Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,921
By This is the grave of Henry Demarest Lloyd.
Born in 1847 in New York City, Lloyd grew up in a middle class family. It was a religious family and they went to Henry Ward Beecher’s church, who became a major influence on Lloyd’s reformist vision of society. Lloyd went to Columbia and then received a law degree there too. He had to work to get himself through college, mostly in a library.
Lloyd was admitted to the New York bar in 1869, but being a lawyer didn’t stick. At first, a committed Gilded Age man, he worked for the American Free Trade League, promoting the classical liberalism of the era. The idea here was fundamentally nostalgic–free trade as a way to continue the small business commonwealth seemingly becoming dominated by large corporations. So the roots of his reformist life were already there. But he was on a journey that would move him to the left. While still there, he became an opponent of Boss Tweed’s corruption, which he found morally revolting. He moved into journalism in 1872, when took a job with the Chicago Tribune. He did well there and became the paper’s chief editorial writer in 1875. He worked there until 1885. This was the Gilded Age and Lloyd was pretty disgusted by the crassness, the corruption, the violence, and all the other terrible things that for some reason the United States has reembraced today by electing Donald Trump president twice. If historians exist, they will write a lot about Americans losing their minds in the early 21st century. Anyway, Lloyd became one of the first major journalists to start critiquing the Gilded Age. He would tackle the questionable business practices and corruption of people such as Cornelius Vanderbilt, making the owners of the paper more than a little uncomfortable at times.
Lloyd got his start as a serious reformer in attacking the show trials to railroad the anarchists to execution over the Haymarket bombing in Chicago in 1886. Someone threw that bomb that killed the cops, but none of the people sentenced to death were among them. For Chicago’s upper class, this was class warfare and these people deserved to die because they were anarchists. The guilt was their ideology. For people such as Lloyd, evidence mattered. Lloyd had married the daughter of Chicago Tribune publisher William Bross, who deeply wanted these people dead. He was so angry over Lloyd’s apostasy on this and he would not see him again, though evidently he did still see his daughter. He was already fired from the newspaper in 1885 for his reformist editorials. He traveled to Europe at this time, having suffered a nervous breakdown over the stress around this. He had questionable mental health the rest of his life in fact, but he came back from his trip determined to make change for the better.
Lloyd had a good target for his biggest journalism–Standard Oil. John D. Rockefeller was so awful and so corrupt and so duplicitous, all wrapped up in a self-righteous package of Baptist hypocrisy. So he started investigating it and publishing on it. His first big splash here was an 1891 Atlantic article titled “The Story of a Great Monopoly.” He built upon this in 1894 with a book length version called Wealth against Commonwealth. This is a foundational book in the so-called muckraking journalism movement. That was a pejorative, but a lot of these journalists embraced it. Ida Tarbell’s work on Rockefeller and Standard Oil is more famous today and perhaps for good reason, but Lloyd was working on this first and she acknowledged his work in her own.
In any case, Lloyd became a founding Progressive, not only helping to pave Tarbell’s path, but people such as Ray Stannard Baker. These and folks such as Lincoln Steffens and Jacob Riis did not always provide the highest quality journalism, but they did do an important job in trying to wake up their middle class leadership to the horrible problems of the Gilded Age.
Lloyd also stood up for striking workers on several occasions. Unlike the Gilded Age elite who saw any workplace organizing as violating the Law from God of the MARKET, Lloyd thought their poverty was a bad thing and their desire for dignity a good thing. So he would go to a lot of strikes in the Midwest and report from there, such as the Milwaukee streetcar operators who struck in 1893 and the famous 1902 anthracite strike. That strike showed how much things had changed, as Lloyd’s journalism was part of the conversation around that strike that convinced President Theodore Roosevelt to intervene to mediate the strike instead of sending in the military to serve as strikebreakers, as presidents such as Rutherford Hayes and Grover Cleveland loved to do. Lloyd had already published, back in 1890, a savage attack on the coal barons called A Strike of Millionaires against Miners, exposing how they worked together to keep their workers in abject poverty and to kill them if they dared unionize.
Lloyd was also a big supporter of the Populists, even running for Congress in 1894 under the Populist Party, though he did not win. In later years, like many intellectuals who came to Populism in that way, he became a socialist. He did so as part of the travels that took over the last decade in his life. He took trips to the UK, continental Europe, and New Zealand to explore social conditions and see what lessons could be learned for the desperately needed political reform in the United States. After a trip to New Zealand and Australia, he wrote two books–A Country without Strikes and Newest England–both lauding how those places were better off than the U.S. He also wrote a book on Switzerland called A Sovereign People: A Study in Swiss Democracy.
Lloyd died in 1903, at the age of 56. His son, also named William, would later became the head of the Communist Party of the United States. Lloyd’s death was in service of the cause–he was covering a strike and he came down with pneumonia that killed him.
Henry Demarest Lloyd is buried in Christ Church Churchyard, Winnetka, Illinois.
If you would like this series to visit other Progressives, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Washington Gladden is in Columbus, Ohio and William U’Ren is in Portland, Oregon. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.