Joseph Labadie (1850-1933) was a Detroit writer and poet, and was involved with nearly every left wing and labor-related issue of the late 1800s.
Jo Labadie was born on April 18, 1850, in Paw Paw, Michigan, to Anthony and Euphrosyne Labadie, both descendants of seventeenth century French immigrants of the Labadie family who had settled on both sides of the Detroit River. His boyhood was a frontier existence among Pottawatomi tribes in southern Michigan, where his father served as interpreter between Jesuit missionaries and Indians. His only formal schooling was a few months in a parochial school.
Later in life he settled in Detroit, becoming a writer, a poet and an active supporter of the Socialist Labor Party. He was key in bringing a new national labor union into Detroit: The Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor, which was founded by garment workers in 1869 in Pennsylvania.
In October 1878 Charles Litchman, “grand scribe” of the Knights of Labor, traveled to the emerging labor center of Detroit and selected Labadie to form the first cell of the union in Michigan. The group preferred to keep its identity obscured, for its mission to organize all laborers into a secret federation was arousing intense hostility from business leaders. Handsome, dapper, friendly, and always ready with a speech, Labadie was an ideal choice for the Knights, whose ideals of brotherhood and justice were at one with Labadie’s values.
In 1888, Labadie organized the Michigan Federation of Labor, became its first president, and forged an alliance with Samuel Gompers. At age fifty he began writing verse and publishing artistic hand-crafted booklets. In 1908, the city postal inspector banned his mail because it bore stickers with anarchist quotations. A month later the Detroit water board, where he was working as a clerk, dismissed him for expressing anarchist sentiments. In both cases, the officials were forced to back down in the face of massive public protest for the person well known in Detroit as its “Gentle Anarchist”.
In about 1910, when he was 60 years old, Labadie began to prepare for the preservation of the vast collection of pamphlets, newspapers, and correspondence which he had accumulated in the attic of his home. The collection was eagerly sought by the University of Wisconsin, one of the paramount repositories of materials relating to labor and socialist history in the United States, but Labadie spurned their offer of $500 for the collection. The libraries of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, and Michigan State University also made attempts to acquire the collection.
Labadie sought instead to keep the material as near to his hometown of Detroit as possible and contacted the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor about their potential acquisition of the material. While the University of Michigan was slow to show interest in the collection, an investigator was eventually dispatched. The report returned on Labadie’s collection was negative, dismissed as a great mass of “stuff.” Labadie remained persistent, however, and he eventually convinced nine Detroit residents, including several businessmen, to donate $100 each for the purchase of the collection, which was then donated to the university with requisite pomp.
In 1912 twenty crates of material were moved from Labadie’s attic to Ann Arbor, forming the foundation of renowned Labadie Collection of radical literature. Labadie spent his later years soliciting donations to the collection from friends and acquaintances, donating hundreds more items himself to the library in 1926.[2] The collection thus preserved is today regarded as among the finest accumulations of 19th Century radical ephemera in the United States.
Sources :
Bill Loomis, “Parades, rallies and picnics popular from the 19th century as unions sought support, pushed for workers’ rights”, Detroit News, September 1, 2013.
Eleanor H. Scanlan, “The Jo Labadie Collection,” Labor History, vol. 6, no. 3 (Fall 1965).
All-American Anarchist: Joseph A. Labadie and the Labor Movement / Carlotta R. Anderson. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1998
Jo Labadie and His Gift to Michigan : A Legacy for the Masses, University of Michigan Harlan Hatcher Graduate Library Special Collections.