Dyer Lum - Life

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."