Carl Gleeser: Grand Junction’s First Radical

Before Grand Junction was even a town, a radical and organizer called the Grand Valley home. Meet Carl Gleeser, anarchist, labor organizer, publisher, writer, pacifist, and Grand Valley pioneer.

Born 1856 in Germany, Gleeser immigrated to the United States in 1872. In 1879, Gleeser was in the area driving oxen to supply the very few settlers in the area. In 1941, Gleeser wrote the Sentinel reminiscing how “changes have been great during the last 62 years,” he continued “The Sentinel is like a message from a place that I helped to put on the map.”

While in GJ he helped organize the Knights of Labor and worked as a watch repairman. He was the still serving as a secretary of the Knights of Labor in 1886, placing him in the center of the action during the 1885 railroad strike. In 1889, he was writing letters to an atheistic anarchist newspaper in Kansas from Grand Junction and signing the letters off with “yours in anarchy.”

But like so many radicals and organizers, Gleeser moved on. He pops up again locally in 1892, while passing thru on his was to “Chicago, wither he goes to join the Anarchist organization. Mr. Gleeser has long been a believer in Anarchism and has been editing a paper of that faith in San Francisco.”

In the wreckage of the 1893 panic, people were grasping for new ways of meeting their own needs. The dire situation called for new thinking, a mutual aid movement known simply as The Labor Exchange, were being set up all over the nation. In 1894, Gleeser became the lead organizer for the state of California and with in a year almost every county had a Labor Exchange, and he was running the movements journal called “Living Issues.”

“The newspapers tell us how the weevil is destroying thousands of tons of wheat, while at the same time men and women are going hungry because they have no work. Suppose this wheat was turned over to them for their labor. Would it not be a great blessing, not only to the persons directly benefited, but to all Californians?” Gleeser told the San Francisco Call in March of 1895.

By the late 1890s, Gleeser was in Kansas, a then hot bed of radical thought and organizing. He was editing a radical German language paper, Kansas Staats-Zeitung latter to become the Missouri Staats-Zeitung. In 1917, in the run up to ‘Great War’ the United States passed the Espionage and Sedition Acts, criminalizing anti-war and radical speech. The following years saw brutal suppression of the Industrial Workers of the World, the first of many Red-Scares, the Palmer Raids, mass deportations of radicals, and of the suppression anti-war socialist and anarchists presses.

In April 1918, Carl Gleeser and Jacob Frohwerk were convicted for publishing 12 articles that “might cause insubordination, disloyalty, and refusal of duty.” Gleeser was sentenced to five years in Leavenworth prison. The case eventually went all the way to the supreme court.

After serving just over a year, Gleeser was released. He shortly there after joined the Llano Colony, the largest and longest lived socialist utopian community. Gleeser worked for and eventually edited the Colony’s newspaper.

Gleeser was a dreamer. He was a man searching and working for a better more just and less hierarchical world, which was always just out of reach. Gleeser’s search for a better world was over when he joined the Llano Colonists, a letter of his to the Vernon Parish Democrat sums it up: “Llano Colony means to me is an opportunity to live an intelligent and sensible life in agreement and harmony with the constitution of nature, including myself, and the equal rights of my fellow human beings. Service is the keynote of our industrial activity, and the golden rule functions to the mutual advantage of each and all. Truthfulness, honesty and integrity flourish in an environment from which the defects of the predatory methods of the modern plutocracy-cursed civilization have been eliminated, and the native goodness of human nature can assert itself. Watch us improve and grow!”