Known as the “millionaire socialist,” Henry Demarest
Lloyd (1847–1903) was a journalist, nonfiction writer, and
social reformer who unwittingly made Ida M. Tarbell’s
1904 muckraking study The History of the Standard Oil
Company famous. For it was Tarbell’s better-publicized
work which validated Lloyd’s 1893 path breaking Wealth
Against Commonwealth and helped set the stage for the
U.S. Supreme Court-ordered breakup of John D. Rockefeller’s monopoly in 1909.
Lloyd was born in New York City in 1847, the son of a
Dutch Reformed Church minister and of a mother who was
a direct lineal descendant to one of the first Dutch settlers in
New York. His stern Calvinistic upbringing provided Lloyd
with the moral consciousness of a reformer and a dislike
for any organized ideology. Well educated, Lloyd studied to
be a lawyer but turned to reporting as a result of the 1872
Liberal Republican movement, which nominated New York
Tribune editor Horace Greeley in an unsuccessful bid for
president. Lloyd obtained work as a business reporter for
the Chicago Tribune in the wake of the city’s disastrous
1871 fire and soon excelled at editorial writing.
Given leeway by publisher Joseph Medill, Lloyd became
an advocate for Chicago’s rebirth as the Midwest’s leading
city, but it was his interest in an obscure Ohio oil company, Standard Oil, and its one-time produce clerk chief
executive, Rockefeller, which gave him national prominence. Lloyd expanded on an 1878 Tribune editorial to
produce an 1881 Atlantic Monthly article that raised the
then obscure Standard Oil to national prominence and
became a starting point for every subsequent late nineteenth-century monopoly investigation. Married to the
only daughter of one of the Tribune’s major owners, his
wife’s wealth allowed Lloyd to retire from the Tribune in
1885 and devote himself full time to writing and public
speaking. For the remainder of the decade, he specialized
in national magazine articles on reform, attacking laissezfaire capitalism, unregulated commodities trading, and the
railroads and other monopolies. His support of the anarchists following the 1886 Haymarket Square bombing led
to his exclusion from Chicago’s upper-class society and his
entrance into an independent political circle with thinkers
such as Jane Addams, William Dean Howells, Eugene V.
Debs, and Booker T. Washington.
Lloyd began researching Wealth Against Commonwealth
in 1889. He discovered that the Standard Oil Company was
crushing all of its competition and overcharging its customers in what Lloyd called a “tribute.” In an era before corporate public relations, Standard Oil and Rockefeller refused
to provide any information or even acknowledge Wealth, so
Lloyd’s work had the effect of a one-sided or ex parte prosecution when it was published in 1893. Nonetheless, Wealth
made Lloyd the leading reform journalist in the era before
muckraking and influenced an entire generation of American social thinkers.
Lloyd’s anti-monopoly writings and independent politics led him to Populism. He ran unsuccessfully for a Congressional seat as a People’s Party candidate in Chicago in
1894. By the mid-1890s, Lloyd had moved closer to socialism, but he saw in Populism an opportunity to overthrow
what Lloyd saw as American plutocracy. It was with great
personal dismay that Lloyd witnessed the demise of the
People’s Party at their 1896 St. Louis national convention
as they embraced pro-silver Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan. Lloyd subsequently argued
that socialist Eugene Debs would have been the party’s best
candidate, but Lloyd and others could not convince Debs to
attend the convention.
Lloyd wrote several other books on cooperatives, social
reforms in New Zealand, and political philosophy. He
also became involved in the issue of public ownership of
municipal utilities as the result of a controversy involving
public transportation in Chicago. He died in 1903 as Ida Tarbell was completing her series of Standard Oil articles
for McClure’s.
Further Reading
E. Jay Jernigan. Henry Demarest Lloyd. Boston: Twayne, 1976.
Richard Junger. The Journalist as Reformer: Henry Demarest
Lloyd and Wealth Against Commonwealth. Westport, CT:
Greenwood Press, 1996.
John L. Thomas. Alternative America: Henry George, Edward
Bellamy, Henry Demarest Lloyd, and the Adversary Tradition. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1983.
Richard Junger