Early years Laurence Gronlund was born in
Thisted, Denmark, on July 13, 1844, the son of Ane Lucie Grønlund and saddler maker's man L. Christensen. Gronlund fought in the
Danish–German War of 1864. He graduated from the
University of Copenhagen's
Faculty of Law in 1865, and emigrated to the United States two years later. For a short time he taught German in a public school in
Milwaukee prior to his 1869 admission to the bar and the opening of a law practice in
Chicago. Alma suffered from poor health and died in 1888.
The Cooperative Commonwealth In 1884 Gronlund published his most influential and best remembered work, a small volume titled
The Cooperative Commonwealth. This book attempted to popularize
Karl Marx's ideas about the
labor theory of value and the fundamentally exploitative nature of competition within the
capitalist system. The
working class, forced to scramble for survival under the competitive system, was depicted as the "natural prey" of small shopkeeper "parasites" who existed by inflating selling prices and depreciating quality. Moreover, the "big capitalists" were said to wield a still more powerful weapon, that of
combination, which made possible more efficient "fleecings" of working people. The capitalist system contained within itself a "fatal contradiction", Gronlund argued – an inherent tendency towards "
overproduction", production at a higher level than the purchasing power of consumers: Since ... Labor under our wage-system, our profit-system, our fleecings-system, only receives about one half [of the value of its production] as its share, it follows that
the producers cannot buy back that which they create. * * * For the more Capital is being accumulated in private hands, the more impossible this wage-system renders it for the producers to buy what they produce. The more necessary it becomes for capitalists to dispose of their ever increasing fleecings, the less the ability of the people to purchase them will, relatively become. ... The more Capital, the more 'overproduction.' Individualism in production, although efficient in causing Capital to grow, was simultaneously "digging the grave of Capital", Gronlund declared. With Marx's
Das Kapital still unavailable in English translation during the decade of the 1880s, Gronlund's reinterpretation of Marx into the American vernacular was revelatory, although he mentioned Marx's name "only once or twice in the book". More than 100,000 copies of
The Cooperative Commonwealth were sold, and the book would remain one of the most influential works on the socialist theme in the United States for the rest of the 19th century. According to historian Rudolf Kirk,
The Cooperative Commonwealth reflects Gronlund's distinctly Christian interpretation of Marx.
Later writings After having lived in the United States for 20 years, in 1885 Gronlund made an extended stay to
Great Britain, where he would remain for two years. Gronlund spent his time in Britain lecturing on socialist themes to both political and academic audiences, touching on both current politics and historical themes in speeches made across England and
Scotland. Gronlund returned to his adopted country in 1887 and resumed his activism on behalf of the Socialist Labor Party. Gronlund was immediately called upon by the SLP to differentiate its views from the
single tax program of
Henry George, an 1886 candidate for mayor of
New York City on the ticket of the upstart
United Labor Party which the SLP had actively supported. The departure of the SLP from the broader United Labor Party of which it was a part was civil, with Gronlund remarking in a June 1887 lecture at New York City that Henry George was ... a most noble man, the starting wedge for socialism in the United States, but his theory is insufficient and his remedies would not accomplish what he believes. When it comes down to the kernel of the matter, he is radically different from us and we must part company from him. Gronlund turned his attention to history with the publication of his second book, a reevaluation of the life and activities of French
Jacobin revolutionary
Georges Danton in the
French Revolution of 1789 to 1794. At the end of his life Gronlund regarded this 1887 work,
Ça Ira! or Danton in the French Revolution, as his most important work. In his book Gronlund attempted to challenge the popular image of Danton, first President of the
Committee of Public Safety, as a terrorist and to restore his place to history as a leader of the democratic French revolution. A member of the National Executive Committee of the Socialist Labor Party in 1888, Gronlund broke with the party soon after, ostensibly over its decision to open a saloon on Fourth Street in New York City as a means of generating funds for use of the party. Gronlund supported "mutual good will and mutual help," at the time best expressed in the United States by the emerging movement built around
Nationalist Clubs.
Final years Gronlund devoted himself almost exclusively to lecturing until his appointment to a poorly-paid position in the office of the
Bureau of Labor in
Washington, D.C., where he worked for Commissioner of Labor
Carroll D. Wright. In the early 1890s, Gronlund visited and spoke at the
Church of the Carpenter in Boston, founded by the
Christian Socialist minister
W. D. P. Bliss. Gronlund also contributed to
The Dawn, the journal of the
Society of Christian Socialists. and
California. (née Boynton). Beulah was regarded as a talented artist and art teacher and was active in launching the
Seattle Humane Society, dedicated to the prevention of cruelty to animals. A fourth and final book,
The New Economy: A Peaceable Solution of the Social Problem, was published in 1898 and emphasized the evolutionary and anti-
class war orientation which Gronlund developed in his later years.
Death and legacy Laurence Gronlund died October 15, 1899, in
New York City, at the age of 53. At the time of his death Gronlund was remembered critically but warmly in the American socialist press. Writing in the
Social Democratic Herald, Secretary of the
Social Democratic Party of America Seymour Stedman remembered him as a proverbial
absent-minded professor: He was eccentric and careless. He would walk with pipe and paper along a thriving thoroughfare oblivious of all; his hat shaped like a French general's, peak in front and back; shoes well worn; clothes shabby, and was in meeting reticent, even timid ... He treated the subject of Socialism plainly and stripped it of utopianism. ... The peoples of the future will dwell in peace where this hardy pioneer warred with the accumulated prejudice, passions, and ignorance of the ages.
Leonard D. Abbott recalled Gronlund as a "great soul" who had lived in poverty throughout his life out of commitment to the socialist cause, the recipient of "very small financial rewards from all his books put together." Wayland would begin his first socialist newspaper,
The Coming Nation, in 1893 and would build his subsequent publication into a mass circulation weekly that would help make socialism a broad political movement during the first two decades of the 20th century. Gronlund's articulation of a vision for a cooperative economy and society echoed over the next decades in early-twentieth century U.S. and Canadian leftist circles. In
Upton Sinclair's 1924 novel Millennium, survivors of a world-wide apocalyptic explosion build what they called a "co-operative commonwealth". Gronlund's writings helped lead to the 1932 formation of Canada's
Co-operative Commonwealth Federation party, which became the largest left-wing political party in that country and continues to this day as the
New Democratic Party. His writings also helped shape the economic principles of the U.S.
Farmer-Labor Party. They were instrumental in the FLP's
Minnesota affiliate, where advocacy for a Cooperative Commonwealth formed the central theme of the Party's platform from 1934 until its
merging with the state
Democratic Party in 1944. == Footnotes ==