German Americans

GERMAN AMERICANS. The first important ethnic socialist group in the United States, German Americans established institutions, styles, and a political-cultural perspective that remained substantially constant for most immigrant groups until 1920 and in subtle ways continuous to the 1940s–1950s. Arriving in several large waves of immigration from the 1830s to the 1890s, reaching a peak of a quarter-million in 1882 alone, Germans would differ in important respects from most other immigrant-radical groups. First of all, they came from a political culture that, despite its internal divisions, bore little resemblance to an oppressed nationality. German working-class immigrants, however personally impoverished, carried their particular socialist heritage of German culture in a proud, sometimes imperious way. They sought and succeeded to a large extent, until the 1890s, in imposing their standards upon other nationalities, as did German-speakers in the Austrian socialist movement.

Second, Germans brought skills and a tradition of industrial organization that enabled them to take a leading role in the development of craft unions and a variety of labor-related social institutions. Toward the end of the century, German immigration patterns had turned heavily from a mostly rural origin to a mostly industrial-urban one. But even in earlier days, the 1840s–1870s, the number of German immigrants with artisan backgrounds of some kind was large enough to enable them to play a role in the fledgling American labor movement that was far out of proportion to their actual size. Not only unions proper but newspapers, halls, public labor forums, and a variety of socialist-laborist institutions bore their stamp.

Third, in the matter of timing, German American socialists moved into the forefront as the older “natural rights” radicalism (highlighted by the Civil War crusade to abolish slavery) ran aground on the increasing division of social classes. German Americans established the first Communist Club, by way of relations with Marx himself, and outnumbered all others in the American wing of the First International. As the small numbers and occasional enthusiasm of native-born socialists waxed and waned erratically, Germans resigned themselves to the task of bellwethers. Like Jews in the 1910–1940 period, but with a class-cultural autonomy in mass society that would later be inconceivable, they tended rightly or wrongly to judge all phases of American radicalism by their own standard.

This hegemony proved remarkably enduring also because German Americans proved the most stable socialist grouping in class and political terms. Working-class households tended to remain so as years and a generation or so passed. Political loyalties altered very little relative to the fast-paced American scene. As late as the 1910s, Germans (by this time mostly well into middle age) dominated the membership rolls of the Socialist Party in greater New York. As late as the 1920s–1930s, Milwaukee, the Germanic city of beer making and Turnvereins (gymnastic societies), continued with a municipal socialist experiment abandoned or never approached elsewhere.

All this success, it might be argued, came at a considerable price. German American socialists suffered, through the entire history of their collective organization, from a sense of insularity within the more chaotic, less generally class-conscious American society (and working class) at large. The problem that therefore posed itself from the 1860s onward was how German radicals might reach out to the wide potential constituency of American socialism and yet maintain a clear class orientation.

During the German American movement’s first major phase, the early 1870s, their leaders (principally Friedrich Sorge) desperately feared the prospect of home-grown radical reformers overwhelming the immigrant socialists, and consequently they expelled a majority of the First International’s American section. In the second phase, the socialists, responding to the railroad strike of 1877, sought to encompass the most radical class forces within their own circles by opening the socialist movement to political action, American style. They watched as their newfound comrades melted away. In the third phase, during the middle 1880s, they earnestly sought to promote local labor tickets, as in the Henry George mayoralty campaign in New York City, and to coordinate craft union activity with that of the Knights of Labor. Whether socialist or “revolutionary socialist” (anarchist), they felt the cold breath of repression and public hostility fall upon them after 1886, and they withdrew to their tents for regrouping.

The German American socialists and anarchists alike succeeded more readily along different lines. Building up their own institutions, especially the daily and weekly press in a half-dozen cities, they created a presence in the labor movement and in the German American community that could be denounced but not easily vanquished. German culture in America, from the theater to literature to choral groups, all felt their influence. The weekly Vorbote (Herald) and daily Chicagoer Arbeiter-Zeitung (Chicago Workers News), a case in point, grew out of the depression of the 1870s and consolidation of immigrant Left resources around an increasingly solid labor movement. Modeled in format and internal structure after the homeland socialist press, enjoying wide support in their neighborhoods, they survived the extreme repression following the Haymarket tragedy, and remained (Arbeiterzeitung expired in 1919, Vorbote in 1924) until the great majority of their readers had reached ripe old age.

Such institutions made possible the development of some of the finest leaders, both lecturer-agitators and thinkers, of the entire American Left saga. These men, largely trained in Germany, also stood in place of Left theoreticians and even Left artists in later generations, as they variously interpreted socialist doctrine in the light of American conditions, and wrote plays and poetry. One of the most distinguished, Adolf Douai, had been a noted pedagogue of the “Forty-Eighters” generation, editor of an abolitionist paper in Texas, and a writer of American travelogues for the German reader. Editor of several early German American socialist papers, he remained the tireless editorialist at his post until his death in the late 1880s. August Otto-Walster, one of the pioneer playwrights and writers of fiction of early German Social Democracy, not only edited American socialist papers in New York, Cincinnati, and Saint Louis but continued his short-story production, while serializing many of his own classics. Joseph Dietzgen, widely known as an independent discoverer of historical materialist principles, in 1886 took over the Chicago Vorbote as its editors faced extreme persecution. Paul Grottkau, once a noted labor leader in Berlin, became a prominent anarchist-leaning editor in Chicago and Milwaukee. By the 1890s, with the end of the Bismarckian repression, the stream of such men was largely cut off. Yet figures such as Alexander Jonas remained with the New Yorker Volkszeitung (New York People’s News) through the 1910s (to be succeeded by the younger German immigrant Ludwig Lore), growing old with American socialism’s most venerable aging constituency.

In consolidating their own forces during the late 1870s to early 1890s, the German American socialists also placed themselves ideally to promote smaller and newer immigrant-radical entities. In Chicago, especially, German socialists maintained an avuncular relationship with the Czech Left community as early as the 1880s. German Jews eased the way for the new Yiddish-language institutions, including newspapers, fraternal benefit societies, and social halls. To a lesser but still important degree, German radicals helped orient incoming Slavs, Hungarians, Finns, and the emerging mass English-language socialist movement.

According to their critics, who included Friedrich Engels, they had retarded the specifically American working-class developments with their insistence upon retaining socialist political leadership for themselves. In the 1870s–1880s, a strong argument could be made for this contention (although not the same argument Engels himself would make): the growingly exclusionary approach of craft unions had made cooperation with the largely Irish American (but also significantly black and female) Knights of Labor problematic, limited to moments of high mobilization. For that matter, socialism at large, in order to gain a wide following in the United States, needed to lay claim to republican traditions, as the Socialist Party would do forcefully after 1900. Lacking the capacity or will to do so, German American socialists froze their movement within a segment of the working class.

On the other hand, German Americans rather eagerly handed over leadership of the socialist movement, that is, the Socialist Labor Party, to non-Germans during the 1890s, with results disastrous on all sides. Embracing the young intellectual Daniel De Leon and his short-lived following in the ghetto Jewish environment, the Germans in effect encouraged an extreme sectarianism posing simultaneously as Americanization and political-class clarification. At the end of the experiment, most Jews and others having already withdrawn, the German loyalists split with the Socialist Labor Party. Henceforth they would settle for a narrower gauge, in the socialist movement led by Eugene Debs. They would live out their socialist beliefs as merely one (if the most venerable) of the ethnic socialist groups that, like most others, chose the Communist alternative in the 1920s. Unlike most other immigrant groups, the German American federation withdrew from the Communist movement en bloc, maintaining its primary institutions intact. Through the Depression and war years, it continued as an independent socialist entity, ranged around the New Yorker Volkszeitung (the Neuer Volkszeitung after 1931) as well as fraternal and cultural institutions whose publications and events were conducted in the German language.

Goyens, Tom. Beer and Revolution. The German anarchist movement in New York, 1880-1914. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2007.

Keil, Hartmut, ed. German Workers’ Culture in the United States, 1850–1920. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988.

Nelson, Bruce C. Beyond the Martyrs: A Social History of Chicago’s Anarchists, 1870–1900. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1988.

Shore, Elliott, Ken Fones-Wolf, and James P. Danky, eds. The German-American Radical Press. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992.