Seymour Stedman was born in Hartford, Connecticut, on July 4, 1871, the son of ethnic Anglo-Saxon parents with ancestors dating back to the time of the American Revolution.

[1] Young Seymour was forced to drop out of school in the third grade to take a job tending sheep for $5 a month as a way of helping his family make ends meet.

[1] As a byproduct of his reading and discussions, Stedman became an adherent of the Single Tax system advocated by Henry George, a reform program then in popular vogue.

[2] In the aftermath of the defeated strike, Gene Debs was incarcerated for six months at Woodstock Jail in Chicago, where he was turned to the doctrine of socialism by the jailhouse visits of Milwaukee newspaper editor Victor L. Berger.

[3] Stedman was elected to the 1896 National Convention of the People's Party, held in St. Louis, where he attempted to start a movement among the delegates to draft Gene Debs as the nominee of the organization for President of the United States.

[5] The following day a statement by Debs was read to the convention indicating that he had no desire to run for president and the bid was over, leaving Stedman to support Bryan in the 1896 campaign.

[7] Stedman's name was offered for nomination for Vice President of the United States at the SPA's 1908 convention in Chicago, but he trailed Benjamin Hanford in the balloting, losing by a vote of 106 delegates to 46.

[9] In 1915 Stedman was their candidate for Mayor of Chicago and in 1920 for Vice President of the United States, running on a ticket headed by Eugene V. Debs.