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. —From Lum's obituary in Twentieth Century, reprinted in Liberty.Lum was a descendent of the Tappan family; his grandfather was a Revolutionist and secretary to Samuel Gompers. In hopes of bringing about the end of slavery, he volunteered to fight on the Union side in the American Civil War. He served as adjunct in the Fourteenth New York cavalry, and later as a brevet captain, fighting in the Red River Campaign. A bookbinder by trade, he became active in the labor movement in the aftermath of the war and ran for lieutenant governor of Massachusetts on the ticket of abolitionist Wendell Phillips in 1876.
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 violence 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."
Read more about this topic: Dyer Lum
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“We all come from our own little planets. That’s why we’re all different. That’s what makes life interesting.”
—Robert E. Sherwood (1896–1955)
“The nature of women’s oppression is unique: women are oppressed as women, regardless of class or race; some women have access to significant wealth, but that wealth does not signify power; women are to be found everywhere, but own or control no appreciable territory; women live with those who oppress them, sleep with them, have their children—we are tangled, hopelessly it seems, in the gut of the machinery and way of life which is ruinous to us.”
—Andrea Dworkin (b. 1946)
“I don’t like your miserable lonely single “front name.” It is so limited, so meagre; it has no versatility; it is weighted down with the sense of responsibility; it is worn threadbare with much use; it is as bad as having only one jacket and one hat; it is like having only one relation, one blood relation, in the world. Never set a child afloat on the flat sea of life with only one sail to catch the wind.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)