Labor Leaders

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Donny Schmeder
(1959-1990)

Labor Historian, Speaker, & Labor Activist

"I never fight for a cause to try to change my enemies -- I fight to keep my enemies from changing me."

Labor historian, speaker and labor activist. Donny came from a Union heritage spanning four generations.

Member IBEW Local 390: Health & Welfare Trustee. Self-taught student of Labor Law.  Organized grade school level speakers bureau on labor history.

Devoted to promoting the men and women who built our nation and who maintain its mines, plants and services
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Hans Schwarz
(1851-1934)

Newspaper Editor & Union Leader

Schwarz was a newspaper editor trained in Germany. He immigrated to America in 1883 and to Belleville in 1884. A year later, he established the "Arbeiter Zeitung" a German language newspaper which a year later became a daily. He published the paper until 1915. His ideas were of great interest to recent German immigrants and he was quite outspoken on labor issues -- to the point of being beaten and vilified.

In 1892 he was elected President of Typographical Union #18 and in 1907 he was elected Secretary of the Illinois Association of German-American Pres.
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Aloys Towers
(1878-1937)

AFL Organizer & VP Illinois State Federation of Labor
Member Moulders Local #182.
Officer from 1878 - 1937.
1913 elected VP Illinois State Federation of Labor - an organization he served for 27 years.
1912-1918 Secretary, Belleville Trades and Labor Assembly.
Republican candidate for Illinois State Representative 1930
 
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George R. Badgley
1898 - 1977

Pattern Maker, Orbon Stove
Member Local #4 Stove Mounters
1940 Elected VP Int'l Stove Mounters Union
1939 Elected Secretary of Stove Industry Labor Council
Secretary Central Trades & Labor Council

Mayor Charles E. Nichols (L) & George R. Badgley, the first recipient of the annual Labor Man of the Year Award, 1967
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Father Frederic Beuckman
1869 - 1934

Past St. Mary Parish, Belleville 1910 - 1934
Author of works on the history of St. Clair County and the Belleville Diocese 1918
An inventor of a gas heater and a new type of gas stove
Declaired a hero in the Shawneetown floods of 1898
 
"My transfer to Belleville in August 1910 to a large Parish in Belleville presented immediately a serious problem. Belleville at the time was one of the nation's most flaring hotbeds of socialistic agitation, especially the west city section. Very few catholic men were then church attendants. They were not only socialists in search of economic redress from economic wrongs, but they had come to believe that the church was standing in the way of such redress. They were coal miners and the industrial workers. Socialistic parades, headed by bands of music very often started the lines of march within a block of my parish church."
 
Life work centered around the trials of the workingman. Following are quotes from the correspondence and writings of Father Beuckman.
 
On July 8, 1917, Fr. Beuckman condemned "the horrible, savage, brutal massacre of Negroes and burning of their houses in East St. Louis" the previous Monday. Most people of St. Mary's who did travel to St. Lous knew only too well of what Father Beuckman spoke.
 
"About the year 1926 quite a number of my parishioners, stove foundry sandblasters, were dying the slow and agonizing death of scilicosis [silicosis] strangulation. Daily I saw these victims of industrial wrongs and neglect die an undieing death, to which even strangulation of an unsuccessful hanging of the gallows is but momentary to the many months of strangulation of an incurable scilicosis victim...What was my position - I could see no other to assume than to crystalize public opinion to the fact that any enameled product, which went into the market with murder label of a preventable industrial fatal disease of scilicosis stamped upon it, cried for an accounting on that indictment. What happened?"
 
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George C. Bunsen
(1822-1908)

Secretary of Benevolent Society
 
Son of famous German-born educator and inventor, George Bunsen. George C. was the Secretary of the largest Benevolent Society in Belleville -- The St. Clair County Benevolent Co with a membership of 2,000. He also operated a gunsmith shop at the West Belleville Toll Gate...1869.  For a short time in 1878, he edited the "Reform" newspaper dedicated to the workingman.

His quote follows: "When a man is steady and sober and finds himself in debt for a common living, something must be wrong."

Bunsen immigrated to America with his parents in 1834. He grew up in an atmosphere of concern for the hardships and economic straits of the workingman in the last half of the 19th Century.
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