Laurence Gronlund

Lawrence Gronlund (Dane: Lauritz Andreas Grønlund, 1846-1899) was an American lawyer, writer, lecturer and politician of Danish descent. Gronlund is best remembered for his pioneering work on adapting international socialism to Karl Marx and Ferdinand Lassall to the American idiom in his popular 1884 book “The Commonwealth” and for his influence on the thinking of the utopian novelist Edward Bellamy, newspaper publisher Julius Wayland and the American socialist movement of 1880 and 1890s. Lawrence Gronlund was born in Copenhagen, Denmark, on July 13, 1846, in a ministerial family. He was a participant in the Danish-German war of 1864. Gronlund graduated from the law faculty of the University of Copenhagen in 1865 and two years later emigrated to the United States. For a short time, he taught German at a public school in Milwaukee before entering the bar in 1869 and opening legal practice in Chicago. Gronlund turned to the ideas of socialism and abandoned legal practice so that he could write and give lectures on collective property issues. Gronlund joined the Socialist Workers' Party (SLP), which is dominated by German-American parties, a political party still in its infancy, and in 1878 published its first work - the brochure The Coming Revolution: Its Principles. Gronlund was a staunch supporter of union-based German-style international socialism, unlike the various community schemes that were then in vogue in the United States.