Powderly, Terence V

Identification: American labor leader Born: January 22, 1849; Carbondale, Pennsylvania

Died: June 24, 1924; Washington, D. C.

Him, Powderly backed further federal legislation to bar American employers from recruiting workers overseas.

While he was a member of Knights of Labor, Powderly was three times elected mayor of Scranton, Pennsylvania. After leaving the union in 1893, he established a successful legal practice. In 1907, he became chief of the new Division of Information in the Bureau of Immigration. In 1911, he was named honorary president of a National Conference of Immigration, Land, and Labor Officials. Both agencies helped immigrants find work and promoted cultural assimilation. Powderly served as Commissioner of Conciliation in the Department ofLaborfrom 1921 until his death three years later.

Maureen J. Puffer-Rothenberg

Further Reading

Phelan, Craig. Grand Master Workman: Terence Pow-derly and the Knights of Labor Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000.

Powderly, Terence Vincent. “A Menacing Irruption.” The North American Review 147, no. 381 (1888): 165-174.

Watson, Martha S., and Thomas R. Burkholder, eds. The Rhetoric of Nineteenth-Century Reform. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2008.

Significance: Although he was the son of immigrants, Powderly believed that immigrant workers had a detrimental effect on the national economy and spent much of his adult life working to combat immigrant labor. As a union leader he supported legislation barring Chinese workers from entering the United States, and he later campaigned for broad bans on immigration. Later, however, he worked on behalf of immigrant welfare.

Born to Irish immigrants, Terence Powderly began his career by following in his father’s footsteps as a railroad mechanic. After losing a job, he found new work through a machinists’ union and later became a union organizer. In 1879, he was elected to lead the Knights of Labor, a national workers’ union. Realizing that employers were recruiting immigrants to work for low wages, he supported the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. In 1885, with the Knights of Labor’s 700,000 members behind

See also: Anti-Chinese movement; Bureau of Immigration, U. S.; Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882; Chinese immigrants; History of immigration, 1783-1891; Immigration law; Labor unions.