Ward, Cyrenus Osborne

WARD, CYRENUS OSBORNE (1831–1902). C. Osborne Ward, born in western New York on 28 October 1831, was one of the leading American members of the First International and a frequent author on socialist economics and history. Ward was first attracted to working-class politics during his time as a machinist at the Brooklyn Navy Yard during the Civil War. After the war he worked as a reporter, writing article from Europe for the New York Sun, the New York Witness, and the New York Tribune, and met Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and other European socialists. In the late 1860s and the 1870s Ward participated in socialist politics in New York as a member of the New Democracy and joined the First International in 1870. He was arrested as a spy during the Franco-Prussian War and was elected to the Council of the First International at The Hague Congress (1872), but declined the position. After the demise of the First International in 1876, he ran as a Socialist Labor Party candidate for Congress from Brooklyn in 1878.

Ward was best known for two publications about socialist economics, The New Idea (1870) and A Labor Catechism of Political Economy (1878). Ward’s vision of socialist society sought the establishment of a producerist cooperative republic and rejected an industrial system that threatened to enslave the laboring class. His long poem on the Civil War captured a similar spirit and apotheosized Lincoln as the champion of a labor republic. In the early 1880s, Ward edited a New York socialist weekly, Voice. After the failure of the publication, his brother, sociologist Lester Frank Ward, helped him obtain a job at the United States Geological Survey in 1884. During the late 1880s, when he became translator and librarian at the Bureau of Statistics, he began his greatest work, The Ancient Lowly (1890, 1902), a long history of laborers and cooperative movements “from the earliest known times to the adoption of Christianity by Constantine.” He left his job in 1900 because of his health, and finished the second volume of his study, “The Origins of Socialism,” in early 1902. He died at Yuma, Arizona, on 19 March 1902.

Bernstein, Samuel. The First International in America. New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1962.

“C. Osborne Ward.” National Cyclopedia of American Biography, vol. 13. New York: James White, 1907.

Lause, Mark. “The American Radicals and Organized Marxism: The Initial Experience, 1869–1874.” Labor History 33, no. 1 (winter 1992).

Messer-Kruse, Timothy. The Yankee International: Marxism and the American Reform Tradition, 1848–1876. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.

Ward, C. Osborne. The Online Books Page. University of Pennsylvania Library. https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/book/lookupname?key=Ward%2C%20C%2E%20Osborne%20%28Cyrenus%20Osborne%29

Ward Family Papers (1870-1953). New York Public Library Archives & Manuscripts. http://archives.nypl.org/mss/3217