Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Sacred Socialism

2023; Michigan State University; Volume: 17; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.14321/jstudradi.17.1.0027

1930-1197

Ryan McIlhenny,

Political Theory and Influence

In 1890, Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy read, “with more than great interest,” Our Destiny: The Influence of Socialism on Morals and Religion, a book written by Laurence Gronlund (1844–1899), considered by many writers as the “foremost” and “ablest exponent of modern Socialism” in late-nineteenth-century America.1 “I quite conscientiously say that I highly appreciate your book,” Tolstoy concluded in his letter, “the ideas espoused in it, and the expression of them.” Although a Christian anarchist and proponent of Henry George's single-tax policy, two positions for which Gronlund was particularly critical, the acclaimed author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina expressed his agreement with the book's central argument: “That morality must be the basis of progress; and that morality is true only when it is an effort to promote [the] organic unity of society.”2 Of special interest to Tolstoy was the way in which Gronlund showed how purity of religion and morality came out of a well-developed socialism. Gronlund believed that unrestrained industrial capitalism, typified in Gilded Age America, created forlorn individuals, made cooperation nearly impossible, and stymied the evolution of humanity toward a collective state of being, impeding, as Tolstoy wrote, “the Kingdom of God on earth.”3 This “Kingdom,” as demonstrated in Our Destiny, was nothing less than the realization of the divine in and as part of human consciousness accomplished through collective cooperation. Gronlund himself wrote that his religious beliefs had “always” been part of his social philosophy, the most consistent feature of his thought. This article prioritizes this aspect of Gronlund's socialism as manifested in his most important work on the topic—Our Destiny.Not much is known about Gronlund's early life in Denmark, where he was born in 1844. He studied law at the University of Copenhagen and later served in the Danish-German War of 1864 before relocating to the United States in 1867. For a short time, he taught German in Milwaukee before starting his legal career in Illinois in 1869.4 Gronlund became a citizen of country reborn—a postbellum nation rapidly transformed by a densely interconnected railroad system, heavy industry, innovative strategies for corporate consolidation and profit maximization, a growing urban sector that brought greater social and cultural pluralism, and an extensive professional bureaucracy.5 These were the conditions that would propel America into becoming a global economic powerhouse.6 The other half of such “progress” included devastating natural disasters, crowded cities, labor exploitation, social dislocation, a renewed commitment to racial supremacy, and the demise of democracy. Such symptoms of American capitalism weighed heavily on the American population, many of whom found socialism a powerful ideological agent to implement radical change. Increasingly unsettled by the consequences of capitalism and growing, according to Stow Persons, “understandably estranged from a profession so largely concerned with the adjudication of conflicting property interests,” Gronlund gave up practicing law in 1879 to establish “a less remunerative but more congenial career” as a journalist and lecturer, communicating with evangelical fervor America's imminent transformation into a collectivist commonwealth.7 Despite its inevitability, the future socialist commonwealth demanded serious preparation. Gronlund understood the immensity of this herculean task, given, he admitted in 1880, that the number of socialists in America could be counted on one hand.8In 1884, he published The Cooperative Commonwealth, the first-of-its-kind adaptation of Marxian socialism for an American audience. Gronlund's unique brand of socialism as laid out in Commonwealth had the most extensive influence on radicals and reformers in late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century America. These, among others, included Edward Bellamy, J. A. Wayland, Frances Willard, Washington Gladden, and, Gronlund's “most eminent disciple,” Eugene V. Debs.9 Writer William Dean Howells said of Gronlund that he was “a man to be read with respect, and his works cannot be ignored by anyone who wishes to acquaint himself with the hopes and motives of a very intelligent body of men.”10 Edward Bellamy, author of the immensely popular Looking Backward: 2000-1887, expressed confidence that “school children of the future would be taught to revere the name of Lawrence Gronlund [sic].”11 American socialists have acknowledged Gronlund as “the ablest exponent of modern Socialism” in late-nineteenth-century America.12After writing Commonwealth, Gronlund crossed the Atlantic and spent a couple years interacting with a number of progressive thinkers in Europe. In England, he was introduced to the British Socialist League and later elected to its council. He was a favorite among the British Fabians, especially that of author and playwright George Bernard Shaw. British novelist William H. Mallock described Gronlund as “the fairest-minded of all our modern Socialists.”13 Upon his arrival in France, Gronlund stayed as a guest in the homes of Jules Guedes and Paul LaFargue, leaders of the French Left. Charles Gide, professor of political economy at the University of Montpellier, France, referred to Gronlund as “one of the most thoughtful and well-informed social philosophers of our times.”14 Gronlund began a lifelong correspondence with Gide after the two met at a conference in Lyon. Also in France, Gronlund spent a few months at the Familieriste, a cooperative community created by Jean Francois Godin. Although initially impressed, he soon became disillusioned with Godin's community. During his stay in Europe, Gronlund wrote what he personally considered his most important work (though sales proved otherwise), Ca Ira, or Danton on the French Revolution, a delineation of his philosophy of history published in Boston a year after his return to the United States in 1886.Shortly thereafter, he joined the Socialist Labor Party (SLP), founded in 1876. By the early 1880s, the SLP, made up of “a heterogeneous collection of anarchists, trade-unionists, and political actionists,” reached a membership of about 1,500; at one point, Gronlund served on the executive committee.15 Although valuing the work of the party and supporting it in terms of its ideals, he eventually left the group not only because of its overuse of German in meetings, which, in his mind, would have alienated English speakers, but more so, he confessed, because of the drinking bouts that went on afterwards.16 The experience in the SLP in no way sapped his political activism, nor that of his energy in crisscrossing the nation lecturing at a variety of conferences, churches, and universities. In 1893, he spoke at the Labor Congress at the World's Fair Columbian Exposition in Chicago—organized, according to Shelton Stromquist, to address the “problems of labor and capital, industrial advancement, and the need for labor legislation.” The Labor Congress sought a “peaceful solution” to the labor question, believing that a war between labor and capital would be “suicidal.” Fellow attendees included Henry Demarest Lloyd, Clarence Darrow, Richard T. Ely, Washington Gladden, George McNeill, Florence Kelley, Samuel Gompers, Henry George, Henry Adams, and W. D. P. Bliss.17 He was also quick to travel wherever labor activism was most intense, as in the case of the tragic unrest among the “starving miners” of Spring Valley, Illinois, in 1895, where he offered instruction in the ways of socialist cooperation to confront the power “exercised by capital,” though he essentially ignored the serious racial dynamics interwoven in the Spring Valley tragedy.18The political experience that garnered much public attention for Gronlund, however, was his engagement with the reform efforts of Henry George. Gronlund had written a couple pamphlets critiquing George's single-tax proposal, a solution to the problem of wealth and poverty, which became the central platform of his United Labor Party. After George's failed campaign for mayor of New York in 1886, Gronlund was identified as the most outspoken of George's critics.19 His tone was stirred in part by George's own harsh and demeaning words against socialism, which included charges that socialists not only lacked a truly radical strategy for change but also (and more important) because of their divisiveness in their agitating for ideological purity. Gronlund's main criticism was that George failed to grasp the problem of wealth and poverty, especially as it related to the core elements of capitalism—namely, labor exploitation. George's tax on the value of land would have done little to alleviate the life of workers under exploitative capitalism.Gronlund's interaction with George revealed an important element in his strategy for radical change. Although unwavering in his principles, Gronlund knew when to be pragmatic. And contrary to George's accusation, he was far from a factionalist. Gronlund exhibited a kind of popular front liberalism when it came to politics; that is, although he disagreed with a handful of fellow reformers and their corresponding agencies—George and his United Labor Party, Edward Bellamy's social blueprint in Equality, and the Populists of the early 1890s—he nonetheless was willing to work with each, though he did express serious dismay when the reformists among the Populist turned in support of William Jennings Bryan and free-silver.20 Nonetheless, he believed that most political reform efforts would move society closer to collectivism, despite ignoring the roots of capitalism, the true source of society's problems. What tempered such frustration was his additional belief that despite how effective programs might be, history would continue along its course. The coming collective would come regardless of impediments, whether from the staunch opposition of capitalists or the half-measures of reformers.Gronlund eventual found a political home among socialist religious intellectuals. He toured with Kingdom Movement founder George Herron and regularly associated with social gospel reformers like William Dwight Porter Bliss to establish religiously minded socialist agencies throughout the country. He was an occasional speaker at Bliss's Church of the Carpenter in Boston, a favorite meeting place for a host of reformers and radicals, including members of the Society of Christian Socialists. He would go on to serve “as vice-president of the Social Reform Union which Bliss organized in the nineties.”21 In a letter to Richard Ely in 1891, Gronlund wrote of his intentions to establish a socialist fraternity in the Fabian tradition; qualification for membership would include “a disposition to welcome the extension of the functions of government.”22 He and Bliss became the “leading spirits” in founding the American Fabian Society (AFS) in 1895 along with its main mouthpiece, The American Fabian.23 The goal of the AFS was “to unite social reformers and lead the way to a conception of Socialism, broad enough, free enough, practical enough to include all that is of value, no matter when it comes, and replace jealousy between reformers by cooperation for the general good.”24 American Fabians “emphasized eclecticism of thought” and elevated education over political partisanship.25 And like the Knights, they pursued the creation of an organization that would align with the machinery of American republican democracy.26Gronlund was not a stranger to personal tragedy. The death of his first wife in 1892 dealt a heavy blow to his heart and health.27 Despite his immense sadness—he thought of suicide on more than one occasion—and steep physical and mental decline, he continued to write and lecture. He found, according to one journalist, that “there was nothing in life left that was worth living for, save the good of his fellow man, and he devoted himself to the propaganda of Collectivism.”28 He would carry “his wife's photograph with him wherever he went, and often when writing would stand it up before him so that the sweet, blue eyes might inspire and console him in his work.”29 He soon found love again when he met and married Beulah Alice Carey on December 24, 1895. The following year, Gronlund moved with his new wife to Seattle, where Beulah, an artist and art teacher, organized the Seattle Humane Society, focusing on the prohibition of cruelty to animals.30 By 1898, Gronlund fell into what today we might consider a serious bout of depression, no doubt exacerbated by his dismal financial situation. He worked through the melancholy in part through the financial aid offered by Jane Addams and Henry Demarest Lloyd but more so in writing his final work, New Economy, in the same year the U.S. went to war against Spain. 31 The book, released around the time that Gronlund addressed the delegates of Social Democracy in Chicago, offered practical guidance on how to move the country closer to the cooperative commonwealth.32 On October 18, 1899, after having written his final piece on the economic benefits of the sugar beet industry, Gronlund, that “sad gentle-faced dreamer,” died suddenly in his room at the Trenton Hotel in New York at the age of 55. Caring little for himself, Gronlund worked tirelessly, wrote A. B. Edler, “to make the world a garden and life a song for the human race.”33Gronlund faded from memory soon after his death.34 It was not until the early 1960s, beginning with P. E. Maher's 1962 Science & Society article, “Laurence Gronlund: Contributions to American Socialism,” that Gronlund was recovered from the dustbin of history. Maher provided an overview of three of Gronlund's most important works: The Cooperative Commonwealth (1884), Our Destiny (1890), and New Economy (1898).35 Gronlund's contributions to American socialism, according to Maher, included making German socialism acceptable in the American context, laying the ground for Edward Bellamy's “Nationalism,” and becoming one of the foremost critics of Henry George. Solomon Gemorah composed the most comprehensive and authoritative biography of Gronlund in his 1965 PhD dissertation from New York University. Along with his “Laurence Gronlund—Utopian or Reformer” published two years later in Science and Society, Gemorah argued that Gronlund's engagement with German scientific socialism was not as significant as his efforts to reconciling “the alternatives of Utopianism or reform.”36 In 1968, sociologist Chushichi Tsuzuki presented Gronlund as one who took the lead in creating a “new economic radicalism” by Americanizing what was essentially a European transplant nurtured by the new immigrants coming into the United States.37 Maher, Gemorah, and Tsuzuki positioned Gronlund in a unique light—a socialist who, despite his efforts to popularize the influential work of Karl Marx, opposed class-driven revolutionary violence. Class warfare, “a fatal German theory” and one “entirely un-American,” Gronlund wrote in 1898, skewed the “Socialist doctrine of the organic unity of society”—an idea taken from Herbert Spencer but later modified under a Hegelian outlook.38 The efforts of one class to dominate the other, whether the bourgeoisie or the proletariat, would only intensify class antagonism, Gronlund thought; it simply pitted one class against another—hardly the kind of social harmony envisioned by many socialists. Gronlund aligned himself with the evolutionary socialism of the British Fabians and the political strategies of Ferdinand Lassalle. The revolution would arrive through the natural course of evolution and the active engagement of an enlightened social mind—“peaceably” by persuasion and “ballots,” not through violence.39This article examines one thread running through Gronlund's socialism: a belief in an “intelligence behind evolution,” as he called it, directing historical events toward the collective commonwealth.40 None of the above secondary works offers an extensive philosophical analysis of this feature of his thought, though they certainly recognize its importance.41 Whatever changes may have come regarding his socialism—the role of intellectuals, the effectiveness of reform programs, and the various political associations he was involved in—this feature, his religious perspective, only grew, reaching maturity in Our Destiny. In recounting his official adoption of socialism, written later in his life, Gronlund admitted that he felt compelled to acknowledge a divine “intelligence” moving through evolution. This just made sense to him; he could not believe otherwise.42 He argues in the book that the advancement of socialism, toward which America was irreversibly headed, was concurrently a moral development of a purer and more evolved religion—a religion that aimed, through a symbiosis of ideas and material dynamics, at the manifestation of the divine in and through humanity's break with competitive individualism. Cooperation, from a refashioned Marxist perspective, would grow with each revolutionary change in the modes of production. At the same time, the evolution toward greater cooperation was the opening up of the mind of God, which would terminate in the establishment of the collective commonwealth and the realization of the mutual identity of humanity and God.Reference to the divine was significantly muted in the first edition of his most influential work The Cooperative Commonwealth (1884). No reference was made to what he later called the “Power behind Evolution” or the “Will of the Universe.” The only words remotely related to this cosmic director in the original appeared toward the end of the book when Gronlund wrote of a “great mystery” navigating history. The phrase seemed to be pragmatic: “some theory of life is needed to give harmony, purpose and vigor to active life, and [readers] will certainly agree on such a theory as will explain the mystery to them and satisfy their highest intelligence.”43 Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw, who edited the 1884 version of Commonwealth for a London publisher, added “will of the universe” (not capitalized) and changed “Great Mystery” to “supreme will” (again, not capitalized) and, elsewhere, “Providence.”44 He thereby strengthened the identity of this force, and Gronlund approved of the stronger, more personal divinity, using the terms “God,” “Power behind Evolution,” and “Will of the Universe” (both subsequently capitalized) not just in subsequent editions of Commonwealth but in the remainder of his works. This made Gronlund's “supreme will” less of a justifying theory—a kind of vague intelligent design or “God of the gaps” explanation—and more of a concrete existing being.This “supreme will” would continue to evolve in his mind. A couple years after the release of Commonwealth and during his time in Europe, Gronlund, for the first time, publicly and in a more formal manner introduced his views regarding the divine—and thus the religious implications of his socialism—at a gathering of the Social Reform Society at Edinburgh University.45 He continued to develop this heavenly agent while writing Ca Ira, a history of the French Revolution. In this work, Gronlund appropriated Thomas Carlyle's vague notion—more vague than Gronlund's, at least—of a supreme power guiding human history. Carlyle's supreme power, Gronlund believed, had little connection with personhood and was far from helping humanity directly, hence the reason Carlyle called it “‘the Eternal Silence.’”46 Yet whatever name intellectuals gave to such a presence—Hebert Spencer called it the “Unknowable”; atheists, the “Laws of Life”; and theists, “God”—it was the unavoidable power within evolution.47 It could not be ignored in any ultimate sense.Our Destiny (1890) was a response to the widely held view that socialism was by nature atheistic and morally bankrupt. Many in the United States, in Gronlund's day and in our own, have held the assumption that socialism has always been inherently opposed to religion. Karl Marx once wrote that religion represented “the sigh of the oppressed class, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions.”48 As an honest “protest against real suffering” (Marx), religion provided inebriating images of an otherworldly metaphysical realm where toil and exploitation would be removed. It allowed members of society, especially those among the working classes, to endure the hardships of this life caused by capitalism, ignoring thereby efforts to create a better world in this life. Restricting belief to a kind of escapism, religion failed to confront the cruelties of the capitalist order, but worse it functioned—as it often does—as a hegemonic tool to maintain that warfare between the oppressed (the proletariat) and the oppressors (capitalists). Bourgeois businessmen and their servants, pro-capitalist religious leaders, used religion to manipulate citizens to serve the interests of capital. In this way, religion was retrogressive and enslaving; it therefore needed to be reformed or completely rejected. Although Marx's famous statement on religion is not inherently anti-religious, it ignores the content of faith and how such content might act as a motivator for radical change.49The “robber barons” of the Gilded Age strengthened their position by capitalizing on the antireligious sentiments of among socialists to denounce socialism in general. Immersing capitalism in the baptismal waters of evangelicalism, the apologists of the “let alone system” presented socialism as fundamentally atheistic. Capitalism took on the divine; criticism of it became tantamount to heresy. Anticapitalists, whether reformers or radicals, threatened God's providential order. For many in the late nineteenth century, the “free” in free market came to mean free society and the “invisible hand,” a consistent misappropriation of Adam Smith's original term, as none other than the hand of God.50 But it should be made clear that the wedding of capitalism with Christianity, one of the most powerful ideological unions of the modern era, was never a natural or inevitable alliance. Capitalists availed themselves of every disciplinary tool to canonize their economic ideology. “The theology of evangelical laissez-faire,” according to contemporary historian Eugene McCarraher, “remained vibrant among business people and their apologists” in postbellum America.51 With a few major adjustments (i.e., abandoning the atheistic tendencies of economic liberalism), the union of evangelicalism and capitalism with the doctrine of providence contributed to the prevailing conservatism of the late nineteenth century—a strand of conservatism that has continued well into the contemporary era.Not all socialists, however, were secularists. Many found common ground with religion, especially Christianity. The earliest socialists, like Fourierist “Associationists,” according to Carl Guarneri, rejected the idea that Christianity and socialism were “inevitable antagonists”; they were, in fact, “indispensable allies.”52 Methodist minister, socialist, and settlement house advocate John Spargo, who authored a handful of works dealing with religion and socialism, including Marxian Socialism and Religion in 1915, believed that there was “no reason to consider socialism hostile to religion in general or Christianity in particular.”53 Charles Fanani was much more bold when he wrote: “Socialism is Christianity; and Christianity is Socialism.”54 Christianity offered a message of selflessness, a love for God and neighbor over neighbor-hating competitive individualism; it was a religion that revolved around the sacrifice of self, taking the life of Jesus as the example, for the purpose of ministering to the marginalized, the forgotten, the economically exploited. Throughout the pages of the Old and New Testament, God himself confronts the arrogance and greed of the wealthy—time and again warning of imminent judgment against those who neglected or directly antagonized the poor. “Pure and undefiled” Christianity was that which addressed the spiritual and physical needs of not just widows and orphans, the lowliest of the lowly, but also those were cheated and exploited via labor.55 Socialism, for J. Stitt Wilson, represented “applied Christianity.”56 W. D. P. Bliss proposed that “the aim of Socialism is embraced in the aim of Christianity.”57 Christian socialists likewise incorporated into their active mission the eschatological reality of God's kingdom both in heaven and on earth as stated in the Lord's Prayer.Our Destiny opens by rejecting the claim that “atheism is an integral part of Socialism.”58 Turning Marx's oft-quoted phrase about religion on itself, Gronlund suggests that a rejection of religion (by socialists) was the “cry of an outraged conscience.”59 Marx, along with socialists of his ilk, were angered by those who poisoned religion to strengthen capitalism. And Gronlund certainly knew the ways in which plutocrats used religion to exploit workers. But this was no reason to abandon religion all together. Although critical of traditional Protestantism, Gronlund utilized much of the language and imagery of Christian doctrine. His theology was one of his own creation, wherein the divine would manifest itself in the common brotherhood of humanity. Having less to do with ethereal doctrines, religion constituted the “restoration of a broken bond.” It was humanity's pursuit of full consciousness and, consequently, absorption into the divine—absolute cooperation, physical and metaphysical. The commonwealth would do away with individualism, that “satanic element of our nature,” he wrote in Commonwealth. The religion of socialism would “make holiness consist of identifying ourselves with Humanity—the redeemed form of man—as the lover merges himself in the beloved.”60 The ripening of this religious consciousness, in turn, would come through cooperative labor. For Gronlund, the divine and the human were tied together, and recognition of the former depended on the progress of the latter. Divorcing the emancipation of humanity from the divine, a form of competition, was both antihuman and antidivine. The divine, it should be observed, did not live above humanity, but within it, manifesting itself when humans worked together.Gronlund articulated a communal religion that connected a universal humanity with a universal intelligence governing that universe.61 His philosophy of history, like plenty of other socialists, had been influenced significantly by the evolutionary organicism of Herbert Spencer. By 1890, however, he seemed to be moving closer to Hegel and away from Spencer, especially when it came to the progress of human consciousness in the divine.62 Indeed, in Gronlund's mind, popular sentiment toward Spencer was moving in a similar direction. “A new wave of thought,” he wrote in the latter portions of Our Destiny, “is evidently approaching, as the philosophy of Spencer and his class rose with such startling rapidity to ascendancy is evidently declining.”63 Gronlund certainly gave credit to Spencer “for his profound speculations on the Social Organism,” admitting that the English social Darwinist successfully “laid the foundation for constructive Socialism.”64 Spencer was correct in his view of natural evolution, but his views on both the individual and the state were much too limited. He viewed the state as nothing more than a collection of individuals, “a crowd of monads” gathered together “for the sake of himself.” The individual took precedent or was more “real” than the more artificial state. Such teachings, Gronlund believed, taken to their logical conclusion, would “evidently end in Anarchism.”65 Yet neither Spencer nor his faithful followers could ultimately obstruct the progress of evolution toward a “Collective Conscience.”66Evolution was the process whereby both humanity and the divine were intertwined in a process of self-becoming that would reach fulfillment in the State, which Gronlund capitalized to distinguish it from mere governance. The State was itself an organism, a Geist or mind marching toward its own emancipation. In History of American Philosophy, Henry Schneider argues that Gronlund's “idealistic theory of the state,” presented in Cooperative Commonwealth, was something “derived largely from Hegel.”67 Although not immediately identical, there does seem to be a hint of Hegel's cosmic philosophical theology in Our Destiny, especially the notion that the organic development of humanity was also the progress of God reaching full consciousness.68 And it was not just Schneider or Gemorah who noticed such a development in Gronlund's mind. Gronlund's contemporary readers recognized it, too. A writer of the London-based Pall Mall Gazette stated that Gronlund “learned from the Hegelians something of the philosophy of history.”69 We should also note that in the course of the last decade of the nineteenth century, Gronlund himself began to identify with the philosophy of Hegel. In 1895, he admitted to a journalist that his version of socialism was “based upon” the investigations “made by Hegel and Karl Marx.”70 By this point, Gronlund had left much of Spencer behind. In the same year, he reiterated his belief that the United States was quickly approaching Hegel's collective state, which he also referred to as “rational socialism.”71Gemorah is correct in saying that Gronlund “dispensed with the dialectic” (ignored might be slightly more accurate) in Hegel. This is no insignificant thing. Nonetheless, Gronlund's understanding of the oneness of humanity with the divine, a oneness realized in the process of cooperation, comes quite close to a Hegelian logic. A brief excursion into Hegel's dialectic may be helpful at this point. In asking the question, “who am I,” from a Hegelian perspective, humans are confronted with the “nothing” or the “negation” of their own existen