John Graham Brooks

[1] Brooks graduated from Kimball Union Academy in 1866 before briefly attending the University of Michigan Law School, from which he withdrew after a year after having second thoughts about entering the legal profession.

[1] He became involved in the lives of the factory workers of the region and expounded upon the social gospel seeking amelioration of the problems suffered by the working poor.

[1] He returned to the United States later in 1885 to once again enter the ministry, accepting a position at a church in the manufacturing city of Brockton, Massachusetts, and lecturing at Harvard on the topic of socialism.

[1] During this period Brooks traveled as a government investigator of strikes and lockouts and lectured on various topics relating to progressive social reform, including trade unions, cooperatives, and the settlement house movement.

In 1911, Brooks lectured at the University of California, Berkeley on the Industrial Workers of the World — a controversial anti-political syndicalist trade union then experiencing its greatest organizational growth.

[1] Rather than seeking to denigrate this group, regarded by many Californians and virtually the whole of its political class with fear and loathing, Brooks took a painstaking historical approach to the organization.

[1][3] He continued to lecture periodically and was honored with a banquet under the auspices of the National Consumer's League in 1925, an event addressed by his peers John R. Commons and Florence Kelley and the future United States Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter.