"[14]
These idealistic "First Principles" found an ardent champion in Terence
V. Powderly, a machinist by trade and twice mayor of Scranton,
Pennsylvania, on a labor ticket, who succeeded Stephens in 1878 to the
headship of the Order. Powderly bore unmistakably the stamp of this sort
of idealism throughout all the time when he was the foremost labor
leader in the country. Unlike Samuel Gompers, who came to supplant him
about 1890, he was foreign to that spirit of combative unionism which
accepts the wage system but concentrates on a struggle to wrest
concessions from the employers. Even when circumstances which were
largely beyond his control made Powderly a strike leader on a huge
scale, his heart lay elsewhere--in circumventing the wage system by
opening to the worker an escape into self-employment through
cooperation.
Producers' cooperation, then, was the ambitious program by which the
Order of the Knights of Labor expected to lead the American wage-earning
class out of the bondage of the wage system into the Canaan of
self-employment. Thus the Order was the true successor of the
cooperative movement in the forties and sixties.
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