New Yorker Volkszeitung

NEW YORKER VOLKSZEITUNG. The daily New Yorker Volkszeitung (NYVZ) was first published on 28 January 1878 by the Socialist Cooperative Publishing Association of the Socialist Labor Party (SLP). It sold 5,500 copies at the beginning and continuously increased its circulation to between 17,000 and 23,000 copies. Economic pressures forced it to close down in 1932; shortly thereafter the weekly Neue Volkszeitung appeared as successor. The founding of the NYVZ was closely related to the intensification of the class struggle and organizational achievements of the labor movement. A year after the 1875 consolidation of the Eisenacher and Lasallean wings of German social democracy into one party, the united Workingmen’s Party was established, soon to become the SLP. German workers and emigrant socialists were active in the new party and were soon joined by the exiles from the newly enacted Bismarckian antisocialist laws. The NYVZ—jointly with the English-language the People (since 1891), later the Worker—became the main organ of the SLP. It was supplemented by a Sunday edition (Sonntagsblatt) and a weekly edition (Vorwärts). Editors were Alexander Jonas (1878–1889), Sergei Schewitsch (1890), Julius Grunzig (1890–1891), Hermann Schlüter (1891–1919), Ludwig Lore (1919–1931), and Siegfried Lipschitz (1931–1932).

Though active in the sometimes acrimonious debates of different SLP wings and outspoken against anarchist tendencies, the daily succeeded in surviving all party splits and sometimes assumed the position of mediator. The paper published German, American, and German-American news as well as international reports. It was the official organ of numerous workers’ clubs, mutual aid societies, and unions (ninety-two in 1903). Its cultural pages reprinted classical authors of world literature from Maxim Gorky to Rudyard Kipling to Frank Norris. It published Plechanov, Liebknecht, Kerr, Zetkin, and Trotsky. Women received scant attention until—significantly—a separate women’s page was added. The NYVZ was banned from Germany under the antisocialist law (though regularly read by Berlin police authorities). US governmental repression during World War I remained limited through the NYVZ opposed the war, probably because of its outspoken stand against the German monarch.

Buhle, Paul, “Ludwig Lore and the New Yorker Volkszeitung,” and Dirk Hoerder, “The New Yorker Volkszeitung”. In The German-American Radical Press: The Shaping of Left Political Culture, 1850-1940, edited by James Dankey, Ken Fones-Wolf, and Elliot Shore. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990.