remembered critically but warmly in the American socialist press. Writing in the Social Democratic Herald, Secretary of the Social Democratic Party of America Seymour Stedman remembered him as a proverbial absent-minded professor: He was eccentric and careless. He would walk with pipe and paper along a thriving thoroughfare oblivious of all; his hat shaped like a French general's, peak in front and back; shoes well worn; clothes shabby, and was in meeting reticent, even timid ... He treated the subject of Socialism plainly and stripped it of utopianism. ... The peoples of the future will dwell in peace where this hardy pioneer warred with the accumulated prejudice, passions, and ignorance of the ages. Leonard D. Abbott recalled Gronlund as a "great soul" who had lived in poverty throughout his life out of commitment to the socialist cause, the recipient of "very small financial rewards from all his books put together." He quoted Gronlund during his last year of life as rejecting the political strategy of winning power through independent political action, declaring "I regard [Eugene] Debs as the most unselfish of labor leaders, but you can't build up a third party in this county – you've got to work through the Democratic Party." Gronlund was enormously influential during the decades of the 1880s and 1890s and is credited by historian Daniel Bell with playing a pivotal role in the conversion of future Appeal to Reason publisher Julius Wayland to socialism in 1891. Wayland would begin his first socialist newspaper, The Coming Nation, in 1893 and would build his subsequent publication into a mass circulation weekly that would help make socialism a broad political movement during the first two decades of the 20th century. Gronlund's articulation of a vision for a cooperative economy and society echoed over the next decades in early-twentieth century U.S. and Canadian leftist circles. It helped lead to the formation of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation party in 1932, which became Canada's largest left-wing political party, and continues to this day as the New Democratic Party, and to the nature of the economic principles of the Farmer-Labor Party of the United States, particularly in the FLP's Minnesota affiliate, where advocacy for a Cooperative Commonwealth formed the central theme of the Party's platform from 1934, until the Minnesota FLP merged with the state Democratic Party to form the Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party in 1944. Footnotes Works The Coming Revolution: Its Principles.