Wright, James Lendrew (1816–93), USA labour leader, was born 6 April 1816 to a protestant family in Co. Tyrone, of whom nothing else is known except that the family emigrated first to St John, in the British colony of New Brunswick, and thence to the US, settling in Philadelphia in 1827. Educated at the Mt Vernon grammar school and Charles Mead's private academy, after serving a six-year apprenticeship Wright worked as a tailor, joining the tailors’ benevolent society of Philadelphia in 1836. In 1847 he opened his own tailoring shop in Frankfort, outside Philadelphia. Becoming manager of a large Philadelphia clothing store in 1854, he lost the position in the panic of 1857 and returned to the tailor's bench as a wage earner – an early career not atypical of mid-nineteenth-century US labour leaders, who tended to move in and out of the wage-earning class, depending on economic fluctuations and personal circumstance. In 1862 Wright joined Uriah Stephens and others in organising a local benefit society, the garment cutters’ association of Philadelphia, and served several years at its president. He helped establish the Philadelphia trades’ assembly (autumn 1863), and was elected its treasurer; the body was among the strongest of the citywide mixed trades’ assemblies that characterised the general upsurge in local labour organisation throughout the northern states consequent on the economic prosperity and full employment of the civil-war years.
When the garment cutters’ association was dissolved amid the nationwide post-war collapse of the labour movement, Wright was among seven members of the association (of whom Stephens was and remained the guiding force) who on 28 December 1869 formally launched a new organisation, the Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor, a name Wright has been credited with devising. Numbered among the first elected officers, as venerable sage (January 1870), for a period later in the 1870s he was master workman of local assembly no. 1 (the founding assembly). Conceived not as a conventional trade union, but as a secret, fraternal society of workingmen, the Knights of Labor, modelling itself on freemasonry, contrived an elaborate body of ritual, symbolic pageantry, quasi-religious imagery, and code of honour to initiate and bind its members, who were enjoined never to write or utter the name of the order in public. After the order's early period of slow and locally confined growth, Wright was active in the expansion of the movement beyond the Philadelphia area. He helped organise the first local assembly in Scranton, Pennsylvania (May 1875), formed during the ‘long strike’ of anthracite miners, the defeat of which destroyed both the regional miners’ union and the clandestine Molly Maguires, thus opening the way for an expansion of the Knights into north-east Pennsylvania. To facilitate this, and in accord with the order's ideal of the brotherhood of all labour, he persuaded local assemblies to abandon notions of craft exclusivity and admit a mixture of trades, and to embrace the unskilled.
In the mid 1870s Wright was prominent in tentative efforts to forge a central authority to coordinate the activities of the growing number of local and district assemblies. However, he firmly opposed any relaxation or abandonment of the policy of strict secrecy – a demand arising largely from the increasing numbers of catholic members (many of them Irish) concerned by their church's condemnation of secret societies – or modification of the centrality of ritual to the order's ethos. In the latter 1870s he was conspicuous in a brief phase of independent workers’ political action that characterised the labour movement throughout America. At a convention in Harrisburg of the United Workingmen, he was nominated to the second place on the ticket, for Pennsylvania state treasurer, with a Pittsburgh Knights leader, John M. Davis, topping the slate for auditor general. Endorsed by the state's Greenback party, an agrarian-based movement urging currency reform, the ‘Greenback and Labor combination’ polled over 52,000 votes, some 10 per cent of the total (1877). In 1878 Wright was candidate of the now fused Greenback–Labor party for state secretary of internal affairs, the second position on a ticket headed by a nominee of the greenback interest for governor, and received some 82,000 votes, representing 12 per cent of the total.
As the Knights of Labor expanded rapidly into the midwest, the order's first grand general assembly (January 1878) formed a permanent central assembly, and granted local and district assemblies the option to undertake public operations; the 1882 general assembly rescinded secrecy entirely and made the order a public organisation. Under the dynamic leadership of Terence Powderly, an Irish-American catholic machinist, who succeeded Stephens as grand master workman in 1879, the Knights in the 1880s pursued a meteoric trajectory to become for a fleeting moment the largest and most powerful labour organisation of nineteenth-century America, and the first to attain national proportions. In the year after the famous strike victory of 1885 against the Southwest Railway Conglomerate of Jay Gould, membership grew by nearly 700 per cent to peak at some 750,000. Preaching class solidarity, and envisioning a mutualist and cooperativist society, the order was occupationally, ethnically, and religiously diverse, including large numbers of women, immigrants, and blacks.
Throughout this period Wright remained a leading, but dissident, figure in the order, a prominent internal critic of Powderly's modernising policies. In September 1879, two weeks after Powderly's accession, Wright wrote to him complaining about the abandonment of secrecy by certain locals, contending that ‘the good old way . . . worked well and in my opinion should never be changed’ (quoted in Weir, 40). In 1881 Powderly in private correspondence numbered Wright among those who wished the order to be a ‘spiritualistic medium’, more aptly called ‘ridicualistic’ than ritualistic (quoted in Weir, 42). As the order, reeling from internal ideological conflict, financial strains, and a series of disastrous strike defeats, rapidly declined in the latter 1880s, Wright – exploiting his prestige as one of the original founders, and invoking the legacy of Stephens (who had died in 1882) – was prominent among traditionalists who sought to restore the emphasis on ritualism and fraternalism, and ascribed the precipitous decline to an overly rapid enlistment of large numbers of lukewarm, improperly initiated members. In 1889 he was among four charter members of local assembly no. 1 who helped organise a fundamentalist ‘founder's movement’ within the order, calling for a return to original principles, including oath-bound secrecy; their rhetoric betrayed a subtext of anti-catholic sentiment. He was part of the clique that in 1893 toppled Powderly from office. Shortly thereafter, he died 3 August 1893 at his home in Germantown, Pennsylvania. His aspirations for the movement were realised when the 1896 general assembly returned the order to total secrecy, and restored much of the original ritual; the change, however, failed to reverse the order's decline.