75 Facts About Dyer Lum

Dyer Daniel Lum was an American labor activist, economist and political journalist.

Dyer Lum was a leading figure in the American anarchist movement of the 1880s and early 1890s, working within the organized labor movement and together with individualist theorists.

Dyer Lum joined the International Working People's Association and the Knights of Labor, within which he advocated for workers organization to push for economic reform and political revolution.

Dyer Lum was deeply affected by the Haymarket affair, as he was close friends with many of the defendants, including Albert Parsons, Adolph Fischer and Louis Lingg, the latter of whom he helped commit suicide in order to avoid execution.

Dyer Lum attempted to use his position to bridge the divide between the two factions, but was ultimately unsuccessful.

Dyer Lum became an influential figure within the American Federation of Labor, encouraging its anti-political stance and practice of voluntary association.

Dyer Lum committed suicide in 1893, months before the pardoning of the Haymarket defendants.

Dyer Daniel Lum was born on February 15,1839, in Geneva, New York.

Dyer Lum's parents recalled him being a rebellious child, who would often stay up at night to watch storms.

From an early age, Dyer Lum himself joined the abolitionist cause, going on to voluntarily enlist in an infantry regiment of the Union Army after the outbreak of the American Civil War.

Dyer Lum was then transferred from the infantry to the 14th New York Volunteer Regiment, in which he rose to the rank of captain.

Dyer Lum became an active participant in reform campaigns, participating in the National Equal Rights Party's campaign to nominate Victoria Woodhull for President and petitioning against the declaration of a Christian state.

Towards the end of the Reconstruction era, Dyer Lum moved to Massachusetts.

Dyer Lum went into politics, joining the Greenback Party and participating in the 1876 Massachusetts gubernatorial election as the running mate of the abolitionist Wendell Phillips.

Dyer Lum served as the private secretary of union leader Samuel Gompers, during the Great Railroad Strike of 1877.

Dyer Lum's political campaigning caused him to lose his job, so in 1878, he moved to Washington, DC in order to continued working as a bookbinder.

Dyer Lum found work as a political journalist, writing articles for Benjamin Tucker's Radical Review and Patrick Ford's Irish World, the latter of which helped him to forge ties between Irish republicans and American workers.

Dyer Lum momentarily set his sights on the abolition of the two-party system.

Dyer Lum hoped that the Greenback Party could supplant them and realign American politics towards labor reform, but the party's nomination of the Republican James B Weaver for the 1880 United States presidential election dashed his hopes.

On October 2,1880, Dyer Lum left the Greenback Party, its executive committee and his post at Irish World, and joined the Socialist Labor Party.

Revolutionary socialists subsequently broke away from the SLP and established the International Working People's Association, which Dyer Lum himself joined in 1885.

Dyer Lum was influenced by the mutualism of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, whose advocacy of mutual banking inspired the monetary reform policies of many American individualist anarchists, grouped around Benjamin Tucker's magazine Liberty.

Dyer Lum considered the time he lived in to have presented a revolutionary situation for anarchists, due to the power vacuum left by the collapse of the left-wing parties, the failure of legislative form and the rapid growth of industrial unions under the Knights of Labor.

In 1885, Dyer Lum gave infrequent lectures on revolutionary anarchism in New Haven, Connecticut, before moving to Port Jervis, New York.

Dyer Lum quickly responded to the bombing with enthusiastic support, although he expressed regret that it had only been an isolated, uncoordinated incident.

Dyer Lum sold his bookbinding business in Port Jervis and moved to Chicago in order to support their defense campaign.

Dyer Lum revived The Alarm under his own editorship and visited the defendants in the Cook County Jail on a daily basis.

Dyer Lum staunchly defended the accused, believing them to have been innocent of the bombing.

Dyer Lum edited their autobiographies, which were published by the Knights of Labor, and organised their defense fund together with the Knights of Labor.

Dyer Lum collaborated with Burnette Haskell, together with whom he planned to unite the IWPA and SLP into a single "American Socialist Federation".

Together with Robert Reitzel, Dyer Lum began planning such an attack, intending to blow up the jail in order to free them from their cells.

Dyer Lum scheduled the attempt to take place on the day before they were due to be hanged.

Dyer Lum had been a close friend of all five of the men, who were now considered martyrs of the anarchist movement.

Dyer Lum refused to shake hands with the Knights of Labor leader Terence V Powderly, who had previously denounced the men as "bombthrowers".

Dyer Lum reported that he "shed no tears" for his fallen comrades and wrote that he was glad that the Haymarket affair had taken place.

Dyer Lum defended himself as having wanted to save "their honor to the cause" and insisted that the defendants had agreed with him.

Dyer Lum thus set out to mend the divide between the individualist and socialist anarchists.

Dyer Lum defended the Haymarket anarchists and challenged Tucker's rejection of revolutionary strategy, resulting in a polemical exchange breaking out between the two, as his position on revolutionary violence only alienated the individualists further.

Dyer Lum himself returned fire at those contributors to Liberty whom he called the "dung-beetles", denouncing them for their excessive self-interest and lack of care for issues that affected wider society, particularly citing Tucker's defense of strikebreakers, who Dyer Lum described as "social traitors".

Dyer Lum opened the columns of The Alarm to anarchists of all political tendencies, while continuing to promote his own ideology as editor.

Dyer Lum was married and had two children, but later separated with his wife after their children grew to adulthood.

At the time, De Cleyre was in a relationship with Thomas Hamilton Garside, a man who Dyer Lum considered to be of a vain and hedonistic character.

Dyer Lum attempted to warn De Cleyre away from Garside, but the two lovers ran away together; only a few months later, Garside abandoned De Cleyre.

Dyer Lum later wrote to De Cleyre that he had been attracted to her because of her "wild nature".

De Cleyre's anarchist philosophy developed further under Dyer Lum's guidance, inspiring her to reject communist and collectivist anarchism in favor of mutualism and voluntaryism.

Dyer Lum himself had his hopes for an anarchist future revived by De Cleyre, who inspired him to re-examine individualist anarchism and reconsider his revolutionary strategy.

Dyer Lum gave revolutionary speeches to the Irish Republican Brotherhood, involved himself in bomb plots and organized black miners in Southwest Virginia.

Dyer Lum had written extensively to De Cleyre of his violent ideations, confessing that his anger would frequently consume him until it developed into hatred.

Dyer Lum confided to De Cleyre that he planned to carry out a suicide attack to avenge the Haymarket martyrs.

Dyer Lum sought refuge in Buddhism, as well as the philosophical pessimism of Arthur Schopenhauer.

Dyer Lum briefly attempted to move to his family's home in Northampton, Massachusetts, but under constant financial pressure, was forced to return.

Dyer Lum went through a large ideological evolution, from republicanism and social democracy to revolutionary socialism and individualist anarchism, resulting in his development of an eclectic political philosophy.

Dyer Lum thought that a successful anarchist movement would require a "convincing and culturally-grounded" critique of political economy, which he proposed in the form of mutualism, and a way of putting such economic reforms into practice, proposing trade union organization and revolutionary strategy.

Dyer Lum believed that the formation of a radical labor movement along such lines could attract enough workers that it could become a revolutionary force.

Dyer Lum elaborated on the evolutionary ethics that he believed underpinned anarchism, anticipating the later works of Peter Kropotkin.

Dyer Lum drew from both American and European political thinkers, including Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau from the former, and Herbert Spencer and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon from the latter.

Dyer Lum was inspired by the economic theory of mutualism and defended individual autonomy and voluntary cooperation, outlining his economic views on these matters in The Economics of Anarchy.

Dyer Lum built on Joshua K Ingalls' land reform policies, arguing that the state-backed land monopoly could be eliminated by abolishing property titles and granting free access to land, which would make renting impossible.

Dyer Lum drew from William B Greene's monetary theory, arguing that the state-backed monetary monopoly could be ended by establishing mutual banks that could issue their own currency and provide interest-free loans in order to support economic growth.

Dyer Lum adopted the collectivist emphasis on revolutionary organizations as a means to unite the working class and solve the "labor problem".

Dyer Lum called for the abolition of wage labor and for anarchists, individualists included, to support unions as a means to achieve the end of the wage system.

Dyer Lum himself was closely involved in the organized labor movement, as he considered unions to be the best method for workers to combat class stratification and political repression.

Dyer Lum considered liberty to be a necessary prerequisite to cooperation, and believed that the state ought to only be used to abolish social privilege.

Dyer Lum considered the idea of economic freedom for individual workers to be anachronistic, as workers in an industrial economy rarely produced anything by their own individual labor; he thus concluded that economic freedom could only be achieved through voluntary cooperation between workers.

Dyer Lum argued for the Knights to pursue workers' cooperation and avoid electoral participation, hoping that the union could serve as a means to achieve a libertarian economic revolution.

Dyer Lum later saw the AFL's craft unions as vehicles for advancing towards anarchy, promoting their voluntarism and supporting their campaign for the eight-hour day, while influencing them to adopt his own economic and political programme.

Dyer Lum believed in the necessity of a social revolution against all forms of "tyranny and exploitation".

Dyer Lum took an eclectic approach to anarchism, coinciding with the principles of anarchism without adjectives and anticipating the later school of synthesis anarchism.

Dyer Lum believed that economic proposals of different anarchist schools, whether they advocated for collectivism, communism or mutualism, ought to be set aside until they had secured liberty, which he held to be the primary objective of all anarchists, irrespective of economic differences.

Dyer Lum thus advocated for unity between the anarchist movement's socialist and individualist factions, attempting to defend the movement's inherent heterogeneity.

Dyer Lum even criticised Lucy Parsons for adopting the label of "communist".

Dyer Lum certainly had a beautiful spirit as I am able to testify from my own acquaintance with the man.

The anarchist movement that Dyer Lum left behind struggled to keep up with the changing times.

Dyer Lum inspired de Cleyre to expand her philosophical outlook by reading from American, as well as European sources, with Thomas Jefferson's work particularly influencing her approach to anarchism.

Dyer Lum initially intended to complete Lum's mission of smuggling poison to Berkman, but eventually abandoned the idea and instead wrote him notes of encouragement, in which she refused to judge him for his actions.