support the militant anarchism of the Haymarket anarchists, he fought for the clemency of the accused because he did not believe they were the sole perpetrators of violence. He broke with the Knights of Labor when their national leader, Terence V. Powderly, repudiated the defendants completely. In 1888, Labadie organized the Michigan Federation of Labor, becoming its first president, and forged a tenuous alliance with Samuel Gompers. At age fifty he began writing verse and publishing artistic hand-crafted booklets. In 1908, the city postal inspector refused to handle his mail because it bore stickers with anarchist quotations. A month later the Detroit Water Board, where Labadie worked as a clerk, dismissed him from his post for expressing anarchist sentiments. In both cases, public officials were forced to back down in the face of mass public protests in support of Labadie, well known to Detroit citizens as its "Gentle Anarchist". Collector of ephemera In about 1910, when he was 60 years old, Labadie began to prepare for the preservation of the vast collection of pamphlets, newspapers, and correspondence which he had accumulated in the attic of his home. 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 Labadie spurned their offer of $500 for the collection. The libraries of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, and Michigan State University also made attempts to acquire the collection. 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. While the University of Michigan was slow to show interest in the collection, an investigator was eventually dispatched. The report returned on Labadie's collection was negative, dismissed as a great mass of "stuff." Labadie remained persistent, however, and he eventually convinced nine Detroit residents, including several businessmen, to donate $100 each for the purchase of the collection, which was then donated to the university with requisite pomp. In 1912 twenty crates of material were moved from Labadie's attic to Ann Arbor, forming the foundation of the renowned Labadie Collection of radical literature. Labadie spent his later years soliciting donations to the collection from friends and acquaintances, donating hundreds more items himself to the library in 1926. Agnes Inglis cataloged and organized the collection. The