Terence Vincent Powderly

• Terence Vincent Powderly
• Born: January 22, 1849
• Died: June 24, 1924

Labor leader, was born in Carbondale, Pennsylvania, the eleventh of twelve children and youngest of eight sons of Terence Powderly and Madge (Walsh) Powder-ly, Catholics from County Meath, Ireland, who had emigrated to America in July 1827. After working for a farmer in Ogdensburg, New York, for two years, the Powderlys had moved to Carbondale, where the elder Powderly worked for a coal-mining company. Powderly recalled that his father had been a proslavery Democrat, whereas his mother was a strong abolitionist. Powderly adopted his mother’s point of view.

Slight of build, nearsighted, and with one bad ear, though otherwise healthy, the young Terence Powderly attended common school until he was thirteen, at which time he began seven years of roughly continuous labor for the Delaware & Hudson Railroad, first as a switch tender, then as a car examiner, repairman, and brakeman, and finally, from August 1866 to August 1869, as an apprentice machinist. Two weeks after his apprenticeship ended, he was laid off because of a miners’ strike and worked in a series of machine shops, primarily in Scranton, Pennsylvania. The strike seems to have sparked his interest in the labor movement; he was, he recalled, struck by the lack of sympathy that the machinists felt for their fellow workers, the miners.

Inspired by a speech by John Siney, head of the miners’ union, Powderly got in touch with the headquarters of the Machinists’ and Blacksmiths’ Union in Cleveland, which sent an organizer to Scranton in 1869 to organize a “subordinate union,” or local. Powderly was not old enough to join the local until November 1871, but the following year he was elected its secretary and president. Also in 1872, he married Hannah Dever; the marriage was apparently based on complete equality of the partners and lasted until her death in 1901.

Between 1873 and 1877, Powderly lost a number of jobs and was blacklisted from others because of his union associations, and during the winter of 1873-74, he was reduced to tramping across Canada looking for work. Reflecting the fluidity in the American labor movement and the secrecy that characterized it, Powderly’s activities in the early 1870s were varied, though he later said that he was inspired from the very beginning by the idea of the solidarity of all laboring people as opposed to the exclusivity of the skilled craftsmen’s unions.

In 1874 Powderly was sent by his machinists’ local to a district meeting in western Pennsylvania, which in turn sent him to a general convention in Louisville, Kentucky. Rebuffed in his attempts to admit a related trade to the union and fearing that a labor aristocracy was developing in the union movement, Powderly became an organizer for the Industrial Brotherhood, a ritualistic and secret organization that sought to build a national labor organization of all working people to replace the defunct National Labor Union. During the same year, while attending an antimonopoly convention in Philadelphia, Powderly was secretly inducted into the Knights of Labor, although there was no local for him to join in Scranton until he was admitted to Local Assembly No. 88 (Stationery Engineers) on September 6, 1876.

Six weeks later, he organized and became president (Master Workman) of a new local assembly, No. 222, primarily of machinists. Over the next four months, three more locals were formed; and so, in February 1877, a district assembly, No. 5 (later changed to No. 16), the next higher level on the Knights’ organizational pyramid, was formed, with Powderly as corresponding secretary. Powderly held that job concurrently with his other positions until 1886. It gave him the opportunity to spread the word of labor solidarity and to build a network of union contacts in other areas.

The Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor had been founded in December 1869 by nine Philadelphia garment cutters whose union had recently dissolved. One of the nine, Uriah Stephens, became the first president (Grand Master Workman), holding the office until 1879. Stephens, who had trained for the Baptist ministry, saw the labor movement as intertwined with Protestant Christianity.

Like the early Christians, the Knights, Stephens felt, had to operate in strict secrecy while making converts. Individuals were thoroughly sounded out before they were even made aware of the group’s existence. The initiation was an elaborate and solemn ritual invoking Protestant religious themes and biblical quotations. Men in all productive callings were accepted into the fellowship, except bankers, lawyers, doctors (until 1884), liquor dealers, and, later, professional gamblers, and stockbrokers. Women were admitted, starting in 1881.

The Knights spread slowly at first, but by 1873 there were eighty locals in the Philadelphia area, and by 1875 there were local or district assemblies in New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and western Pennsylvania. As much a fraternal order as a labor movement, the society through its locals offered members few benefits and served primarily as a center for their social lives. There was no single statement of principles beyond the quasi-religious ceremonies and no coordinating organization; and secrecy (five stars were used in place of its name in public materials) kept the Knights from speaking with a single voice. Attempts at unity were hindered by regional rivalries, particularly between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, until the violent railroad strikes of 1877 caused Powderly and several others to call for the meeting that became the first General Assembly.

The General Assembly, held at Reading, Pennsylvania, in January 1878, adopted a constitution, which Powderly, incorporating the principles of the Industrial Brotherhood, helped draft. It was a statement of labor solidarity above trade and craft exclusiveness. A resistance fund (strike fund) was established, and leadership was vested in an executive board and a president, the Grand (later General) Master Workman.

Uriah Stephens was elected to head the Knights, but from the very beginning of the group’s national existence Powderly was recognized as one of its most influential leaders. Chosen Grand Worthy Foreman (vice president) at the General Assembly of January 1879, he was elected to succeed Stephens as president nine months later.

Stephens claimed declining health and the impact of his losing race for Congress on a Greenback-Labor ticket in 1878 as the reasons for his resignation. But Powderly was also prepared, as Stephens was not, to remove the obstacles to the Knights’ expansion: the strong Protestant, if not anti-Catholic, tinge in its rituals and the strict secrecy that raised suspicions of radical conspiracies and hindered the Knights’ ability to speak for labor on the national stage. Stephens wanted both the ritual and the secrecy preserved. He broke with Powderly in 1881 and threatened to form a rival union, but his death intervened.

An effective public speaker, a shrewd political manipulator behind the scenes, and a leader who knew how to keep his lines open to his following—though a poor delegator of authority—Powderly turned the Knights into the first genuinely worker-led national labor organization in America. Gaining support as a result of the depression of 1882-84 and aided by innovative steps (lowering the age of admission; opening membership to women, blacks, and the new immigrants; using commissioned organizers; reducing the secrecy that had made admission to membership a slow and limited process), the Knights under Powderly’s leadership grew from about 9,000 members in 1879 to 110,000 in 1885 to over 700,000 in 1886, its peak year.

Powderly regarded 400,000 of the members as curiosity seekers who did more harm than good, and most were probably inspired to join by the Knights’ defeat of Jay Gould’s railroad system in 1885. But the sheer numbers made Powderly the most powerful labor spokesman in the country, though they also made the organization nearly impossible to control.

Like Stephens, Powderly believed that the strength of consolidated capital required that all working people form a single bloc. The craft unions that aimed at short-term benefits for their members (“pure and simple unionism”) only increased social fragmentation by exploiting the hostility between the skilled and the unskilled and among the skilled crafts themselves, thereby preventing the formation of a new unified society organized on moral principles.

Powderly saw the Knights as primarily an educational organization, propagandizing for this new society, but he lacked a clear-cut vision of it. The Knights’ only alternative to the wage system was a system of cooperatives in which factories owned by workers would produce goods to be distributed by similar cooperatives in the consumer sphere. Powderly himself was not strongly attached to the idea; and although he turned the resistance fund toward education and cooperation, the Knights never carried out a systematic effort in the field.

Powderly strongly supported land reform, temperance, and other social measures. Although he was elected as the Greenback-Labor candidate for three successive terms as mayor of Scranton (1878-84), he was ambivalent about direct labor participation in politics and kept the national Knights neutral until 1892, by which time the organization was too weak to have any impact.

In labor tactics, Powderly argued that strikes were counterproductive, outmoded, and conducive to violence, and he claimed that he never ordered a strike himself. He preferred arbitration (the term for collective bargaining in that era) and education. He played a role in settling 400 labor disputes, he recalled in his memoirs, but he was given the credit and blame for four major strikes in particular: the telegraphers’ strike of 1883; a second strike against Jay Gould’s railroad system in the South and West in early 1886; the Chicago packers’ strike later in 1886; and the New York Central Railroad strike in 1890.

Powderly’s failure in the Gould strike—he did not call the strike, eventually came out against it, and then claimed a solution that quickly unraveled and resulted in defeat—and his ambiguous role in the packers’ strike for an eight-hour day no doubt contributed to the loss of a third of the Knights’ members in a year, beginning a decline that left the organization with only 75,-000 members by 1893, Powderly’s last year as president.

Another major factor in the decline was the inability and general unwillingness of the Knights’ leaders to accommodate the demands of the trade (craft) unions, which, unlike the Knights, actively sought concrete benefits for their own members. Although probably more than half of the Knights’ local assemblies in 1886 were organized as craft, rather than “mixed,” assemblies, on the national level the executive board made only halfhearted and confused efforts to integrate the national craft union leaders. The matter came to a head in 1886, when a group led by Samuel Gompers split with the Knights and organized the rival American Federation of Labor (AFL).

The AFL’s subsequent success and the Knights’ decline caused labor historians to dismiss the Knights’ aims and Powderly’s achievements as either a na]ve and unfocused (that is, nonradical or non-Socialist) attempt to create a broad working-class consciousness, or as a retrogressive extension of middle-class, small-enterpreneur, or rural values to industrial labor. The later revival of industrial unionism and working-class radicalism revived some appreciation of Powderly’s work, but it is still generally dismissed as “immature.”

Powderly was forced out of the leadership of the Knights in November 1893 by a coalition led by the farmers who by then constituted a large majority of the membership. The Knights persisted as a fraternal order and finally disbanded in 1917.

After his resignation, Powderly resumed the study of law, which he had briefly begun in 1878, and was admitted to the Pennsylvania bar in 1894; he was admitted to practice before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1901. In 1894, he worked for Republican candidates in Pennsylvania. He campaigned for William McKinley in the election of 1896 and was appointed U.S. Commissioner General of Immigration in 1897. He was dismissed over a minor political matter in 1902 by President Theodore Roosevelt, who later regretted the action.

Powderly next engaged in a series of business ventures (1902-07), and then was appointed by Roosevelt as chief of the Division of Information of the Bureau of Immigration, a position he held until 1921. He also served as a commissioner of conciliation in the Labor Department (1921-24). He died at seventy-five in Washington, D.C. His second wife, Emma Fickenscher, whom he had married on March 31, 1919, survived him.

Powderly’s autobiography, which he worked on between 1914 and 1921, was published posthumously as The Path I Trod (1940), ed. by H. J. Carman, H. David, and P. N. Guthrie. He also wrote a documentary history, Thirty Years of Labor, 1859-1889 (1889). His papers are at the Catholic University of America. The best secondary source is N. J. Ware, The Labor Movement in the United States, 1860-1895 (1929). Also useful are M. A. McLaurin, The Knights of Labor in the South (1978) and Gerald Grob, Workers and Utopia (1961). See also P. S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States, vol. 2 (1964) and the Dictionary of American Biography (1935).