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The Printer's Son
Who was Elbert Elias Stevens?
For more than twenty years, Elbert Stevens edited The Labor Digest, one of America's most influential labor newspapers. He was a respected printer, union leader, entrepreneur, political candidate, and one of Minneapolis's best-known voices for organized labor.
Then he disappeared.
No obituary has been found. No death record has been identified. After decades spent shaping public debate, one of the city's most prominent labor editors quietly vanished from history.
The Printer's Son began as a family search for "Uncle Bert." It became something much larger.
Drawing on thousands of pages of labor newspapers, union proceedings, city records, frontier newspapers, and long-forgotten archives, David Stevens reconstructs the remarkable life of a man who grew up in his father's Wisconsin printing office and came to stand at the center of one of the most turbulent periods in American labor history.
Along the way, the story expands to include three other remarkable men whose lives became intertwined with Stevens and with the future of industrialist Otis Briggs, Citizens' Alliance leader and defender of the open shop; Ray Dunne, the fiery organizer shaped by the Industrial Workers of the World; and Carl Skoglund, the Swedish immigrant whose revolutionary ideals helped transform American labor.
Rather than casting heroes and villains, The Printer's Son explores four principled men who shared a belief in the dignity of work but reached profoundly different conclusions about how justice should be achieved.
Part biography, part narrative history, and carefully grounded in original historical sources, this book offers a fresh look at the labor struggles that shaped Minneapolis—and restores to history a forgotten editor whose own story was almost lost.
For more than twenty years, Elbert Stevens edited The Labor Digest, one of America's most influential labor newspapers. He was a respected printer, union leader, entrepreneur, political candidate, and one of Minneapolis's best-known voices for organized labor.
Then he disappeared.
No obituary has been found. No death record has been identified. After decades spent shaping public debate, one of the city's most prominent labor editors quietly vanished from history.
The Printer's Son began as a family search for "Uncle Bert." It became something much larger.
Drawing on thousands of pages of labor newspapers, union proceedings, city records, frontier newspapers, and long-forgotten archives, David Stevens reconstructs the remarkable life of a man who grew up in his father's Wisconsin printing office and came to stand at the center of one of the most turbulent periods in American labor history.
Along the way, the story expands to include three other remarkable men whose lives became intertwined with Stevens and with the future of industrialist Otis Briggs, Citizens' Alliance leader and defender of the open shop; Ray Dunne, the fiery organizer shaped by the Industrial Workers of the World; and Carl Skoglund, the Swedish immigrant whose revolutionary ideals helped transform American labor.
Rather than casting heroes and villains, The Printer's Son explores four principled men who shared a belief in the dignity of work but reached profoundly different conclusions about how justice should be achieved.
Part biography, part narrative history, and carefully grounded in original historical sources, this book offers a fresh look at the labor struggles that shaped Minneapolis—and restores to history a forgotten editor whose own story was almost lost.
109 pages, Paperback
Published July 17, 2026
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