Uriah Smith Stephens

Uriah Smith Stephens (born August 3, 1821, Cape May, New Jersey, U.S.—died February 13, 1882, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) was an American utopian reformer who was instrumental in founding the Knights of Labor, the first national labour union in the United States.

Stephens wanted to become a Baptist minister, but family financial reverses (largely brought about by the Panic of 1837) led him into an apprenticeship to a tailor. After working as a tailor in Philadelphia from 1845 to 1853, Stephens traveled to California by way of the West Indies, Central America, and Mexico. When he returned to Philadelphia in 1858 he became caught up in antebellum reform movements, advocating abolitionism and a utopian socialism that would later underlie his union-organizing efforts.

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Those efforts began in 1862, when Stephens helped organize the Garment Cutters’ Association of Philadelphia. When that union collapsed in 1869, Stephens joined with six others that same year to found the Noble Order of the Knights of Labor, with Stephens becoming the union’s first grand master workman. Open to all working people (excluding bankers, lawyers, stockbrokers, gamblers, doctors, and liquor manufacturers and salespeople), the Knights were supposed to serve as a voluntary association of producers, brought together in a great fraternal body to replace the ugly materialism of the new industrial age with a cooperative economic order. In Stephens’s view, the Knights constituted something akin to a secular church and thus required substantial secrecy and ritual to bind together its diverse membership. In an era that saw several brutal union-busting struggles, secrecy was also regarded as an essential survival strategy.

As the Knights grew into the most powerful labour organization of its day, Stephens found himself and his beliefs more and more the targets of attack. Secrecy and ritual became the central issues of controversy, and many members took exception to Stephens’s opposition to strikes and other job actions. In 1878—after losing a congressional bid as a Greenback Party candidate—Stephens resigned as leader of the Knights.

His successor was Terence V. Powderly, and Stephens and Powderly clashed bitterly over the secrecy issue until in 1881 Powderly triumphed and the Knights repudiated the rule of secrecy and employed less ritual, stripping the union of the quasi-religious trappings in which Stephens believed so devoutly. Under Powderly the Knights of Labor went on to acquire almost 700,000 members by 1886—four years after Stephens’s death. But by that time it was an entirely different organization from the cooperative commonwealth that Stephens had envisioned.