1. Laurence Gronlund was a Danish-born American lawyer, writer, lecturer, and political activist.
24 Facts About Laurence Gronlund
1. 2.
Laurence Gronlund graduated from the University of Copenhagen's Faculty of Law in 1865, and emigrated to the United States two years later.
3.
Laurence Gronlund was converted to the ideas of socialism and gave up the practice of law in order that he might write and lecture on matters of collective ownership.
4.
Laurence Gronlund joined the German-American dominated Socialist Labor Party, a political party still in its infancy, and in 1878 published his first work, a pamphlet entitled The Coming Revolution: Its Principles.
5.
Laurence Gronlund was a firm advocate of trade union-based, German-style International Socialism, in contrast to various communitarian schemes then in vogue in the United States.
6.
On 29 June 1881, Gronlund married Alma C Holm in Boston, Massachusetts.
7.
In 1884 Laurence Gronlund published his most influential and best remembered work, a small volume titled The Cooperative Commonwealth.
8.
Laurence 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.
9.
Laurence Gronlund returned to his adopted country in 1887 and resumed his activism on behalf of the Socialist Labor Party.
10.
Laurence 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.
11.
The departure of the SLP from the broader United Labor Party of which it was a part was civil, with Laurence Gronlund remarking in a June 1887 lecture at New York City that Henry George was.
12.
Laurence 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.
13.
Late in 1890 Laurence Gronlund published his third book, an "essay in ethics" entitled Our Destiny: The Influence of Socialism on Morals and Religion.
14.
Laurence Gronlund noted with bemusement that while people shuddered in fear of "destructive Socialism," at the same time the concentration of capitalism through trusts and increased government intervention in economic affairs was slowly bringing into existence a socialist regime.
15.
Laurence Gronlund contributed to The Dawn, the journal of the Society of Christian Socialists.
16.
Laurence Gronlund was a speaker at a Congress of Economics held in conjunction with the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, speaking there alongside Henry George and Richard T Ely.
17.
Laurence Gronlund spoke to a variety of audiences from coast to coast, including forays into Utah and California.
18.
Laurence Gronlund spoke not only to English-speaking audiences, but spoke in his native Danish to members of the Scandinavian immigrant community during his travels around the United States.
19.
On 24 December 1895 in Seattle, Washington, Laurence Gronlund married Beulah Alice Carey.
20.
Laurence Gronlund died October 15,1899, in New York City, at the age of 53.
21.
At the time of his death Laurence Gronlund was remembered critically but warmly in the American socialist press.
22.
Laurence Gronlund 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.
23.
Laurence Gronlund treated the subject of Socialism plainly and stripped it of utopianism.
24.
Laurence Gronlund was enormously influential during the decades of the 1880s and 1890s and is credited by historian Daniel Bell with playing a pivotal role in the conversion of future Appeal to Reason publisher Julius Wayland to socialism in 1891.