By People’s History of the Grand Valley
Meet Carl Gleeser: anarchist, labor organizer, publisher, radical feminist, writer, pacifist, and Grand Valley pioneer. Born 1856 in Germany, Gleeser immigrated to the United States in 1872. He was one of the very earliest settlers in the Grand Valley in 1881, Gleeser was here for a short time 1881-1890~ but while here he organized with the Knights of Labor and worked as a watch repairman. He was in the center of the action during the 1885 railroad strike. Gleeser was regularly praised in the pages of “Lucifer the Ligh-Bearer,” a radical anarcho-feminist paper that was advocating free-love, homosexuality, abortion advice, and total liberation of women, as the leading subscription gather and signed his letters off with “Yours in Anarchy.”
But like so many radicals and organizers in Grand Junction’s past, Gleeser moved on.
In the wreckage of the economic panic of 1893, a mutual aid movement known simply as The Labor Exchange, were being set up in communities all over the nation. In 1894, Gleeser became the lead organizer for the state of California and within a year almost every county had a Labor Exchange, and he was running the movements journal called “Living Issues.”
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 (google it), mass deportations of radicals, and of the suppression anti-war socialist and anarchists presses.
In April 1918, Carl Gleeser was convicted for publishing 12 articles that “might cause insubordination, disloyalty, and refusal of duty.” Gleeser was sentenced to five years in Leavenworth prison.
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 more just and less hierarchical world.
Gleeser’s search was over when he joined the Llano Colony. He eventually took over the editorship of the colony’s newspaper, and garnered the moniker “Papa Gleeser.” This life long revolutionary found his place as the kindly old grandfather of the revolution. A letter of his to the Vernon Parish Democrat sums it up his creed:
“Live an intelligent and sensible life in agreement and harmony with the constitution of nature…and the equal rights of my fellow human beings…”
The Revolutionist 