Recent months have exposed a stunning paralysis of the broad political center. While the 2024 election fueled MAGA to wildly exaggerate its popular mandate, many liberals and self-described moderates — through an anti-politics that combines resignation with their own sense of ideological predestination — have cited Donald Trump’s victory as evidence to assert yet again that the United States is somehow a “center-right nation.” Of course, basic evidence counteracts such claims. Economic redistribution — from government-ensured health care coverage and tuition-free public college to paid family and medical leave and COVID-19 monetary relief measures — remains broadly popular, and labor and wage laws won sweeping referenda even within so-called red states.
The problem, one might reasonably conclude, is not the rejection of the Left’s stances on core issues — many of which command majority support — but the failure to mobilize a mass political base that can create and sustain a cohesive narrative around economic democracy.
The dependent issue of how to optimally deliver Left ideas to a mass audience is not unique to today. Generations of socialists have attempted to simplify theoretically complex politics and package them in accessible ways for a wide populace. And for many Americans searching for an alternative to the capitalist order during the first Gilded Age, their initial exposure to a serious critique of classical political economy came courtesy of a reformer named Laurence Gronlund — the first person to attempt what historian Howard Quint called “a comprehensive yet simplified analysis of Marxism for the man in the streets.”
Long before there was David Harvey, there was Laurence Gronlund. His paramount work, The Cooperative Commonwealth and Its Outlines: An Exposition of Modern Socialism, published in 1884, was the earliest to adapt “scientific socialism” for Anglophonic audiences. As what historian Lorenzo Costaguta has recently called “the most important explanation of socialism in the English language available at the time,” Commonwealth became one of the best-selling books of the decade, and its impact on contemporary reform can scarcely be overstated. Read and celebrated by British Fabians and the French left, it boasted a list of American devotees that included Edward Bellamy, Julius Augustus Wayland, Frances Willard, and Gronlund’s “most eminent disciple,” Eugene V. Debs.
In a new biography, American Socialist: Laurence Gronlund and the Power Behind Revolution, historian Ryan C. McIlhenny attempts to unpack the essence of his Gronlund’s life and worldview, from his obscure origins to his legacy, since overlooked, as an instrumental propagandist for “modern” socialism in America. In doing so, McIlhenny unveils the internal rifts, theoretical contradictions, and self-immolating struggles that plagued the late nineteenth-century left, including the tension between nationalism and internationalism, the incongruity of evolutionism within historical materialism, and how (or if) to address racism and sexism under capitalism. But Gronlund’s story also reveals a deep genealogy of indigenous radicalism — one whose dynamism and popularity depended on bringing the debate over socialist concepts to the public sphere.
Toward a Cooperative Commonwealth
Gronlund’s exact origins, however, contain a degree of mystery. Born in Denmark in 1844, Gronlund relocated to the American Midwest in 1867, during Reconstruction and at the region’s new dawn as a global industrial juggernaut. Working first as a teacher in Milwaukee and an attorney in Illinois, he became a reform journalist and lecturer, and was moved to embrace socialism after reading the works of Blaise Pascal, whose asceticism, anti-individualism, and religious inquiry Gronlund never fully shed despite moving toward “scientific” socialism.
His subsequent, and by all accounts politically formative, years proved murky. Some historians, including McIlhenny, assert that Gronlund participated in the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 under the name Peter Lofgreen as a member of the St Louis Commune strike committee. As Lofgreen, Gronlund was possibly arrested and charged with being a “notorious Communist, spiritualist, and general demoralizer.” Others have disputed these claims.
What we do know for certain is that while 1877 launched Gronlund’s collectivist career, propelling him toward various overlapping reform movements, beginning with support for the eight-hour workday, he also appeared deeply affected by the counterthrust following the strike. This Thermidorian alliance of business and the state following what he called a “revolt of American white slaves against their task masters” likely conditioned him toward gradualism and caution. Even so, McIlhenny contends that reform was never an end in itself for Gronlund, but a means toward the eventual, if peaceful, end of capitalism altogether.
This activist period, whatever its murky details, was followed by a creative flurry. The year after the Great Railroad Strike, Gronlund published his first major work (now lost), The Coming Revolution, which became the final chapter of The Cooperative Commonwealth, his great attempt to Americanize socialism. Completed three years before the first English translation of Karl Marx’s Capital, with Gronlund working from the revolutionary’s original German texts, Commonwealth was intended to make socialism available to the “main current of English thought.”
While hardly an exhaustive analysis of Capital, Gronlund’s book succeeded in “noting the basic workings of capitalism, specifically ‘surplus value,’ labor exploitation, and the central importance of the labor theory of value.” Like Marx, he viewed socialism within a philosophy of history in which society advanced through the succession of modes of production: slavery, serfdom, and wagedom. Similarly, Gronlund understood his study as representing a clean break from utopianism and an exposition of what he deemed “modern Socialism, German Socialism, which is fast becoming the Socialism the world over.”
In fact, Gronlund saw in the associative nature of corporate trusts the seeds of capitalism’s eventual demise. If workers could co-opt and harness the cooperative model of large corporations, shifting its rewards away from the plutocratic few and toward the democratic many, then the United States, where monopoly was most acute and inequality most glaring, might become the first successful socialist country. This aspiration dovetailed with the Knights of Labor’s struggle to reconstitute the nation’s republican tradition through opposition to the “slavery” of wages, as well as Greenbacker, Farmers’ Alliance, and Grange drives toward nondomination. Gronlund reasoned that this convergence of economic leveling would culminate in public ownership of the means of production, or what Morris Hillquit later described as “the transfer of ownership in the social tools of production — the land, factories, machinery, railroads, mines — from the individual capitalists to the people, to be operated for the benefit of all.” This inversion of the corporate model was, for Gronlund, both the highest form of cooperation and a repudiation of competitive individualism, which constituted the beating heart of the new capitalist ethos.
Gronlund broke from Marxist orthodoxy in other critical ways. He remained a committed reformist, for example, and his opposition to social revolution and class violence that might “smash the state,” meant to distinguish European socialism from a new American variant, betrayed a perhaps naive faith in evolution while eliding the pitfalls of (even collectivist) nationalism. Often privileging ideas and elite vanguardism over structural forces and mass action through a hybrid of religious socialism and historical materialism, he also expressed a sense of predestination and the “divine in history” that became more pronounced toward the end of his life. Later editions of Commonwealth, influenced by the rising popularity of the Social Gospel movement, increasingly incorporated concepts such as “God” and “Will of the Universe.”
In any case, the book was a runaway success, selling over 100,000 copies in the United States and Great Britain. Gronlund’s effort to synthesize theory and organization — to create a usable text for democratizing existing labor movements and promoting independent working-class politics — bore immediate fruit, as Commonwealth, and its distillation of complex ideas, found its way into shop floors, movement spaces, and the pages of trade union presses. The labor left had its Bible, at least for the time being.
The Lessons of Spring Valley
The next act in Gronlund’s political life was characterized by a frenetic energy that saw him ping between movements and political battles. Stirred by reformer Henry George’s criticism of socialism during the 1886 New York City mayoral campaign, Gronlund became one of the sharpest public critics of George’s single-tax plan and accused the candidate of failing to grasp “the problem of wealth and poverty, especially as it related to the core elements of historic capitalism — namely, labor exploitation.” (George later blamed Gronlund and the socialists for his defeat.)
That same year, Gronlund published a biography of Georges Danton, with the idea that the memory of the French Revolution would prepare the United States for its own impending political and social transformation — one that, he still insisted, would not require violence but be led by a few committed individuals guided by “the Power behind evolution to usher society toward its revolutionary destiny.” Toward that end, he worked — and regularly clashed with — Bellamyites, Georgists, Populists, and labor Democrats. He also joined the heavily German Socialist Labor Party, which was born out of the Workingmen’s Party and the 1877 strike, but soon left owing to its sectarian character. Speaking at the Labor Congress at the World’s Fair Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, he continued to insist upon a “peaceful solution” to the labor question, holding that any direct confrontation between labor and capital would be “suicidal.”
At the same time, Gronlund moved sharply toward the religious left. Although far from a Christian dogmatist, his beliefs regarding transindividualism, communitarianism, the labor theory of value, common ownership of nature, and comradeship with the poor overlapped with the Social Gospel movement and the country’s budding Christian socialism. Gronlund’s articulation of this development, Our Destiny, published in 1891, offered the highest point of his religious perspective. Although he continued to insist that his version of socialism was “based upon” the basic questions, investigations, and theories of Marx, according to McIlhenny, Gronlund’s commitment to gradual reform, and his growing sense of faith over social scientific rigor, now placed him “in the category of a philosophical theologian more than a socialist agitator.”
Even so, Gronlund seemed to be everywhere, editorializing across the labor press and traveling to hot spots of worker unrest. In 1895, that activism brought him to Spring Valley, Illinois, where he publicly supported the “starving miners” while missing a key component of the big picture. For many Spring Valley unionists, their exploitation constituted not simply a crime against working people but against “white men.” This sense of racial and gender (rather than class) grievance intensified when owners began to replace strikers with nonunion African American workers, resulting in the most destructive race riot in the state’s history as a largely immigrant mob of coal miners attacked their black neighbors, violently driving them out of town.
For socialists, this was a common blind spot. Their “wage slavery” discourse was a politically useful concept that served a crucial solidaristic function within multiracial industrial unions, cutting across racial and ethnic divides; it was also a sincere valuation of one’s condition, far more literal and universal than historians have credited. Yet like many industrial battles, Spring Valley was not simply a labor action but also an instance of racist violence. And, as McIlhenny concludes, “was frequently the case, Gronlund ignored the serious racial dynamics interwoven into the conflicts between labor and capital, especially in the Spring Valley conflict.”
That Gronlund did not address its race dimensions was typical, revealing the broader struggles of Gilded Age socialists to grapple with the racialized nature of US capitalism. Although Marx himself understood the hyperexploitation of black people as a key ingredient of ruling class control — one that worsened conditions for workers across the board — Gronlund, like most of his contemporaries, consistently failed to identify the fight against racial (and to a lesser extent gender) oppression as central to the fight against capitalism. That failing resided not in his class-first outlook, which involved foregrounding material conditions as the foundation for the creation and manipulation of intraclass social difference, including race and racialization — a sensible approach when striving to organize the world’s most diverse working class. Rather, it lay in his seeming disregard for the problem of racial discrimination. It would take decades, through the racially progressive wing of Debs’s Socialist Party and the more aggressive anti-racism of the American Communists, before the mainstream US left began to internalize the lessons of Spring Valley. Such lessons involved the necessity of not only labor interracialism but racial justice beyond the workplace — opposition to the color line, lynching, and black disenfranchisement — as necessary to forge a more capacious socialism.
The People’s Marxism
Eugene Debs once declared, “The grave of Laurence Gronlund is a shrine where socialist pilgrims may renew their allegiance to the great cause.” Yet the celebrated reformer was quickly forgotten following his death in 1899, his erasure part of the curious trajectory of Gilded Age labor radicalism in which collective memory — the omission of the Great Railroad Strike vis-à-vis the relative notoriety of Haymarket — proved a terrain of struggle both within and outside the Left. This cultural vortex cast aside Gronlund and his works, despite Debs’s prediction that they would stand forever as “eternal monuments.” Subsequent socialist writings rendered Commonwealth less theoretically relevant, even passé; its author never merited a single mention in the pages of the Daily Worker. It was not until the 1960s that a popular reassessment began, with both Stow Persons’s edited reissues and the writings of P. E. Maher, who sought to explain why one of history’s most influential socialists had become “virtually unknown today.” By the 1990s, scholars such as Mark Pittenger, who devoted an entire chapter to Gronlund in American Socialists and Evolutionary Thought, widely accepted Gronlund’s importance for “getting Marx into the American movement.”
Indeed, this effort to both understand and popularly communicate what capitalism was, how it functioned, and why it produced inequalities through the exploitation of a permeant class of wageworkers illuminates why Gronlund still matters. The weakness of US Marxism during the Gilded Age was the inability of socialists to, as Vladimir Lenin put it, “adapt themselves to the theoretically helpless but living and powerful mass labor movement that is marching alongside them.” Gronlund, despite his faults, recognized and attempted to overcome that obstacle.
Of course, beyond a handful of preeminent theorists, few nineteenth-century socialists offer today’s left meaningful insight into our current political struggles or the workings of twenty-first century political economy. Yet Gronlund’s popular injection of Marx into a rising transatlantic socialist movement was groundbreaking, as was his adaptation of essentially European ideas associated with German-language immigrant communities into mainstream American society. The ideas and language he helped popularize, including that of “emancipated labor” within a “cooperative commonwealth,” were part of an indigenous American socialism that was nevertheless shaped through transnational currents and, in its most solidaristic form, international in outlook. Although Debs’s politics slowly evolved beyond the domestic cooperative vision, for instance, the man whom Debs studied (along with Marx and Karl Kautsky) while in federal prison had during his own lifetime helped forge what sociologist Chushichi Tsuzuki called a “new economic radicalism” in and beyond the United States.
But what precisely was “the power behind revolution”? Gronlund, it appears, never quite hit the target. His writings were torn between the materialist, or the idea that social change is deeply contingent and shaped by productive relations, and the metaphysical, or the notion that socialism was an almost inevitable moral or religious truth. As McIlhenny asserts, “Pascal’s wager rested on a faith in the liberation of humanity via the existence of God; Marx’s wager rested on the liberation of humanity by humanity.”
Gronlund’s meaningful legacy, such as it is, lays in its relation to the latter, or the insistence that capitalist system is less one of spiritual poverty than of basic exploitation. As Charles Postel contends, Gronlund’s work had a profound impact on his contemporaries strictly because it was “not a romantic novel about a beautiful dream, but a functional treatise on modern conditions.”
Now our second Gilded Age, with an electorate starved for economic reform and uniquely approving of socialist ideas, raises yet again the critical question of messaging within a bleak political landscape. While conservatives raise the specter of “socialism” to oppose civil rights, public education, health care initiatives, and other public provisions, the “resistance” is characterized by its empty bromides: the anti-politics of “America is already great,” “searching for the nation’s soul,” and “joy.” The choice between wanton cruelty and utter vapidity provides socialists an opportunity to fill the void with a genuinely transformational alternative by organizing as socialists to build working-class power. And hopes for achieving a “new common sense” around material redistribution and opposition to economic oligarchy lie not only in their urgency but also their venerability. For all his shortcomings, American Socialist restores Gronlund’s place within this robust radical tradition.