Lee Meriwether biography
Lee Meriwether
[TMSI #1734]
Lee
Meriwether, social reformer, was born in Columbus, Miss., Dec. 25,
1862; son of
Minor and Elizabeth
(Avery) Meriwether. His father was a lawyer and his mother
the author “The Master of Red Leaf,”
“Black and White,” “The Ku Klux
Klan,” “My
First and Last Love,” and other books.
He was
educated in the public schools of Memphis, Tenn., to which place
he had removed with his parents
in childhood, and in 1890
established
the Free Trader
at Memphis which they
conducted until 1883.
In 1885-86 he visited Europe, and toured the
country from
Gibraltar to the Bosphorus on foot for the
purpose
of studying the conditions
of workingmen and the effect of the protective tariff. He was
appointed
by Secretary of
the Interior Lamar to write a report on the “Condition of European
Labor,”
which was published in the annual report of the U.S.
bureau of labor in
1886. He served as a special
agent of the U.S. Interior department,
1886-89,
and was employed in collecting data concerning
labor
in the United States and
Hawaiian Islands, and in 1891 in visiting the island prisons of the
Mediterranean. He studied law in the office of his father at
St. Louis, Mo., 1890-91;
was admitted to
the bar in 1892, and settled in practice in St. Louis
in 1893.
He was labor commissioner of Missouri,
1889-90, and
again, 1895-96. He was
married, Dec. 4, 1895, to Jessie, daughter of A. F. Gair, of
Brooklyn,
N.Y. He
was the unsuccessful
Democratic candidate for mayor of St. Louis in 1897, and
in
1901 he was the candidate of the Public Ownership party for the
office. He
claimed to have been
counted out by means of a partisan election law,
and he
was credited with 31,000 votes, as against
33,000 for the Republican nominee.
He is the author of : A Tramp Trip: How
to See Europe on Fifty
Cents a Day (1887); Afloat
and Ashore on the Mediterranean;
The Tramp at Home; A Lord’s
Courtship;
An American King; Miss Chunk, and various reports.
Source: "The Twentieth Century Biographical Dictionary of
Notable Americans" by Rossiter Johnson, John Howard Brown, Boston, 1904 .