Laurence Gronlund (1844–1899) is not exactly a household name. Outside American historians of the Gilded Age, and beyond the tiny number of socialists familiar with their political tradition’s more arcane annals, the Danish immigrant and socialist intellectual is an obscure figure. Gronlund is thus a curious choice as the subject of a biography, especially since his biographer, the historian Ryan C. McIlhenny, pitches his book as having contemporary relevance. Gronlund’s life and work, McIlhenny hopes, will serve as “motivation for readers continuing to live the consequences of” the Great Recession that followed the 2008 financial implosion, “one of the worst economic downturns since the Great Depression” (199). This is a high bar to set for a biography of a relatively unknown person who died right before the inauguration of the twentieth century. And yet, McIlhenny is convincing.

Indeed, Gronlund’s socialist vision, articulated in the First Gilded Age, of the late nineteenth century, has something to offer inhabitants of the Second Gilded Age, in the early twenty-first century. McIlhenny writes: “As a passionate radical committed to confronting the moral bankruptcy of a society built upon unrestrained capitalism, Gronlund was certainly out of place, a gentle though committed activist living as a kind of intellectual wayfarer whose principles ran much deeper than shallow bourgeois appearances” (1). This person sounds like someone worth learning about in 2026.

Gronlund was partly an activist, made evident by the fact that he frequently pops up in the historical record of the Gilded Age, especially that era’s many turbulent labor struggles. For example, he was involved in the St. Louis general strike that grew out of the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. But Gronlund was first and foremost an intellectual. His mission was to convince as many Americans as possible to embrace socialism. Of course, for Gronlund, there was no tidy demarcation between activism and intellectualism. Gronlund conceptualized his contributions to intellectual life as political interventions. For instance, his heated debate with Henry George, author of the wildly popular 1879 book, Progress and Poverty, which advanced the idea of a single tax on land as the solution to Gilded Age inequality, contributed to the larger socialist movement’s skepticism regarding George’s politics. As with Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Gronlund thought that George’s narrow focus on land was shortsighted because it failed to properly challenge capital. “Placing a tax on the value of land,” McIlhenny writes, paraphrasing Gronlund, “would not eliminate the wage system. Consequently, it would not eliminate exploitation. The capitalist would still be able to get rich through surplus capital” (119).

How capitalists got rich through surplus capital, an exploitative process Gronlund termed fleecing, was a key aspect of the Danish immigrant’s most famous work, The Cooperative Commonwealth, the first recognizably Marxist critique of capitalism in American intellectual history. Gronlund dedicated a big chunk of his 1884 book, which McIlhenny insists “is immensely valuable even for contemporary readers,” to the component of Marx’s thought that most resonated with Gilded Age workers, his theory of surplus value (21). Gronlund wrote that “workers receive only about half of what they produce, just enough to keep up life and strength and bring up a new generation of laborers, while the other half stealthily passes into the pockets of quite another class of men.” Capitalists, in other words, profit from the difference between the value of work done and the amount of wages paid, a feature of the system that Gronlund blamed for “pauperism” and “nearly all modern crime.” This is what Gronlund meant when he wrote about a system premised on “fleecing.”Footnote ¹

The Cooperative Commonwealth proved hugely influential to Edward Bellamy, author of the 1888 utopian novel Looking Backward, and Eugene V. Debs, the veritable grandfather of American socialism. Not only did the book endow them with a persuasive Marxist analysis of what capitalism does to labor, but it was also convincing because, during an industrial revolution that perpetrated extreme inequality and a harsh ideological regime premised on a fanatical variant of individualism, Gronlund’s book made the case for cooperation and community. His vision of freedom was collective. Individuals would only be free in association with others, and only if their associations enhanced freedom for everyone.

In articulating a collective notion of freedom, Gronlund, like other socialist intellectuals of his time, rejected the populist position against the almighty corporation. As opposed to an antitrust standpoint, he viewed the corporate form as the shell of a future cooperative commonwealth. Evoking the evolutionary ethos of the day—which had conservative consequences when articulated by the likes of Herbert Spencer, the first social Darwinist, but potentially progressive outcomes in the hands of a socialist—for Gronlund, trusts came into being as part of society’s natural evolution. The socialist mission was to appropriate the trusts, to take control of them for the good of all. The trusts had usefully socialized production. Once the socialist movement came to power, ownership would also be socialized, yielding an equal distribution of resources. Gronlund, no violent revolutionary, believed these developments would come about peacefully. They were historically inevitable.

Gronlund’s evolutionary, almost teleological theory of history grew stronger with age. In addition to Marx, he also turned to George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel for philosophical guidance. Part and parcel of Gronlund’s Hegelian turn was his embrace of Christianity. He increasingly believed that humans were on a course guided by divine will. Although his own life trajectory was tragic, as his physical and economic health deteriorated, leading to his death in 1899 at the age of fifty-five, Gronlund’s legacy grew stronger as his ideas meshed with Christian socialism. McIlhenny focuses on this theme as he concludes his biography. Gronlund’s Christian turn might make him seem less relevant in the eyes of a twenty-first-century socialist, given that secularization helped shape the history of the American left since the early twentieth century. But not for McIlhenny, who emphasizes Gronlund’s Christian socialism because he wishes “to dispel the notion that religion and socialism are inherently antithetical to one another” (28). In this vein, he writes: “If Jesus himself had come to visit America’s plutocratic elites, Gronlund imagined, he ‘would flog every one of them out of the temple’” (143). Our contemporary plutocratic elites are certainly deserving of a flogging.

Although Gronlund’s Christian turn makes for interesting reading in the hands of McIlhenny, American socialism and American Christianity tend to be best understood as discrete historical topics. That said, the Christian tradition has nothing on the socialist movement when it comes to establishing a sainthood. Eulogizing Gronlund, Eugene Debs, socialist saint extraordinaire, evoked sacred imagery. “The grave of Laurence Gronlund,” Debs preached, “is a shrine where Socialist pilgrims may renew their allegiance to the great cause he loved and labored for with all his strength of mind and heart” (205). Gronlund’s gravesite is no longer on the socialist tour guide. Perhaps McIlhenney’s excellent book will make it a shrine once again.