Uriah Smith Stephens

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

Uriah Stephens was born in Cape May, N.J., on Aug. 3, 1821. He studied to be a Baptist preacher, but financial problems forced him to become apprenticed to a tailor. He apparently continued to study in his spare time but in 1845 moved to Philadelphia and practiced his trade full time.

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

Stephens early joined the trade union movement. He helped organize the Garment Cutters' Association of Philadelphia (1862) and was active in its affairs. Late in 1869, however, having fallen on bad times, the union disbanded. Stephens and eight others, seeking to maintain a workers' organization, soon founded the Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor.

Stephens influenced the Knights' peculiar character. A religious mysticism led him to emphasize the fraternal solidarity of labor. Thus he eschewed craft divisions and advocated admission to and equality in the Knights of all workers, regardless of religion, political affiliation, or race.

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

Stephens maintained his policies as the union grew from 9 members in 1869 to 9,000 in 1878. In 1878 he was elected the first grand master workman of the union. But by now Stephens was distracted by politics and spent much of his time running for Congress on the Greenback party ticket. He resigned as head of the union, but the Knights reelected him. After another year he resigned anew and was succeeded by Terence V. Powderly.

Powderly and Stephens quarreled immediately because Powderly had pushed modification of the Knights' ritual and abandonment of its secrecy in order to placate the Catholic Church. Stephens remained an inactive member until his death on Feb. 13, 1882. He had pioneered in many workable and successful labor union policies.

Further Reading

Information on Stephens is in the standard histories of the labor movement during this period. The most comprehensive is Norman J. Ware, The Labor Movement in the United States, 1860-1895 (1929), still the definitive work on Stephens's Knights of Labor. Foster Rhea Dulles, Labor in America (1949; 3d ed. 1966), is informative, as, to a lesser extent, are Henry Pelling, American Labor (1960), and Thomas R. Brooks, Toil and Trouble: A History of American Labor (1964).

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Uriah Smith Stephens
Born	August 3, 1821 Cape May, New Jersey
Died	February 13, 1882
Occupation	Founder of Knights of Labor

Uriah Smith Stephens (August 3, 1821 - February 13, 1882) was a U.S. labor leader. He led nine Philadelphia garment workers to found the Knights of Labor in 1869, a more successful early national union.

Stephens longed to be a Baptist minister but never entered the field. In 1846, he moved to Philadelphia, where he worked as a tailor and became very active in politics. He ran for the United States Congress in 1878 on the Greenback–Labor ticket, but lost. He was responsible for the incorporation of the word "labor" in this party’s name.

Stephens was initiated an Entered Apprentice Mason in Kensington Lodge No. 211 in Philadelphia on December 9, 1864; passed to the Degree of Fellowcraft on February 25, 1865; and raised to the Sublime Degree of Master Mason on March 24, 1865. He was also a member of Keystone Lodge No. 2, Knights of Pythias, and Fidelity Lodge No. 138, Independent Order of Odd Fellows.

Stephens’ involvement with Masonry began during the same period of his initial involvement with organized labor. In 1862, he helped to organize the Garment Cutters’ Union, which survived for only seven years. At his invitation, a few members of the recently demised union met at his home on Thanksgiving Day, November 25, 1869. At this meeting, he unfolded his plan for the "Noble and Holy Order of Knights of Labor" as a "brotherhood of toil" open to every laborer, mechanic, and artisan who wanted to improve his mind and condition, regardless of country, creed, or color. At the new order’s second meeting on December 28, 1869, Stephens’ ritual, Adelphon Kruptos (Secret Brotherhood), was officially adopted. In this opus, Stephens expressed his conviction that the "Everlasting Truth sealed by the Grand Architect of the Universe" is that "everything of value, or merit, is the result of creative Industry." Ritualistic work included lectures on the nobility of labor and the evils of wage slavery, monopoly, and accumulation. Stephens selected an equilateral triangle within a circle as the new order’s emblem, embellishing it with symbolism from the various lodges to which he belonged.

The Knights of Labor elected Stephens as the first local Master Workman, the first District Master Workman, and the first Grand Master Workman. By 1879, there were 23 district assemblies and 1,300 local assemblies. At that time, Stephens resigned the highest office in the order and was replaced by Terence V. Powderly. The decision resulted from a policy shift experienced the previous year—which he opposed—when the General Assembly, mainly due to pressures exerted by Roman Catholic members, had voted to make public the name of the order, omit scriptural quotations from the ritual, and edit the initiation ceremonies to make them less offensive to the Catholic Church. On January 1, 1882, after five years of debate regarding the wisdom of secrecy, the Knights of Labor became a public organization.

Stephens died on February 13, 1882. He was buried in the Odd Fellows Cemetery in Philadelphia. At the time of his death, he was estranged from the order he had founded and guided for nearly a decade. Nevertheless, he was still revered by many Knights. As a result, when the General Assembly convened in Richmond, Virginia, in 1886, they voted to appropriate $10,000 to erect a home for the family of their founder.

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