Thorne, Florence (1877–1973)

American labor researcher and editor. Born Florence Calvert Thorne on July 28, 1877, in Hannibal, Missouri; died of pulmonary emboli on March 16, 1973, in Falls Church, Virginia; daughter of Stephen Thorne (a teacher and grocer) and Amanthis Belle (Mathews) Thorne; attended Oberlin College, 1896–99; University of Chicago, Ph.B., 1909.

Taught liberal arts (1899–1912); employed as a researcher, writer, and executive assistant to American Federation of Labor (AFL) president Samuel Gompers (1912–17); served on the Subcommittee on Women in Industry of the Advisory Committee of the Council of National Defense (1917); served as assistant director of the Working Conditions Service, War Labor Administration, U.S. Department of Labor (1918); director of research, AFL (1933–53); served as a delegate to the Federal Advisory Commission for Employment Security (World War II); served as adviser to the International Labor Organization; wrote Samuel Gompers, American Statesman (1957).

The labor organizer and editor Florence Thorne was born in Hannibal, Missouri, in 1877, the middle of three daughters of Amanthis Belle Mathews , a descendant of English aristocracy, and Stephen Thorne, a native of Georgia and a one-time Confederate soldier who later taught school before opening a grocery outlet. She was valedictorian of her high school class, graduating in 1896, and went on to Oberlin College in Ohio, where she majored in English and classical languages in preparation for a career as a schoolteacher. After three years at Oberlin, Thorne left to teach for a year in Georgia. In 1903, she returned to college, attending summer sessions at the University of Chicago for the next six years. During the school year, she supported herself by teaching high school in Hannibal. She finished her bachelor of philosophy degree in history and political science in 1909. Exposed to the trade-union movement by one of her courses, Thorne decided to pursue a graduate degree at Chicago in labor economics. While researching her thesis on the American Federation of Labor (AFL), Thorne met Samuel Gompers, president of the AFL and the man who would have the most impact on her career. Gompers was supportive of Thorne's research, and allowed her access to the AFL's files in Washington, D.C.

Although she had to leave her research to return to Hannibal to teach, Gompers had been so impressed by Thorne that in 1912 he offered to make her assistant editor of the AFL's publication, The American Federationist. This was the start of her 40-year professional association with Gompers and the AFL. Thorne became Gomper's assistant, speech writer, and confidante, in addition to her duties as the principal writer and editor of the Federationist. In the course of her first five years with the AFL, Thorne also conducted economic and political research to help the organization develop new political strategies. A supporter of American involvement in World War I, Thorne left the AFL in 1917 to work for the Advisory Committee of the Council of National Defense's Subcommittee on Women in Industry. She transferred to the Department of Labor in 1918, serving as assistant director of the Working Conditions Service of the War Labor Administration. With the end of the war, Thorne returned to work with Gompers, primarily as the researcher and ghostwriter of his autobiography, which she completed and published after his death in 1924 as Seventy Years of Life and Labor: An Autobiography (1925).

In 1925, Thorne again became editor of the AFL newsletter under the federation's new president, William Green. In 1933, she was made director of the AFL's new research department, which she had started as a volunteer effort in 1926 to collect vital statistics on unemployment among local unions. Throughout the Depression years, the research department interpreted New Deal programs to help local union leaders with labor negotiations. Thorne also directed many studies on topics such as unemployment and child labor. This type of research was soon to be used in the creation of the New Deal's protective labor legislation, which Thorne herself was politically opposed to; like Gompers, she believed that improvement in working conditions and economic equity through trade-union activism by workers themselves was preferable to government-imposed legislation.

During World War II, Thorne expanded her research function to include direct negotiations on AFL delegations. She also served as a consultant with the International Labor Organization and on the Federal Advisory Commission for Employment Security.

Florence Thorne retired from the AFL in 1953 at age 73. Never married, she shared a home in Falls Church, Virginia, with her longtime companion and AFL research associate Margaret Scattergood , whom she had met in 1928. In 1957, her biography of Gompers, Samuel Gompers: American Statesman, was published. Raised Baptist, she converted to Catholicism a short time before her death at age 95 in 1973.

sources:

Sicherman, Barbara, and Carol Hurd Green, eds. Notable American Women: The Modern Period. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1980.

Laura York , M.A. in History, University of California, Riverside, California