Gronlund, Laurence

GRONLUND, LAURENCE (1846–1899). A Danish-born socialist, Gronlund penned some of the most popular radical works of the Gilded Age. Although he died at the age of fifty-three in poverty and obscurity, no theorist or other popular economist could equal his impact upon the early course of American-style Marxian socialism. Gronlund’s adaptation and popularization of German socialist ideas into the American vernacular influenced Edward Bellamy, Victor L. Berger, Eugene V. Debs, and their entire radicalized generation. Thanks to his 1884 volume, The Cooperative Commonwealth, Gronlund stands as the effective intermediary link between the ideas of Karl Marx and Ferdinand Lassalle on the one hand and the Socialist Party on the other.

A native of Copenhagen, Gronlund fought in the Second Schleswig-Holstein War against Prussia in 1864, after which he attended law school and graduated from the University of Copenhagen. He emigrated to the United States in 1867, and taught the children of immigrants in Milwaukee before passing the Illinois state bar and opening a law office in Chicago. There, the Norwegian Forty-Eighter Marcus Thrane had already begun to cultivate a socialist current among Scandinavian immigrants. Through the mid-1870s, this small current became part of the regroupment of comrades in different language groups into the first explicitly socialist political party in the United States. Gronlund himself abandoned legal practice to take up life as an author and lecturer.

By 1877, Gronlund become actively engaged in this process at St. Louis. Under the name of Peter Lofgreen, he held office in the English-speaking section of the Workingmen’s Party of the United States in that city. The press later identified him as the likely chair of the executive committee that led the party through the remarkable transformation of the national railroad strike there into the short-lived “St. Louis Commune,” a city-wide takeover by a broad strike committee. Arrested in the course of its suppression and released, he participated in the emergence of a new Socialistic Labor Party in early 1878, sketching his vision in his first published work, a pamphlet titled The Coming Revolution. The electoral disappointments of the next years, reversing early victories in several states, shattered the socialist organization and prompted a minority toward social revolutionism (or anarchism) and prospective armed revolt. Gronlund, however, remained on his own path, pulled towards the economically-oriented socialist writings of Marx, Engels and Lassalle. These ideas he reinterpreted in his master work, The Cooperative Commonwealth, published in 1884

Gronlund popularized a critique of competitive capitalism that highlighted the crucial notion of “overproduction” within industrial capitalism. That is, wage workers received back far less than the value of what they produced, resulting in inevitable commodity surpluses and economic crises. He stressed that the working class faced the impositions of the petty capitalists as well as the great combinations and trusts. Only a new, cooperative economy, complete with the expansion of democratic norms and a remaking of social relations of education, justice, and gender rights, could resolve the problems of modern society. This vision dovetailed with other contemporary arguments about the growing danger of monopolies. But Gronlund’s emphasis on the working class distinguished it from contemporary Greenback, anti-monopolist and Populist currents.

Absent an English translation of Marx’s Capital into English, Gronlund’s book came as revelation to an entire generation of English-speaking activists. More than 100,000 copies sold over the next two years, astounding for a political work of its kind, netting the author approximately $1,000. This impressive sales total more than doubled in 1888, by virtue of one of Gronlund’s careful readers, the journalist Edward Bellamy who wrote Looking Backward: 2000–1887. Together these two books set in motion political activity directed towards creation of anew society, with the Nationalist Clubs of the 1890s culminating in the establishment of the Socialist Party of America in 1901.

Thanks to the book’s popularity, Gronlund traveled to lecture in Britain for two years, returning to take part in Henry George’s 1886 United Labor Party mayoral campaign in New York City. After the failed campaign, George dismantled the coalition in the interests of the Democratic party. Gronlund made the case for socialism against George’s “single tax” solutions in two subsequent, unsuccessful New York socialist municipal races. Despite his earlier implicit strategy of reasoned argument and moral suasion, the encounter with George and the general repression of radical ideas in the wake of the Haymarket affair inspired Gronlund to write Ça Ira! (1887), literary restoration of the reputation of French revolutionary leader Georges Danton.

Serving on the Socialist Labor Party’s National Executive Committee for a time, Gronlund broke with the party around 1890. He published Our Destiny: The Influence of Socialism on Morals and Religion the same year, dealing largely with the roots of morality, proposing a system of ameliorative reform, including municipal ownership, aid to unemployed workers, nationalization of mines and telegraphs, establishment of a national bank system, regulation of railroad fares and freight rates, and expansion of a rational public education system starting with kindergartens. This last book captured little public attention.

Around this time, Gronlund embraced the movement of Nationalist Clubs inspired by Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backwards, which proposed the gradual reconstruction of governmental authority to counter-balance the destructive features of capitalism. He spent some years working for the U.S. Bureau of Labor, but apparently restless, returned to the lecture trail. Known in later years for his tattered attire, shabby hat, and unkempt personal appearance, Gronlund eked out an existence as an occasional lecturer, frequently shaking hands with the handful of sympathizers in attendance before passing penniless into the night to sleep in a public park. He died in New York City at the age of fifty-three.

Gemorah, Solomon. “Laurence Gronlund's Ideas and Influence, 1877–1899” PhD dissertation. New York University, 1965.

Gemorah, Solomon. “Laurence Gronlund—Utopian or Reformer?” Science & Society, vol. 33, no. 4 (Fall–Winter 1969), 446–58.

Quint, Howard H. The Forging of American Socialism: Origins of the Modern Movement. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1953.