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 .


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