Germer, Adolph

GERMER, ADOLPH (1881–1966). Every factional struggle within a political organization generates leaders of the various antagonistic sides. Some of these leaders enter the battle to fulfill plans of action—to cleanse, to redirect, to purify, to change. Others find themselves suddenly placed in a defensive role, seeking to maintain and preserve. These leaders bent upon conserving the established order of things are sometimes the victims of circumstance, forced by events to act their part for good or ill. Radical mine union organizer and party functionary Adolph Germer, executive secretary of the Socialist Party of America during its bitter 1919 split into Communist and Social Democratic wings, is a prototypical example of the latter sort of factional leader—an accidental general thrust into an inevitable political war.

Adolph F. Germer was born in Welan, East Prussia, the son of a socialist miner who was drawn to the coal mines of Southern Illinois in 1888 by relatives promising he would find a job and a better life there. What the elder Germer actually found was poverty and economic insecurity, and young Adolph followed his father to the mines in 1892 as an eleven-year old coal trapper to supplement the family income with his earnings of sixty cents a day.

Things only got worse when the Panic of 1893 ushered in the decade of the “Grim Nineties.” Demand fell, production was shuttered, wages were slashed, and workers went on strike to maintain a living wage. Both socialist father and budding socialist son became active in the United Mine Workers in 1894. It would be activism in this union that provided the committed and ambitious Adolph with his means of escape from the mines as he transitioned from activist worker to professional union functionary.

Germer joined the Social Democratic Party in 1900 and made the acquaintance of that party’s leader-without-portfolio, Eugene V. Debs, not later than 1903. Gene Debs and his brother Theo would remain regular correspondents and close, life-long personal friends with Germer.

Germer remained active in both branches of the radical movement, party and union, throughout his life. He regularly wrote for the socialist press, informing readers about activities of socialists and other insurgents within the United Mine Workers and providing informed accounts of the periodic wage disputes and strikes that were endemic to the industry. As he became better known, his place in the party steadily grew. In 1912, he stood as a candidate of the Socialist Party for the Illinois state legislature, followed the next year by election to the governing National Executive Committee of the party.

In 1916, he was elected Executive Secretary by the Socialist Party’s membership—the top-ranking paid staff member in charge of day-to-day operations of the national office in Chicago. Ironically, Germer would win this office thanks in large measure to the bloc voting by the Socialist Party’s numerous language federations—activity which he denounced as anti-democratic and corrupt when the shoe was on the other foot in the election of 1919.

Documents show that Germer played a large part in the abrogation of the Socialist Party’s National Executive Committee election in early 1919, halting the counting of votes when it became clear that the slate of an organized Left Wing Section was about to capture the reins of the Socialist Party and control over its valuable assets through the ballot box. He was instrumental in the expulsion of the Michigan and Ohio state organizations as well as other certain left wing delegations in advance of the 1919 emergency convention, thereby enabling party regulars to control the gathering and steamroll the opposition, which bolted to form a new organization known as the Communist Labor Party.

As the ringleader of such dubious anti-democratic activities, Germer was rewarded with enmity from the party left and disgust from the party center. His mandate to run the organization undermined, 1919 would be his last year of occupancy of the big office at Socialist Party headquarters. Ironically, this fate of history was nearly averted by martyrdom. In February 1918 Germer was among five key Socialist Party officials indicted by a Chicago grand jury for alleged violation of the Espionage Act. Tried before the notorious hangin’ judge Kennesaw Mountain Landis, Germer was sentenced to 20 years at Leavenworth in February 1919. He was free to act as top Socialist Party official in the party war of 1919 only because he was freed on $25,000 bond at the time. Germer would never serve time in prison after reversal of the sentence on appeal.

After being forced from party office Germer was taken care of by his friends in the organization. He was made an assistant secretary of Local New York in February 1921 and elected Massachusetts state secretary in 1922. From 1923 he was active in the Oil Field, Gas Well, and Refinery Workers Union. He ended his career as a field organizer for the Congress of Industrial Organizations, working in that capacity from 1936 until he retiremed in 1955.

Adolph Germer died in Rockford, Illinois at the age of eighty-six.

Cary, Lorin Lee. Adolph Germer: From Labor Agitator to Labor Professional. PhD dissertation. University of Wisconsin, 1968.

Draper, Theodore. The Roots of American Communism. New York: Viking Press, 1957.