1. Charles Joseph Antoine Labadie was an American labor organizer, anarchist, Greenbacker, libertarian socialist, social activist, printer, publisher, essayist, and poet.
17 Facts About Jo Labadie
1. 2.
Jo Labadie was born on April 18,1850, in Paw Paw, Michigan, to Anthony Labadie and Euphrosyne Labadie, who were both first cousins and descendants of seventeenth century French immigrants of the Labadie family who had settled on both sides of the Detroit River.
3.
Jo Labadie's boyhood was a frontier existence among Potawatomi tribes in southern Michigan, where his father served as interpreter between Jesuit missionaries and Native Americans.
4.
Jo Labadie's only formal schooling was a few months in a parochial school.
5.
Jo Labadie began five years of "tramp" printing and then settled in Detroit as a printer for the Detroit Post and Tribune.
6.
Jo Labadie married his first cousin, Sophie Elizabeth Archambeau, in 1877, despite him being agnostic and her being Catholic.
7.
Jo Labadie joined the newly formed Socialist Labor Party in Detroit at the age of 27 and soon was distributing socialist tracts on street corners.
8.
In 1878, Jo Labadie organized Detroit's first assembly of the Knights of Labor, and ran unsuccessfully for mayor on the Greenback-Labor ticket.
9.
Jo Labadie became closely allied with Benjamin Tucker, the country's foremost exponent of that doctrine, and frequently wrote for the latter's publication, Liberty.
10.
Jo Labadie broke with the Knights of Labor when their national leader, Terence V Powderly, repudiated the defendants completely.
11.
In 1888, Jo Labadie organized the Michigan Federation of Labor, becoming its first president, and forged a tenuous alliance with Samuel Gompers.
12.
In both cases, public officials were forced to back down in the face of mass public protests in support of Jo Labadie, well known to Detroit citizens as its "Gentle Anarchist".
13.
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 Jo Labadie spurned their offer of $500 for the collection.
14.
Jo 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.
15.
Jo Labadie spent his later years soliciting donations to the collection from friends and acquaintances, donating hundreds more items himself to the library in 1926.
16.
Joseph Jo Labadie died on October 7,1933, in Detroit, Michigan, at the age of 83.
17.
Jo Labadie donated the vast majority of manuscripts and ephemera acquired in his lifetime to the collection at the University of Michigan Library, a deed he viewed as his primary legacy.