The following excerpts are from the 
"The Fighting Machinists, A Century of Struggle" 
by Robert G. Rodden.

SECOND GRAND MASTER MACHINIST. 
JOHN J. CREAMER, 1890 - 1892. 
Talbot's successor, James J. Creamer of Richmond, Virginia, was born in 1861. At seventeen he began his apprenticeship in the machine shop of the Richmond Locomotive Machine Works. A member of the Knights of Labor, he served as secretary of the Richmond Assembly. However, when he heard of Talbot's Order of Machinists and Mechanical Engineers, he became a charter member and helped to organize Lodge 10. 

THIRD GRAND MASTER MACHINIST. 
JOHN O'DAY, 1892 - 1893. 
When Creamer's successor, John O'Day of Indianapolis, took over as Grand Master Machinist in 1892 business and industry were in a deep economic downslide. This inflamed class-ridden relationships between employers and wage earners. Shortly after O'Day took office steelworkers in Homestead, Pennsylvania fought one of the bloodiest pitched battles in American labor history. This classic collision between capital and labor occurred on the banks of the Monongahela River, just outside of Pittsburgh.

FOURTH GRAND MASTER MACHINIST.
JAMES O'CONNELL 1893 - 1911.
Born in Minersville, Pennsylvania, in 1858, he entered his apprenticeship in Oil City, Pennsylvania, in 1874 and worked in machine shops there for the next six years. He moved on to Detroit for short time, but returned to Western Pennsylvania to enter the newly booming oil business. Later he went to New York where he joined the Knights of Labor and served as a delegate at its 1886 Convention in Richmond. . . .As a member of the Executive Board O'Connell and Creamer became friends and allies. He usually stayed at Creamer's home when in Richmond on union business. When elected Grand Master Machinist he was thirty-five years old. . . .An observer at the 1908 AFL convention who wrote a series of thumbnail sketches of leading labor figures of the day indicated that O'Connell's leadership was based on ability, not personality. In fact he described O'Connell as a "veritable iceberg," too cold-blooded and deliberate to be a "true Irishman."

FIFTH INTERNATIONAL PRESIDENT.
WILLIAM H. JOHNSTON 1911 - 1926.
William Hugh Johnston, the new International President, was born into a trade union family in Nova Scotia in 1874. His father was an early leader of the Shipwrights and Spar Makers, the union of craftsmen who built the elegant Yankee Clippers. In 1888, at the age of 14, Johnston became an apprentice in the machine shops of the Rhode Island Locomotive Works. . . .In 1895 he helped organize and became a charter member of an IAM lodge in Pawtucket. Following the Panic of 1897 he returned to the Rhode Island Locomotive Works in Providence, transferred his membership to Lodge 147 and soon became president and chairman of the shop committee. On several occasions the company invited him to drop his union activities by offering to promote him to general foreman. He not only stayed with the union, but went over to Brown and Sharpe to try to organize that violently anti-union company from within. . . .Later, as a district business representative, he negotiated a fifty-four hour week along with wage increases for most of his members.
Johnston was thirty-seven when he took office as International President. He was bald, short, stocky and powerfully built. Though somewhat forbidding in appearance, he was described by those who knew him as good natured and amiable. Johnston was well read, commanding the attention of audiences through his logic and knowledge rather than the more florid flights of oratorical rhetoric more common to that time.

SIXTH INTERNATIONAL PRESIDENT.
ARTHUR O. WHARTON 1926 -1939.
Wharton had made his reputation not only in the IAM, but throughout the labor movement for his part in the 1911 strike against the Illinois Central and Harriman Lines. As the IAM's representative to this early stab at coordinated bargaining, he became everybody's choice to head the six shop crafts negotiating team--the so-called Federation of Federations. Later, when these six organizations created a formal Railway Employee's Department in the AFL, they elected Wharton as first president. When he agreed to be drafted to lead his own union, he took a substantial cut in salary--from $10,000 to $7,500 a year. He did so to halt the dissension which, as he said, "was wrecking the organization to a degree no outside agency had been able to accomplish."
Wharton was born in 1873 into a mixed Anglo-Indian homesteading family on a remote and windswept plain in Kansas. While still a young boy his mother was widowed when his father got lost in a blizzard and froze to death. At fourteen he began a machinist apprenticeship on the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe. Upon becoming a journeyman in 1890 Wharton joined the IAM and went to work for the Union Pacific soon after. There he helped organize several lodges and was a leader of a strike against that road in 1893. Over the next several years he remained active in union affairs and was elected to a number of local and district lodge offices.

EIGHTH INTERNATIONAL PRESIDENT.
ALBERT J. HAYES, 1949 - 1965.
Born on Valentine's Day, 1900, to immigrant German parents in Milwaukee, Hayes was the seventh in a family of ten children. Like so many first generation children in those days, Al Hayes grew up speaking two languages. He was an exceptionally bright student and highly competitive third baseman who remained a fierce competitor throughout life. Hayes apparently hoped to be the first of his family to graduate from college. But this hope ended abruptly when his father was permanently and totally crippled by a freak accident in the coal yard where he worked as a foreman. . . .with his help desperately needed at home he was forced to go to work. Settling on a machinist apprenticeship as his best choice for a lifetime career he got a job with the West Milwaukee shops of the Milwaukee Railroad. 

NINTH INTERNATIONAL PRESIDENT.
P.O. SIEMILLER, 1965 -1969.
Christened Paul LeRoy, Siemiller was born in September 1904 on a homestead close by the Platte River in central Nebraska. His father was a Civil War veteran who served at various times with the  4th Iowa Infantry and the 51st Missouri cavalry. While Roy was still a boy his father left the farm to an older brother and began an odyssey that took the family westward and eastward before finally settling down in Arkansas. Striking out on his own in the old time "strike and succeed" tradition of a Horatio Alger hero, young Roy left school at an early age to become a Western Union messenger. Spotting an "Apprentice Wanted" sign in the window of a machine shop where he was about to make a delivery, he removed his Western Union cap, went inside, fibbed about his age and talked himself into working nine hours a day at 11¢ an hour (with, as he later said, "no deducts"). 

ELEVENTH INTERNATIONAL PRESIDENT,
WILLIAM W. "WIMPY" WINPISINGER, 1977-1989.
Born the son of a union printer in Cleveland in 1924, Bill Winpisinger got on the fast track early in life. As a burly teenager he was a ferocious competitor, playing both ways on the line in high school football and good enough at basketball to get a tryout as a catcher with the Yankee farm club. Possessing a keen and questing intelligence he was to much the rebel, too rambunctious and impatient for the faculty at Cleveland's West Tech High School. Helped by a little push from the authorities, he dropped out of the 11th grade a month after Pearl Harbor. With the world at war and itching for more action than a class room could offer, he went to work in a local machine tool factory. In later years he recalled that this first brush with factory life, though brief, was enough to teach him the evils of company unionism. In August 1942, four months before his 18th birthday, he enlisted in the Navy. Over the next three years he served in the Mediterranean, North Africa, England and was at the beaches of Normandy on D-Day. He was on his way to the Pacific when Japan surrendered. Though he credits the navy with teaching him his trade as a diesel mechanic, he says it also taught him to distrust the abuse and ignorance of autocratic authority.

THIRTEENTH INTERNATIONAL PRESIDENT,
R. THOMAS BUFFENBARGER, 1997 -
R. Thomas Buffenbarger is the 13th International President in the 112-year history of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM).
First elected in 1997, Tom Buffenbarger leads 730,000 active and retired IAM members in Canada and the United States. As one of the largest industrial unions in North America, the IAM represents the men and women who build, repair and operate the machines that maintain the peace and sustain the prosperity both nations now enjoy.
IAM members are building America's F-22 fighters at Boeing and Lockheed Martin, Aegis destroyers at Bath Iron Works and Bradley fighting vehicles at FMC Corp. hey are servicing United and US Airways planes, Union Pacific and Amtrak trains, UPS trucks and GM cars. In the last five years, the IAM has negotiated collective bargaining agreements with over 4,000 employers.
Under Tom Buffenbarger's leadership, the IAM continues to diversify. It now represents doctors and limousine drivers in New York City, care givers in VA hospitals, loggers in Oregon, and cigarette makers in Virginia. The IAM is currently organizing Boeing engineers and United Mileage Plus employees.
As its International President, Tom Buffenbarger serves on five major IAM sponsored organizations. He closely tracks the performance of the IAM National Pension Fund and the National IAM Benefit Trust Fund. He serves on the board of directors of Guide Dogs of America and IAM Cares. And Mr. Buffenbarger helps lead the Machinists Non-Partisan League, the twelfth largest political action committee in the nation.
Tom Buffenbarger is a member of the Executive Council of the AFL-CIO. In that capacity, he chairs the federations' Committee on State and Local Central Bodies. He was instrumental in launching the New Alliance, a program designed to increase the AFL-CIO's impact at the grassroots level.
His duties as international president span the globe. Tom Buffenbarger is a member of the Canadian Labor Congress. he serves on the Executive Committee of the International Metalworkers Federation that represents 20 million workers in over 100 countries and as President of its Aerospace Department. Mr. Buffenbarger also is a member of the US Treasury Department's Advisory Committee to the International Monetary Fund.
President Buffenbarger, a journeyman tool and die maker at GE's jet engine plant in Evandale, Ohio, has been a machinist for nearly thirty years. He was the youngest International President in IAM history when he took the helm of the union at age 46. Mr. Buffenbarger is a graduate of Ohio University. He and his wife Linda have two children, Amy and Andrew. They live in Brookeville, Maryland.

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