Henry Demarest Lloyd

[5] Lloyd was one of the precursors to the later muckraker journalists,[6] writing a searing exposé of the monopolistic abuses of John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Trust, "The Story of a Great Monopoly," published in the March 1881 issue of The Atlantic.

Lloyd, after leaving the newspaper, continued to file stories as a free-lancing dispatcher, using the Associated Press wires, and his publications of outrage over the treatment of miners in the Spring Valley dispute are credited with ending that episode.

He was president of the Town Meeting in 1898 and is credited with a leading role in pioneering what became known nationally as the "Winnetka system" of self-government, a reform cause broadly taken up by Samuel Gompers and the labor movement.

He was survived by a son, William Bross Lloyd, who would emerge as a founding member and early leader of the Communist Labor Party of America in 1919.

After his death, Lloyd's library, which included thousands of books and pamphlets relating to trade unionism, cooperation, socialism, and monopolies, was donated to the University of Wisconsin.

[9] Lloyd was an inspiration to a generation of young investigative journalists and radical political activists, such as Charles Edward Russell, who later recalled:

"As the Standard Oil article in the Atlantic became the armory of every person willing to fight for industrial freedom, so Wealth Against Commonwealth in later years became the great storehouse of information to which numbers of able campaigners habitually resorted for their facts.