Uriah Smith Stephens

Uriah Smith Stephens ( born August 3, 1821 in Cape May, New Jersey, † February 13, 1882 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) was Baptist, American union leader and founder of the Knights of Labor.

Life

About Uriah Smith Stephens ' childhood and his parents are unknown. He studied religion and wanted to become a Baptist preacher. But he was forced for financial reasons to begin a lesson by the consequences of the economic crisis of 1837. He began an apprenticeship in the trade of a tailor, but tried part-time to maintain his studies. But with the move to Philadelphia in 1846 he abandoned his studies altogether. He worked in his profession as a tailor until 1853 and then went to California for five years. During this time, he toured the West Indies, Central America and Mexico.

In 1858 he came back to Philadelphia. He joined the trade union movement, became a follower of utopian socialism as a Republican and an opponent of slavery. He supported the 1856 Republican presidential candidate John Charles Frémont and 1860 Abraham Lincoln.

In 1862 he joined the Garment Cutters ' Association and was an active member until its dissolution in 1869. Later that year, he invited eight colleagues of his profession to be a, presented his plans and visions for a new workers' organization represents and founded with them the Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor, later renamed the Knights of Labor. The Assembly created a kind of secret society with rituals and obligations of confidentiality.

Stephens was elected by the first General Assembly of the Knights of Labor to their Masterwork man and 1878 to their Grand Master Workman. In the same year, he ran on the ticket of the Greenback - Labor Party for the U.S. Congress, but was not elected.

In 1879 he was then, after he had a year previously had declared the resignation, presided off and was replaced by Terence Vincent Powderly.

Stephens died on February 13, 1882 in Philadelphia and was buried there in the Odd Fellows Cemetery ( cemetery).

As a token of their gratitude for his services and the General Assembly of the Knights of Labor in 1886 decided in Richmond, Virginia to build the family a house to protect it.

Work

Stephens ' significant work is limited to the time of 1869, the founding of the Knights of Labor, until his resignation in 1879. His merit was to have founded an organization of workers who did not want to restrict locally or regionally as a union, and also showed open for all the people who produced something, so the value added process of a product had part. This included driving business with express, but for example, bankers, speculators and brokers expressly.

Stephens was influenced by him a very own religious mysticism and tradition of thought, which was reflected in the celebrated by the Knights of Labor rituals and secrecy rules. He led the union in a sort of Masonic tradition at that time protected the organization and its members well and in times where employers to break resistance by force use accustomed to survive helped.

Stephens was a very religious embossed visionary than that he could move masses for the trade union movement. Among the ten years of his leadership, the organization seven years later grew only by about 9000 members, not to be compared with the approximately 700,000 members under the leadership of Terence Powderly Vincent.

When he in 1878 tried to run for the Greenback - Labor Party, in which he was responsible for the word " laboratory " in the signature, for a seat in the U.S. Congress, already showed a certain lack of interest in the concrete trade union work. As Powderly 1879, the union leadership took over, Stephens immediately quarreled with him because of this radical change in the Knights introduced, the organization opened, fraternity rituals abolished and the Noble and Holy Order of banished from the name.

Stephens remained there until his death as an inactive member of the Knights, but alienated from the organization and their chosen paths.

Swell

• Gary M. Fink: Biographical Dictionary of American Labor Leaders, Greenwood Press, Westport, Connecticut, 1974, ISBN 0-8371-7643-3.
• Biography - BookRags
• Melvyn Dubofsky, Foster Rhea Dulles: Labor in America - A History Harlan Davidson Inc., Wheeling, Illinois, 2004, ISBN 0-88295-998-0.

Further reading

• Melvyn Dubofsky: Industrialism and the American Worker 1865-1920, Harlan Davidson Inc., Wheeling, Illinois, 1969, ISBN 0-88295-925-5.
• Steve Leikin: The Practical Utopians - American Workers and the Cooperative Movement in the Gilded Age, Wayne State University Press, Detroit, 2005, ISBN 0-8143-3128-9.
• Edward Pessen: Most Uncommon Jacksonians: The Radical Leaders of the Early Labor Movement, State University of New York Press, 1967 ISBN 0-8739-5129-8.

• Unionists ( United States)
• Born in 1821
• Died in 1882
• Americans
• Man