827, and after two years on a farm at Ogdensburg, New York, settled at Carbondale where his father was employed as teamster by a coal-mining company.
Education
He attended school from seven to thirteen at Carbondale.
Career
After studies he went to work on the railroad, first as switch-tender and later as car-repairer and brakeman. At seventeen he was apprenticed to the machinists' trade and after the expiration of his apprenticeship in 1869 worked at that trade until March 1877. On November 21, 1871, he joined the Machinists' and Blacksmiths' Union in which he soon became prominent.
While living at Oil City in April 1874 he was appointed organizer for western Pennsylvania for the Industrial Brotherhood, and the liberal principles but ineffective methods of that organization influenced his entire career as a labor leader. In the same year he was initiated at Philadelphia into the secret order of the Knights of Labor, and on September 6, 1876, joined Assembly No. 88 at Scranton, on October 14 was elected Master Workman of Assembly No. 222, and on February 24, 1877, was chosen corresponding secretary of the newly organized district assembly. As a member of the committee on constitution of the First General Assembly of the Knights in January 1878, he assisted in securing the adoption of a preamble based on that of the Industrial brotherhood.
A year later he was chosen Grand Worthy Foreman of the order, and in September 1879, Grand Master Workman (General Master Workman after 1883). This office he held until November 1893, throughout the entire period of the rise and fall of the Knights of Labor as a powerful labor organization.
Meanwhile, in 1878, he was elected mayor of Scranton on a Greenback-Labor ticket, and was reelected in 1880 and again in 1882, serving in all six years. To him the Knights of Labor was a great educational organization, destined to reform the world by converting the working people to demand government ownership of public utilities, regulation of trusts and monopolies, reform of the currency and of the land system, and such measures as the abolition of child labor.
When, in 1884, he endeavored to secure the newly created post of United States commissioner of labor he was vigorously and successfully opposed by a group of employers who asserted that he was in sympathy with communists. In 1886 Powderly spoke at a mass meeting in New York for the Labor party which had nominated Henry George for mayor and in 1891 he was present at the political convention, originally called by the Citizens' Alliance and the Knights of Labor, which organized the People's party.
On September 24, 1894, he was admitted to the bar in Lackawanna County, Pennsylvania. In 1897 he was admitted to practice before the supreme court of Pennsylvania and in 1901 before the Supreme Court of the United States. In 1894 he stumped his state for the Republican ticket and two years later worked in half a dozen states for McKinley, who rewarded him in March 1897 by an appointment as United States commissioner-general of immigration.
Later he was appointed special representative of the Department of Commerce and Labor to study the causes of emigration from Europe, and on July 1, 1907, became chief of the Division of Information of the Bureau of Immigration. He held this office until 1921, attempting unsuccessfully to make his division the nucleus for a federal employment exchange, and then became a member of the Board of Review of the Immigration Department. He served on this board, and also at times as a commissioner of conciliation of the Labor Department, until the long illness which preceded his death.
During his years in the Knights of Labor he was a frequent contributor to the Journal of United Labor, and later he wrote occasional articles for magazines and gave speeches before labor and other organizations which were printed in their proceedings. In 1892 his debate with Samuel C. T. Dodd on Trusts was published. He contributed a chapter on "The Army of Unemployed" to The Labor Movement: The Problem of Today (1887) and wrote several pamphlets.
He died in Washington, District of Columbia, at the age of seventy-five.
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Religion
He was a Mason.
Politics
Powderly was also a supporter of Henry George's popular "single tax" on land values. He opposed the immigration of Chinese workers to the United States.
He proposed financing public works project through low interest government loans as a means of providing work for the many unemployed.
Views
He opposed the trade form of organization because he believed skilled workers should assist the unskilled. He laid little stress on immediate demands, such as higher wages and shorter hours, and opposed strikes as an outmoded industrial weapon which should be superseded by arbitration. His ultimate ideal was the abolition of the wage system, not through revolution but through producers' cooperatives in which every man would be his own employer.
Personality
An energetic, handsome man of medium height and somewhat stocky build, with keen blue eyes under heavy brows, a ruddy complexion, a strong, indented chin, long mustaches with curling ends, and a smooth yet alert manner, he was a fluent and nimble-witted orator, and his unpretentious, kindly, and good-humored bearing gave him a strong hold on the affections of his followers. At the same time he was feared and reviled by employers and the press.
He was an idealist and reformer, but not an aggressive leader. Personally sober he denounced drink as one of the great evils under which working men suffered.
Connections
Powderly married, at Scranton, Pennsylvania, on September 19, 1872, Hannah Dever, and after her death took as his second wife Emma Fickenscher in Washington on March 31, 1919.