Unions and Universities: The Rise of the New Labor Leader.

T. V. Powderly, Grand Master Workman of the Noble Order of the Knights of Labor from 1879 to 1893, has been portrayed in many different ways—as idealist, reformer, humanitarian, windbag, renegade, crook, imposter, agitator, introvert, self-seeker, charlatan, cheap politician, turncoat, rabble rouser, and drippy sentimentalist. Some claim that he was a great labor leader; others just as vigorously maintain that he was utterly lacking in the qualities of leadership—that he was, in reality, an insignificant nobody swept along by the changing currents of the American labor movement. It is not the purpose of this short article to paint a full-length portrait of Powderly but rather, on the basis of newly discovered data, to indicate briefly which, if any, of the above characterizations fit the man.

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Portrait of an American Labor Leader: William L. Hutcheson.

ILR Review ◽

10.2307/2519781 ◽

1957 ◽

Vol 10 (3) ◽

pp. 463

Author(s):

Philip Taft ◽

Maxwell C. Raddock

Keyword(s):

Labor Leader ◽

American Labor

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Epilogue

Robert R. Church Jr. and the African American Political Struggle ◽

10.5744/florida/9780813056272.003.0008 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 124-136

Author(s):

Darius J. Young

Keyword(s):

African American ◽

Political Activism ◽

Labor Leader ◽

White Community ◽

Socialist Labor ◽

Walter White ◽

American Leader

This chapter discusses Church’s waning influence and subsequent shift to more radical political activism in the 1930s and 1940s. Church resigned his position at the NAACP and argued with the newly appointed Walter White. While he remained respected as an African American leader, his relationship with the white community became increasingly adversarial. His fallout with Boss Crump in the 1930s led to Crump directly attacking him. At the same time, his relationship with socialist labor leader A. Philip Randolph became closer. The chapter ends with a discussion of the erasure of Church’s legacy in Memphis immediately after his death, and his daughter’s mission to restore it.

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A Labor Leader

The Wealth Weapon ◽

10.4324/9781315135434-4 ◽

2017 ◽

pp. 40-52

Keyword(s):

Labor Leader

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The Heroic Guerrilla

10.5149/northcarolina/9781469655970.003.0008 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 83-94

Author(s):

Miguel La Serna

Keyword(s):

Latin American ◽

The State ◽

Labor Leader ◽

Labor Activists ◽

Enrique Lopez Albujar ◽

Che Guevara ◽

San Martín

Daniel Bravo is a young boy in San Martin, a department in the Amazon. The son of a peasant labor leader, he experiences the effects of a police massacre of labor activists in Tabalosos. Victor Polay and Nestor Cerpa head up a guerrilla front in San Martin to commemorate the anniversary of the death of Latin American revolutionary Che Guevara. The state counterinsurgency, headed by Defense Minister Enrique Lopez Albujar, comes to San Martin

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Global Master Workman

10.3828/liverpool/9781800859609.003.0006 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 129-150

Author(s):

Steven Parfitt

Keyword(s):

United States ◽

Civil War ◽

Labor Force ◽

Labor Movement ◽

The United States ◽

Labor Leader ◽

Irish Immigrants ◽

National Border ◽

American Labor Movement ◽

American Labor

This chapter analyzes the story of a transnational figure who hardly ever crossed a national border in his career as labor leader. Terence Powderly (1849-1924) was born in Carbondale, Pennsylvania, in 1849, to Irish immigrants. He entered the labor force as a switchman for the Delaware and Hudson railroad at the age of 13, as the Civil War raged across the United States, and became a machinists’ apprentice at the age of 17. He was marked out very early as a rising star in the American labor movement, rising quickly in the Machinist and Blacksmith’s Union after joining it in 1871. In 1874, a year after the Panic of ’73 brought economic depression to the United States and forced Powderly west to find work, he joined a relatively new, secret union that he would be associated with for the rest of his life: The Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor.

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