Grand Master Workman: Terence Powderly and the Knights of Labor. By Craig Phelan. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000. Pp. 294. $65.00

This volume is a throwback to an older style of labor history, one based on the leaders of the labor movement. Craig Phelan has produced an intriguing, and in places even inspiring, history of Terence Powderly, the leader of the Knights of Labor from 1879 to 1893. Powderly's story deserves to be retold. His history stands at the cross-roads of an older American set of ideals dating back to the founding of the nation and the emerging corporate values associated with the late-nineteenth-century rise of big business. This is a story of one of the earliest attempts to break from an elitist model of craft unions and replace it with a broad-based labor movement, one that welcomed skilled and unskilled, men and women, and people of all races. This is the story of how this movement was ultimately crushed by larger forces at work in society. It reminds us of what might have been, and perhaps encourages us to think of what still might be.