The Danish labor movement has become increasingly popular, and the newspaper, now called Social Demokraten, has a wide circulation, but the movement has become increasingly unhappy over Louis Pio's authoritarian leadership style.

Pio leaves Denmark in 1877 to the great indignation of Danish socialists, who discover that he had been bribed by the police to leave the country.

He travels to Smoky Hill River, near Hays City, Kansas, to found an ill-starred socialist colony, which will soon fail because of the lack of agricultural expertise among the colonists.

He will then move to Chicago, Illinois, where he will live in poverty, working at odd jobs, until he dies on June 27, 1894.