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Grand Master Workman: Terence Powderly and the Knights of Labor. By Craig Phelan. (Westport: Greenwood, 2000. viii, 294 pp. $65.00, ISBN 0-313-30948-5.)
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.
Phelan does not disappoint. He offers historians an extraordinary and largely persuasive defense of Powderly that differs sharply from previous assessments.
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...