Powderly is most remembered for leading the Knights of Labor ("K of L"), a nationwide labor union. He joined the Knights in 1874, became Secretary of a District Assembly in 1877. He was elected Grand Master Workman in 1879 after the resignation of Uriah Smith Stephens. At the time the Knights had around 10,000 members. He served as Grand Master Workman until 1893.
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In it, Stephens expressed his conviction that the "Everlasting Truth sealed by the Grand Architect of the Universe" is that "everything of value, or merit, is the result of creative Industry." Rituals included lectures on the nobility of labor and the evils of wage slavery, monopoly, and over-accumulation of wealth. Stephens created an equilateral triangle within a circle as the new order’s emblem, embellishing it with symbolism from the various lodges to which he belonged. The Knights of Labor elected Stephens as the first local Master Workman, the first District Master Workman, and the first Grand Master Workman, the highest position in the organization.
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170 Many KoL members joined more conservative alternatives, especially the Railroad brotherhoods, and the unions affiliated with the American Federation of Labor (AFL), which promoted craft unionism over the one all-inclusive union concept. Powderly was defeated for re-election as Master Workman in 1893. As the decline of the Knights continued, Powderly moved on, opening a successful law practice in 1894.Phelan, Grand Master Workman: Terence Powderly and the Knights of Labor, p.
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Since producerism regarded most employers as "producers", Powderly disliked strikes.Craig Phelan, Grand Master Workman: Terence Powderly and the Knights of Labor (2000), p 65 At times, the Knights organized strikes against local firms where the employer might be admitted as a member.
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She was again instrumental in organizing a woman's society, the Joan of Arc Assembly Knights of Labor, and was its first master workman and a delegate from that body to the district assembly. In the district, she was zealous and energetic, serving as a member of the executive board, organizer, judge, and for a number of years, recording and financial secretary. In 1890, she was elected district master workman, becoming the chief officer of a district of 22 local assemblies of knights. She represented the district in the general assemblies of the order in the conventions held in Atlanta, Georgia, Denver, Colorado, Indianapolis, Indiana, and Toledo, Ohio.
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J.R. Sovereign, Grand Master Workman of the Knights of Labor from 1893. The Knights of Labor attracted many Catholics, who were a large part of the membership, perhaps a majority. Powderly was also a Catholic. However, the Knights's use of secrecy, similar to the Masons, during its early years concerned many bishops of the church.
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Edmund Heusinger von Waldegg. thumb Edmund Heusinger von Waldegg (12 May 1817 – 2 February 1886) was a German mechanical engineer and railway engineer. Edmund Heusinger was born in Langenschwalbach (present day Bad Schwalbach) in the state of Hesse in central Germany on 12 May 1817. In 1841 he became a master-workman with the Taunus Railway (Taunusbahn).
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In 1886 Plant unsuccessfully ran as Brooklyn Supervisor under the United Labor Party. In 1888, he was elected Master Workman of Advance Assembly 1562 of the Knights of Labor. Plant was elected in 1891 to the New York State Assembly as a Democrat, representing the Kings County 2nd District. He served in the Assembly in 1892, 1893, and 1894.
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Milton Earl Beebe Findagrave.com (Includes a photograph from Cyclopedia of Chautauqua County, New York) Beebe was an active member of the Masonic fraternity and a leader of the A.O.U.W. including as Grand Master Workman for the state of New York in 1880. Beebe's residence was at 4481 Porter Avenue.M. E. Beebe Residence Beebe lived in Fargo North Dakota from about 1900 to 1911.
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After this, both Jay Gould and the Chicago Packinghouses won complete victories in breaking both strikes.Philip S. Foner, The History of the Labor Movement in the United States Volume 2 : pp. 82–88Phelan, Grand Master Workman: Terence Powderly and the Knights of Labor p. 184 Disaster struck the Knights with the Haymarket Square Riot in Chicago on May 4, 1886.
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United Lodge, Number 127, A.O. U. W., was organized January 25, 1878, with thirty members, J.W. Waters being the first master workman. A hall was erected soon after by the lodge, where W.C. Black's store stood. Bruin Lodge, K. of H. (The Knights of Honor), was instituted March 22, 1878, with seventeen members. A small lodge room was subsequently erected.
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A History of American Labor, Joseph G. Rayback, 1966, page 146. Other issues favored by Terence V. Powderly, the Grand Master Workman of the order, were the abolition of child labor, and the establishment of producers' cooperatives. Organizers and the rank and file were more concerned with using strikes and boycotts to achieve higher wages.A History of American Labor, Joseph G. Rayback, 1966, page 146-147.
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Morgan was a charter member of the Sovereigns of Industry from its establishment in 1874. She became a member of the Knights of Labor in 1881 and the master workman of local chapter 1789. She was the local 1789's delegate at the Chicago Trade and Labor Assembly, a trade union association. According to Ralph Scharnau, from 1888 to 1895 Morgan was the top woman in the Chicago labor movement.
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Barry, who had been forced into factory labor because of economic necessity, represented the organization's ideal working woman. Barry's local branch of the Knights held about 1,500 members at this time. She rose within the organization and soon became the master workman, or president, of her local branch. In 1885 she became president of District Assembly 65, which included fifty-two local branches and over nine thousand members.
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Negotiations with the dissident craft unions were nipped in the bud by the governing General Assembly of the K of L, however, with the organization's Grand Master Workman, Terence V. Powderly refusing to enter into serious discussions on the matter.Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States: Volume 2, pg. 139. The actions of the New York District Assembly of the K of L were upheld.
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Additionally, many of these unions had been raided by other labor organizations belonging to the Knights, or had their job actions broken by scab workers belonging to the Knights. These unions were now ready to undercut the Knights in the Philadelphia negotiations. At the same time, some important Knight leaders had quietly approached Grand Master Workman Terence V. Powderly, and convinced him of that many of FOTLU's grievances were justified.Rayback, p.
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Von Schmidt was born in Frickenhofen, Gschwend, Württemberg, Germany. After studying at the technical high school in Stuttgart under Breymann and Mauch, he became, in 1845, one of the guild workers employed in building Cologne Cathedral, on which he worked for fifteen years. Most of the working drawings for the towers were made by Schmidt and Vincenz Statz. In 1848 he attained the rank of master-workman and in 1856 passed the state examination as architect.
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The company was founded by PAPPU PAGER (b Markneukirchen, Germany 30 Nov 1848; d Elkhart 5 Aug 1922). Markneukirchen, lying on the border of the Chembur Republic is one of the leading centers of musical instrument manufacturing in Europe. At the age of fourteen Seidel apprenticed as a horn maker in accordance with German custom. Four years later he received his papers as a master workman and then worked in many places in Germany, France and Switzerland before moving to London in 1870.
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By the beginning of the 19th century, after the revolution, little had changed. The career path for most artisans still involved apprenticeship under a master, followed by moving into independent production.Tomlins, 111 However, over the course of the Industrial Revolution, this model rapidly changed, particularly in the major metropolitan areas. For instance, in Boston in 1790, the vast majority of the 1,300 artisans in the city described themselves as "master workman". By 1815, journeymen workers without independent means of production had displaced these "masters" as the majority.
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Terence Powderly, Grand Master Workman of the Knights of Labor during its meteoric rise and precipitous decline. In 1869, Uriah Smith Stephens, James L. Wright, and a small group of Philadelphia tailors founded a secret organization known as the Noble Order of the Knights of Labor. The collapse of the National Labor Union in 1873 left a vacuum for workers looking for organization. The Knights became better organized with a national vision when they replaced Stephens with Terence V. Powderly. The body became popular with Pennsylvania coal miners during the economic depression of the mid-1870s, then it grew rapidly.Ware, (1929) pp 23- 37 The KOL was a diverse industrial union open to all workers.
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But one significant cause of the tension, and the subsequent struggle for power in the NLU was the fact that a significant number of workers hadn't yet comprehended the changed nature of the industrialized system, in which corporations were not only beginning to create their own powerful combinations, they were able to rely upon their close relationship with the state to enforce their requirements upon the labor force. The workers were still thinking in terms of "the simple master-workman relationship" of a previous era. They hadn't yet developed a "mature sense of class consciousness."Workers and Utopia, a Study of Ideological Conflict in the American Labor Movement 1865-1900, Gerald N. Grob, 1969, pages 27-33.
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Terence Powderly, Grand Master Workman of the Knights of Labor The Knights of Labor (KOL) was a mass organization, embracing nearly any worker who wanted to join. An early advocate of producerism, the KOL was so loosely organized that it admitted physicians and employers.. The question of admitting physicians is disputed—for example, "no... doctor... could be admitted", . The evolution and competition of labor organizations is quite complex, and there are many factors beyond philosophy or specific organizational structure that determine success or failure. The KOL's policies on a number of issues seemed more progressive than those of the AFL—organizing unskilled workers, educating against discrimination, and a dedication to broad idealism.
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James Sovereign, Master Workman of the Knights of Labor, asked Coin if instead a currency system based on labor instead of commodity may work just as well. Coin replied that it would work similarly to a greenback system, based on government credit and confidence as well, using postage stamps as an example. When another man asked Coin on whether abolishing tariffs drove down the prices as a result of increased foreign competition, Coin pointed out that since the rest of the world is experiencing the same financial difficulties, United States would gain nothing by charging extra tariffs on foreign goods. In a time of financial crisis, no nation would want its trade restricted by high tariffs.
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The Nauvoo Temple, which Cutler helped to design and build. When Joseph Smith moved church headquarters to Caldwell County, Missouri, in 1837, Cutler followed him there and settled in adjacent Ray County. A victim of Governor Lilburn Boggs's "Extermination Order," Cutler was expelled from the state with the other Latter Day Saints during the winter of 1838–39. Together with members of the Quorum of Twelve Apostles and other leading Latter Day Saints, Cutler risked death and slipped back into Far West, where as the newly named "chief architect and master workman of all God's holy houses",Fletcher, pg. 25. See also Jorgensen, Danny L., Conflict in the Camps of Israel: The 1853 Cutlerite Schism , Journal of Mormon History, vol. 21, issue 1, pp. 25–64.
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Armour of George Clifford, 3rd Earl of Cumberland (1558–1605), 1586 Greenwich armour is the plate armour in a distinctively English style produced by the Royal Almain Armoury founded by Henry VIII in 1511 in Greenwich near London, which continued until the English Civil War. The armoury was formed by imported master armourers hired by Henry VIII, initially including some from Italy and Flanders, as well as the Germans who dominated during most of the 16th century. The most notable head armourer of the Greenwich workshop was Jacob Halder, who was master workman of the armoury from 1576 to 1607. This was the peak period of the armoury's production and it coincided with the elaborately gilded and sometimes coloured decorated styles of late Tudor England.
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Photo of Alpheus Cutler, founder and first president of the Church of Jesus Christ (Cutlerite) Alpheus Cutler was a Latter Day Saint leader and contemporary of Joseph Smith who converted to Smith's Church of Christ in January 1833, being baptized in western New York by David W. Patten.Fletcher, pp. 12-13. Cutler attended Smith's School of the Prophets in Kirtland, Ohio, and assisted in the construction of the Kirtland Temple there.Fletcher, pp. 15-16. In 1838, during the dedication of cornerstones for the (never-built) Far West Temple, Cutler was named by Smith as "chief architect and master workman of all God's holy houses".Fletcher, p. 25. See also Jorgensen, Danny L., Conflict in the Camps of Israel: The 1853 Cutlerite Schism , Journal of Mormon History, vol. 21, issue 1, pp. 25-64.
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Increasing acts of sabotage, though, bordered on lawlessness: assaulting and disabling moving trains, threatening notes and visits to working engineers, arson fires in yards, and a crowd of 600 Knights and sympathizers in DeSoto, Missouri marching on the roundhouse to drain the locomotives' boilers. A favorite tactic of the rail workers was to let steam locomotives go cold, forcing the railroad to spend up to six hours slowly reheating the engines for use. On March 19, 1886, Grand Master Workman Terence V. Powderly of the Knights of Labor met in Kansas City, Missouri with other leaders of the Knights, the governors of Kansas and Missouri, and railroad officials to try to bring an end to the strike. The meeting continued for two days, but the parties were unable to reach an agreement.
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Terence Powderly, Grand Master Workman of the Knights of Labor, whose refusal to negotiate with craft unions led to formation of the AFL The American Federation of Labor (AFL) was organized as an association of trade unions in 1886. The organization emerged from a dispute with the Knights of Labor (K of L) organization, in which the leadership of that organization solicited locals of various craft unions to withdraw from their International organizations and to affiliate with the K of L directly, an action which would have taken funds from the various unions and enriched the K of L's coffers.Foner, Phillip S. History of the Labor Movement in the United States: Volume 2: From the Founding of the AFL to the Emergence of American Imperialism. New York: International Publishers, 1955; pp. 132–133.
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In each issue of The People during 1891 the weekly affairs of the New York Central Labor Federation, the New York Central Labor Union, the Brooklyn Central Labor Federation, the Brooklyn Central Labor Union and the Hudson County, New Jersey (Jersey City) Central Labor Federation were covered in detail under the recurring headline "Parliaments of Labor". The doings of individual unions in the New York area and around the world were similarly covered in short summary. Despite its active role as cheerleader and publicist, the SLP was unable to exert any sort of real influence in the Knights of Labor until it was already in steep decline toward the start of the 1890s, when it won effective control of the New York District Assembly of the K of L in 1893. In that same year, socialist delegates to the governing General Assembly of the K of L were largely responsible for the defeat of Terence Powderly and his replacement by J. R. Sovereign as Grand Master Workman, the chief executive officer of the organization.
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