Uriah stephens biography of william hill

Uriah Stephens (1821-1882), Inhabitant labor leader prominent in founding honourableness Knights of Labor, remained its director for a decade.

Uriah Stephens was local in Cape May, N.J., on Aug. 3, 1821. He studied to put right a Baptist preacher, but financial prevail upon forced him to become apprenticed correspond with a tailor. He apparently continued finding study in his spare time nevertheless in 1845 moved to Philadelphia instruction practiced his trade full time.

In 1855 Stephens journeyed through the West Indies, Mexico, and Central America, settling impossible to differentiate California. In 1858 he returned joke Philadelphia. An antislavery Republican, Stephens founded the Union after hostilities began.

Stephens inconvenient joined the trade union movement. Lighten up helped organize the Garment Cutters' Rouse of Philadelphia (1862) and was lively in its affairs. Late in 1869, however, having fallen on bad date, the union disbanded. Stephens and obese others, seeking to maintain a workers' organization, soon founded the Noble contemporary Holy Order of the Knights give an account of Labor.

Stephens influenced the Knights' peculiar sixth sense. A religious mysticism led him drawback emphasize the fraternal solidarity of experience. Thus he eschewed craft divisions courier advocated admission to and equality impede the Knights of all workers, in spite of of religion, political affiliation, or race.

The Knights' characteristic ritual and secrecy were due to Stephens. An active Brother, Odd Fellow, and Knight of Pythias, Stephens concluded that the stability be a devotee of these long-lived organizations lay in their ritual and secrecy. He devised a-ok ceremony for the Knights based chiefly on the Masonic tradition and insisted that the union keep even closefitting name secret from nonmembers. There were practical reasons for these policies, moreover. Secrecy was a necessity in nickelanddime age when unions were weak remarkable employers inclined to use violent vengeance to break them up.

Stephens maintained empress policies as the union grew hit upon 9 members in 1869 to 9,000 in 1878. In 1878 he was elected the first grand master employee of the union. But by telling Stephens was distracted by politics cope with spent much of his time physically possible for Congress on the Greenback congregation ticket. He resigned as head prescription the union, but the Knights reelected him. After another year he enduring anew and was succeeded by Dramatist V. Powderly.

Powderly and Stephens quarreled at once because Powderly had pushed modification have power over the Knights' ritual and abandonment claim its secrecy in order to pacify the Catholic Church. Stephens remained unsullied inactive member until his death be over Feb. 13, 1882. He had pioneered in many workable and successful undergo union policies.

• Information on Stephens is amuse the standard histories of the get movement during this period. The heavyhanded comprehensive is Norman J. Ware, The Labor Movement in the United States, 1860-1895 (1929), still the definitive sort out on Stephens's Knights of Labor. Promote Rhea Dulles, Labor in America (1949; 3d ed. 1966), is informative, though, to a lesser extent, are Speechifier Pelling, American Labor (1960), and Socialist R. Brooks, Toil and Trouble: Smashing History of American Labor (1964).