Cause of death Suicide Role Poet Other names Dyer D. Lum | Known for Labor activism Resting place Northampton Name Dyer Lum | |
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Died April 6, 1893, Boston, Massachusetts, United States | ||
Dyer Daniel Lum (1839 – April 6, 1893) was a 19th-century American anarchist, labor activist and poet. A leading syndicalist and a prominent left-wing intellectual of the 1880s, Lum is best remembered as the lover and mentor of early anarcha-feminist Voltairine de Cleyre.
Contents
Lum was a prolific writer who wrote a number of key anarchist texts, and contributed to publications including Mother Earth, Twentieth Century, Liberty (Benjamin Tucker's individualist anarchist journal), The Alarm (the journal of the International Working People's Association) and The Open Court among others. Following the arrest of Albert Parsons, Lum edited The Alarm from 1892–1893.
Traditionally portrayed as a "genteel, theoretical anarchist", Lum has recently been recast by the scholarship of Paul Avrich as an "uncompromising rebel thirsty for violence and martyrdom" in the light of his involvement in the Haymarket affair in 1886.
Life
In disposition, Mr. Lum was most amiable; in the character of his mind he was philosophical; in mental capacity, he was at once keen and broad. His friends, who were many, mourn his passing away.
Lum was a descendant of the prominent New England Tappan family; his grandfather was an American revolutionary. In hopes of bringing about the end of slavery, he volunteered to fight for the Union Army in the American Civil War. He served as an adjutant in the Fourteenth New York Cavalry, and later as a brevet captain, seeing combat in the Red River Campaign. A bookbinder by trade, Lum became active in the American labor movement in the aftermath of the war. He served as a secretary to Samuel Gompers and ran for lieutenant governor of Massachusetts on the Labor Reform ticket of abolitionist Wendell Phillips in 1870.
He became widely known in 1877 after a period traveling across the country as secretary to a congressional committee appointed to "inquire into the depression of labor." Between 1880 and 1892, he was an advocate of direct action and trade unionism, and in later years was "the moving spirit of the American group" which worked for the commutation of Alexander Berkman's sentence for the latter's attempted assassination of Henry Clay Frick. Lum committed suicide in 1893 after suffering from severe depression, although at the time the cause of death was reported in the anarchist press as "fatty degeneration of the heart."
Relationship with de Cleyre
When Lum met Voltairine de Cleyre in 1888, he was twenty-seven years her elder and had lived a life rich in experience. They forged an "unshakable" friendship, and Lum had a profound influence on Voltairine de Cleyre's political development, which evolved in an opposite direction to his; she started out as an orthodox Tuckerite individualist, but became increasingly involved with the radical labor movement and ultimately called for a panarchist "anarchism without adjectives" movement. Their relationship ended after five years of intense involvement, leaving their planned collaborative project—a lengthy social and philosophical anarchist novel—ultimately unpublished.
Involvement in the Haymarket Riot
Lum was closely associated with, and worked alongside the martyrs of the Haymarket affair in Chicago in 1886. In an 1891 essay, he wrote that on the afternoon of May 4, August Spies sent word to the militants that they were not to bring arms to the Haymarket. This order was not respected, Lum noted– "one man disobeyed that order; always self-determined, he acted upon his own responsibility, preferring to be prepared for resistance to onslaught rather than to quietly imitate the spiritual "lamb led to slaughter." Lum asserted that the eight defendants were initially unaware of the bomb-thrower's identity, although it became known to two of them ("but neither Spies nor Parsons…"), believed by Paul Avrich to be George Engel and Adolph Fischer.
In Lum's account, the bomb-thrower's name "was never mentioned in the trial and is today unknown to the public." Paul Avrich attests that Lum urged Albert Parsons to refuse clemency, and plotted to rescue the anarchists from Cook County Jail by attacking it with explosives. According to de Cleyre, he then assisted the suicide of one of the eight defendants, Louis Lingg, by smuggling into Lingg's prison cell a dynamite cap concealed in a cigar, which Lingg subsequently lit, thereby blowing off half his face and leaving himself lingering for several hours in torturous pain before dying.
Thought
…rent, interest, profit are the triple heads of the monster against which modern civilization is waging war.
Lum's political philosophy was a fusion of individualist anarchist economics– "a radicalized form of laissez-faire economics" inspired by the Boston anarchists– with radical labor organization similar to that of the Chicago anarchists of the time. Lum's ideas have variously been described as individualist anarchist, syndicalist, mutualist, and anarcho-communist, as well as anarchist without adjectives. Herbert Spencer and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon influenced Lum strongly in his individualist tendency. He developed a "mutualist" theory of unions and as such was active within the Knights of Labor and later promoted anti-political strategies in the American Federation of Labor. Frustration with abolitionism, spiritualism, and labor reform caused Lum to embrace anarchism and radicalize workers, as he came to believe that revolution would inevitably involve a violent struggle between the working class and the employing class. Convinced of the necessity of violence to enact social change he volunteered to fight in the American Civil War, hoping thereby to bring about the end of slavery. Kevin Carson has praised Lum's fusion of individualist laissez-faire economics with radical labor activism as "creative" and described him as "more significant than any in the Boston group".
Lum argued in The Economics of Anarchy that the "labor problem" was a result of intervention by the state in creating monopolies, with particular reference to the land and money monopolies. Lum advocated the destruction of the land monopoly, which he saw as a government-granted monopoly, by abolishing land titles and to allow free access to land, thus making the extraction of rent impossible. Similarly, mutual banks set up to issue their own currencies would end the state monopoly and undercut the ability of banks and lenders to charge interest.
In anarchy labor and capital would be merged into one, for capital would be without prerogatives and dependent upon labor, and owned by it. The laborer would find that to produce was to enjoy and the nightmare of destitution banished. The artisan would find in co-operation that nature alone remained to be exploited. The tradesman would find that production offered greater inducement than exchange, unless he accepted a position of competence and ease in the labor exchange which would supplant isolated stores. The clerk, no longer with his horizon bounded by a ribbon counter, would have full scope to display his talents in any direction. The farmer, above all, free from irksome care to meet interest, to dread foreclosure from enforced taxation, with his family growing up around him, and rendered secure by a common title and mutual inter-dependence, or seeking in insurance indemnity for depredation. would find in anarchy release from useless drudgery and his labor crowned with plentiness and peace.