William Bross Lloyd

William Bross Lloyd (1875-1946) was an American attorney and political activist. The oldest son of the muckraking journalist Henry Demarest Lloyd and Jessie Bross, daughter of Chicago Tribune founder William Bross, William Bross Lloyd is best remembered as a founding member and financial angel of the fledgling Communist Labor Party of America, forerunner of the Communist Party USA.

William Bross Lloyd, Sr. was born February 24, 1875 in Chicago, Illinois. He was the oldest son of muckraking progressive journalist Henry Demarest Lloyd and Jessie Bross, daughter of Chicago Tribune founder William Bross, through whom he ultimately inherited a valuable one-quarter share of the newspaper.

Lloyd attended Harvard College from which he graduated in 1898. Thereafter he enrolled at Harvard Law School, completing his studies there in 1902 and continuing to practice law in the states of Massachusetts and Illinois.

While at Harvard Lloyd met his fellow student Lola Maverick and the couple married in November 1902. The couple traveled briefly following their marriage before setting up house in Chicago, where William intended to begin practicing law. The couple would have four children, three girls and a son, before a bitter divorce in 1916. Lloyd would remarry to Madge Bird following the divorce and fathered one more son in 1918 by his second wife.

Following his father's death in September 1903, William decided to enter politics himself, giving up plans on practicing law to instead become an activist in the movement for public ownership of the municipal railway system — the primary mode of civic transportation in the pre-automotive era. While Lloyd's father, Henry Demarest Lloyd, had long been a member of the socialist movement, as a youth William Bross Lloyd was not a member of the Socialist Party of America or its youth section, joining the organization only in 1906. Lloyd would remain a political activist for the better part of the next two decades.

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