1. Louis Albert Francois Pio was a Danish politician who founded and served as the first chairman of the Danish Social Democratic Party from 1872 to 1874 and again from 1876 to 1878.
15 Facts About Louis Pio
1. 2.
Louis Pio's father was an officer in the Danish Army, of French ancestry, and his mother came from a North Jutland bourgeois family.
3.
Louis Pio was expelled from school due to disciplinary problems, but nevertheless managed to work as an adjunct teacher at a private school with a progressive curriculum.
4.
Louis Pio tried, without success, to enter a teacher's seminary and, later, to obtain an officer's commission.
5.
In 1869, Louis Pio began to write articles for a paper established by his cousin Harald Brix.
6.
In 1870, Louis Pio began to work for the Danish postal service, where he made the lasting contribution of inventing the red postbox, seen everywhere in Denmark even today.
7.
Louis Pio had become interested in socialism through his reading of Danish folk literature, which often depicted the oppressed joining together to oppose their oppressors.
8.
The paper was very successful, and Louis Pio became the main writer for its articles as well as the main theoretician for the group of socialists.
9.
Ideologically, Louis Pio did not hew to a narrow path, and presented ideas primarily from Ferdinand Lassalle and Karl Marx.
10.
Louis Pio's leadership was controversial since other Danish socialists considered his style somewhat dictatorial, but he established good contacts with socialist movements elsewhere in Europe, maintaining an extensive correspondence with other socialist leaders, much of which survives today.
11.
Louis Pio is known for his tactical skill in employing strikes.
12.
Louis Pio argued that three conditions must be met before a strike could be initiated: a majority of the strikers must be members of the International; there must be sufficient funds to sustain the strikers; and strikes must not occur simultaneously in more than one trade.
13.
Louis Pio was cultivated as a martyr by the socialist movement, and continued to write articles which were smuggled from prison and published in Socialisten.
14.
Louis Pio traveled to Smoky Hill River, Kansas, to found a socialist colony, which soon failed because of the lack of agricultural expertise among the colonists.
15.
Louis Pio moved to Chicago, Illinois, where he lived in poverty, working at odd jobs.