07/11/2026
TODAY IN LABOR HISTORY: On July 10th, 1896, our founder Henry Miller met his untimely demise after falling off a pole the night before.
“A union was the logical answer for the many problems facing these workers; so the small group of electricians meeting in St. Louis sought help from the American Federation of Labor (AFL) to unionize. An organizer named Charles Kassel was assigned to help them, and in 1890 the group was chartered as the Electrical Wiremen and Lineman’s Union, No. 5221, or the AFL Federal Labor Union 5221. A St. Louis lineman, Henry Miller, was elected president.
Henry Miller was a man of remarkable courage and energy. J.T. Kelly, the first secretary of our Brotherhood, said of Miller, “No man could have done more for our union in its first years than he did.” Miller packed his tools and an extra shirt in an old carpetbag and rode the rails to many U.S. cities to work the trade. The receiving committee for Miller’s arrival in a city was often a “railroad bull”—a policeman who chased him and tried to put him in jail for his unauthorized mode of travel.
Nonetheless, Miller persevered. Everywhere he went, he organized the electrical workers he met into local unions. Largely because of Miller’s work, a great deal was accomplished in that first year of the union. Local unions char- tered by the AFL and other electrical unions were organized all over the United States, including Chicago; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Evansville and Indianapolis, Indiana; Louisville, Kentucky; New Orleans, Louisiana; Cincinnati and Toledo, Ohio; Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Duluth, Minnesota; and New York City.
The First Convention was called in St. Louis on November 21, 1891. Ten delegates attended, representing 286 members:
1. Henry Miller, St. Louis
2. J.T. Kelly, St. Louis
3. W. Hedden, St. Louis
4. C.J. Sutter, Duluth
5. M. Dorsey, Milwaukee
6. T.J. Finnell, Chicago
7. E. Hartung, Indianapolis
8. F. Heizleman, Toledo
9. Joseph Berlowitz, Philadelphia
10. H. Fisher, Evansville
The IBEW now recognizes these delegates as our founding fathers. They met in a small room above Stolley’s Dance Hall in a poor section
of the city. It was a humble beginning—only a tiny fraction of the trade seemed interested in building a national union, and no representa- tives of southern or western workers attended the meeting. The handwritten report of that convention records Henry Miller’s thoughts:
At such a diminutive showing, there nat- urally existed a feeling of almost despair. Those who attended the Convention will well remember the time we had hiding from the reporters and trying to make it appear that we had a great delegation.”
