Henry Demarest Lloyd

• Henry Lloyd
• Born: May 1, 1847
• Died: September 28, 1903

Author and Journalist known in his late years as the “millionaire radical,” was born in New York City but became the crusading conscience of Chicago. The eldest son of the Rev. Aaron Lloyd and Maria Christie (Demarest) Lloyd, he was descended on his father’s side from the regicides Edward Whalley and William Goffe, who were members of the court that condemned Charles I of England and who fled to America at the Restoration.

A brilliant student, Lloyd earned a degree from Columbia College in 1867. In 1869 he was graduated from Columbia Law School and in the same year admitted to the New York bar. Raised in the austerity of the Dutch Reformed Church of which his father was an impecunious clergyman, had early felt himself “too unconventionally and unaffectedly pious to be a minister.”

Deeply influenced by the liberal historiographical teaching of Francis Lieber, Lloyd went directly from college into reform activity, participating in the electoral defeat of Tammany Hall in New York in 1871. The next year, however, he opted for the more progressive but hopeless candidacy of the anti-Greeley free-trade Liberal Republican William S. Groesbeck. This capped his three years of reform activism, which taught him that deep change was not so easily come by, and he decided to make his career in journalism.

Having already successfully edited the journal of the American Free-Trade League, he was able to get a job on the Chicago Tribune, first as night city editor, then as literary editor. Here he played a significant role in raising the intellectual level of his readership. He fell in love with and the following year (1873) married Jessie Louisa Bross, the well-educated, independent daughter of William Bross, former lieutenant governor of Illinois, part owner and publisher of the paper. The Lloyds had four sons: William Bross, Henry Demarest, Demarest, and John Bross.

Moved off the literary page when his candid discussions of Darwinism and European skepticism helped antagonize the local Protestant clergy, Lloyd was made financial editor and later chief editorial writer, after Joseph Medill, another of the owners, who had been mayor of Chicago, resumed the editorship. Covering the activities of the railroad “robber barons” and other speculators of the era confirmed Lloyd in his inbred ethical distaste for “all forms of money making ... as pursuits in themselves for themselves,” and he continued to crusade for free trade and against monopoly.

In March of 1881, a talk Lloyd had delivered to the Chicago Literary Club entitled “A Cure for Vanderbiltism” was published in William Dean Howells’s The Atlantic Monthly as “The Story of a Great Monopoly.” An exposé of the railroads and their alliance with John D. Rockefeller’s petroleum “octopus,” it was so widely appreciated that the magazine had to go back for six additional printings. This made Lloyd the “first of the muckrakers” (he was to lend great help and guidance to Ida Tarbell when she did her sensational series on Standard Oil in McClure’s magazine twenty years later).

His articles in the Tribune, a mouthpiece for the expansionist entrepreneurs of the Middle West in their struggle against the financiers of Wall Street, increasingly favored free trade, competition, and then the consumer and labor. His personal idealistic views were rapidly advancing far beyond what he could express in the newspaper, as he grew aware that “our criminal rich,” playing fast and loose with “other people’s money” (those whom Theodore Roosevelt a generation later would label “malefactors of great wealth”), would never police themselves or change their ways and that state legislation was impotent to curb them.

Abandoning his earlier adherence to the Jack-sonian principles of states’ rights, which had been seen as liberalism for most of the century, Lloyd now came out for vesting the necessary regulatory and taxing powers in the national government. This was the seed of the progressive thought that was to blossom in the politics of Theodore Roosevelt and bear fruit when Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal transformed the nation.

But it brought Lloyd into open conflict with Medill and led to his leaving the Tribune in 1885 to devote himself entirely to reform and public welfare. On his return from a trip to Europe, he found Chicago in the turmoil growing out of the Haymarket affair of 1886. He took a leading role in the light to save the lives of anarchist labor leaders convicted of complicity in the bombing, even though he did not share their views. His experiences in Europe had broadened his understanding of the labor movement, and he increasingly moved toward positions further to the left.

Involved in the Spring Valley, Illinois, coal miners’ strike of 1889, Lloyd devoted his first major book to that strike in 1890, then served unofficially as an organizer for the Milwaukee streetcar workers in 1893. He had by now become closely associated with the labor lawyer Clarence Darrow and Eugene V. Debs, then a union organizer, and defended Debs in the Pullman strike of 1894. In that year, Lloyd published his most significant work, Wealth Against Commonwealth, a book condemning the misuse of power by monopolies, especially the Standard Oil Company, for which he marshaled exhaustive documentation from court and legislative records, as well as the firsthand accounts of many of those involved.

While eminently successful and remaining a classic in its field, the book, of course, did not achieve the reform Lloyd envisioned. He turned to political action in the national People’s party, running for Congress on that ticket in 1894, and was badly beaten. When that populist party was absorbed into the Democratic party, Lloyd found himself leaning more and more toward the left. He supported Debs and the Socialist party in their endeavors (eventually joining it in the last year of his life), but he remained an independent idealistic reformer, who had of his own accord reached social-democratic conclusions and now found himself endorsing various socialist proposals though not fully agreeing with them.

Lloyd spent the years 1897-1901 in travel, acquainting himself with the developments in the labor movements and social experiments of Great Britain and New Zealand, as well as other countries. He brought back with him books on labor copartnership and compulsory arbitration of strikes, idealistic positions that the hardheaded American Federation of Labor was not ready to adopt. In Switzerland, he studied the initiative-and-referendum system whereby legislation is proposed and adopted by popular vote; back in the United States, he was active in 1902 in support of the long coal miners’ strike. When this finally went to arbitration, Lloyd was found alongside John Mitchell, president of the United Mine Workers, and Clarence Darrow, representing the miners.

He had hardly recovered from the stress of his arduous strike negotiations when he launched a campaign for municipal ownership of Chicago’s streetcars—a task he did not live to complete. He died in Chicago at the age of fifty-six. Darrow, in memorializing him, summed up Henry Demarest Lloyd as “an incorruptible, radical, fearless socialist scholar aristocrat who dared to condemn existing evils and champion the common man.”

Lloyd’s publications include “The Story of a Great Monopoly,” The Atlantic Monthly, March 1881; A Strike of Millionaires Against Miners; or The Story of Spring Valley (1890); Wealth Against Commonwealth (1894; reprinted, with an introduction by T. C. Cochran, 1963); Labour Copartnership (1898); Newest England (1900); A Country Without Strikes (1900). Posthumously published works are J. Addams and A. Withington, eds., Man, the Social Creator (1906); J. A. Hobson, ed., A Sovereign People (1907); A. Withington and C. Stallbohm, comps., Men, the Workers (1909); Mazzini and Other Essays (1910); Lords of Industry (1910). Biographical sources include Arena, December 1903; C. Lloyd, Henry Demarest Lloyd, 1847-1903, 2 vols. (1912), a biography by his sister that contains an exhaustive bibliography of his writings; and the Dictionary of American Biography (1933). A. Nevins, John D. Rockefeller: The Heroic Age of American Enterprise, 2 vols. (1940) attempts to refute his views on Standard Oil, but Lloyd’s thesis is fully and convincingly defended in two works by C. M. Destler, American Radicalism, 1865-1901 (1946) and Henry Demarest Lloyd and the Empire of Reform (1963). Obituary notices appeared in The Chicago Daily News, September 28, 1903 and The Chicago Daily Tribune, September 29, 1903.