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:
“My life is superficial, takes no root in the deep world; I ask, When shall I die, and be relieved of the responsibility of seeing a Universe which I do not use? I wish to exchange this flash-of-lightning faith for continuous daylight, this fever-glow for a benign climate.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Perhaps our eyes are merely a blank film which is taken from us after our deaths to be developed elsewhere and screened as our life story in some infernal cinema or despatched as microfilm into the sidereal void.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)
“Many older wealthy families have learned to instill a sense of public service in their offspring. But newly affluent middle-class parents have not acquired this skill. We are using our children as symbols of leisure-class standing without building in safeguards against an overweening sense of entitlement—a sense of entitlement that may incline some young people more toward the good life than toward the hard work that, for most of us, makes the good life possible.”
—David Elkind (20th century)