Book Review

With his biography of the Knights of Labor (KOL) Grand Master Workman Terence V. Powderly, Craig Phelan has established himself as the leading biographer among U.S. labor historians. The choice of Powderly takes Phelan deep into waters of scholarly controversy, in contrast with his previous works examining the lives of the American Federation of Labor president William Green and the United Mine Workers president John Mitchell.	1
Phelan does not disappoint. He offers historians an extraordinary and largely persuasive defense of Powderly that differs sharply from previous assessments.	2
Early labor historians dismissed Powderly as representing the last gasp of an old-style reform unionism. More recent historians, while shifting focus to the communities, have only added to the criticisms. Powderly was purportedly hostile to strikes and trade unionism, an ineffectual, vacillating bumbler, and a small-town moralist. Phelan rejects these characterizations and portrays Powderly as a master politician and a forceful and shrewd labor leader. But, in defending Powderly, Phelan has done something else. He has become the first scholar in decades fully to master the voluminous Powderly correspondence and has thereby given us a new national narrative of the Knights' rise and fall. The highlights of that narrative are as follows:	. . .