About Illinois Staats-Zeitung

Illinois Staats-Zeitung

The Illinois Staats-Zeitung, the Illinois State Newspaper, was a German-language daily published in Chicago from April 1848 until 1921, with some accounts extending its life to 1922. It was one of the best-known German-language newspapers in the United States, and along with the Westliche Post and the Anzeiger des Westens, both of St. Louis, it was counted one of the three most successful German-language papers of the Midwest. It was described in its prime as the leading Republican paper of the Northwest alongside the Chicago Tribune, and by 1876 it was printing 14,000 copies an hour and stood second only to the Tribune in circulation in Chicago.

The paper was founded as a weekly and became a daily in 1851. Its editors were refugees and veterans of the German Revolution of 1848, the Forty-Eighters, who made it an antislavery, Republican institution, helped build the Republican Party in Illinois, survived the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 by printing temporarily in Milwaukee, and reached a circulation reported at 97,000 in 1892. It declined after the deaths of its great nineteenth-century figures and collapsed during the First World War era, when its support for Germany cost it advertisers and standing. In 1921 it was sold for 25,000 dollars and resurrected under another name.

Foundation in April 1848

The Staats-Zeitung was founded in April 1848, the year of revolutions across Europe, and its early history reflects that coincidence. A small German weekly called the Volksfreund, founded two years earlier by Robert Hoffgen, preceded it in Chicago, with about seventy subscribers; one account of the paper's own anniversary history names Hoffgen as the Staats-Zeitung's founder as well, with the enterprise beginning as the owner and a single apprentice, John Simon, who set the type while the proprietor rode unpaved roads through the surrounding country seeking subscribers, and slept on a pile of old newspapers in the office that was also his home.

Whatever its modest beginnings, the paper's trajectory was steeply upward. Founded as a weekly in April 1848, it became a daily in 1851, the year George Schneider joined its staff. Hermann Kriege was the first editor-in-chief, serving from 1848 to 1850. In the 1850s the paper was taken over by Forty-Eighters, the educated refugees of the failed German revolution, and became the major daily newspaper of Chicago's German-born community.

George Schneider and the Making of Republican Illinois

George Schneider, editor from 1851 to 1861, was the Staats-Zeitung's first great figure; the spelling Georg Schneider also appears. Among his associates on the paper were George Hillgaertner and Daniel Hertel. Schneider played a major role in building the Republican Party in Illinois, and the Staats-Zeitung was an important instrument in that work. It was, in effect, a party-founding newspaper: through its columns, German immigrants were recruited into the new antislavery coalition that became the Republican Party.

The paper opposed slavery, and Schneider used it as a platform to campaign against the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which opened the western territories to slavery and destroyed the old party system. On February 22, 1856, Schneider attended, on behalf of the Staats-Zeitung, the Decatur meeting of anti-Nebraska editors in Illinois, at which twenty-six newspapers were represented and which was assembled by Paul Selby of the Morgan Journal. That editors' convention is remembered as a foundational gathering of the Illinois Republican Party, the party that two years later nominated Abraham Lincoln for the Senate and four years later for the presidency.

The Civil War Years Under Lorenz Brentano

During the Civil War, Lorenz Brentano was proprietor and editor-in-chief, from 1861 to 1867, succeeding Schneider. In those years the paper completely dominated the German-language press of Chicago, the Democratic German papers of the city being short-lived at the time, and the Staats-Zeitung stood as the second-largest daily newspaper in Chicago overall. German Chicago was overwhelmingly Unionist, and its great newspaper was the community's recruiting sergeant and bulletin board.

Among the staff during the war was Wilhelm Rapp, who had come from the Baltimore Wecker after a riot destroyed that paper's office in the Baltimore violence of April 1861, the unrest that produced the first bloodshed of the Civil War. After the war Rapp returned to the Wecker. His itinerary between Baltimore and Chicago, driven by a mob, illustrates the interconnected world of the German-American press, in which editors circulated among a handful of great papers and carried their politics with them.

Hesing, Raster and the Peak Years

In 1867 Anton C. Hesing, a Prussian immigrant and former sheriff of Cook County, moved from partial to complete ownership of the paper, a position he held until his retirement in the 1880s. Hesing was a public figure and political boss of a kind, and he used his paper for maximum political impact. He helped launch the pro-alcohol People's Party in 1873, a revolt against temperance legislation that threatened German Chicago's beer culture, and orchestrated the election of Harvey Doolittle Colvin as mayor of Chicago. The venture fell into disrepute within a few years, and the Staats-Zeitung returned to the Republican ranks, though from 1876, when it endorsed the Democrat Samuel J. Tilden for president, it remained officially independent and criticized both major parties.

Concurrently with Hesing's takeover in 1867, Hermann Raster became editor and held the post until his death in 1891, the longest tenure in the paper's history. The paper reached the peak of its financial success under Raster. Wilhelm Rapp returned to the Staats-Zeitung in 1872 and succeeded Raster as editor in 1891, serving until 1907. Washington Hesing, the owner's son, a Yale graduate of 1870, became managing editor in April 1880 after service on the Chicago Board of Education, and was succeeded in 1893, on his appointment as postmaster of Chicago, by Joseph Brucker. Between 1891 and 1899 the paper also published a separate evening edition, the Abendblatt.

The Great Chicago Fire of 1871

The Staats-Zeitung was particularly hard hit by the Great Chicago Fire of October 1871. The building housing the publication, including its machinery and type, was lost to the flames, and with it the back files of the paper and its records of accounts. Virtually the entire staff, from editors to press operators, were burned out of their homes at the same time. A newspaper that had lost its plant, its archive and its ledger in one night had to be rebuilt from nothing while its city lay in ashes around it.

The recovery became one of the paper's proudest stories. German type, necessary for a German-language paper, proved impossible to obtain on short notice in Chicago, so production was moved briefly to the German enclave of Milwaukee. The paper missed, by its own account, only the Monday issue that was half printed when the fire came; on Wednesday morning, October 11, a small one-sided sheet was in readers' hands, growing day by day, and fifty days after the fire the paper had regained its old size, with smaller print actually giving readers more material than before, while the editorial staff worked in Chicago and the presses ran in Milwaukee, connected by telegraph. A new permanent home followed about a mile from the city center, a multistory building at the corner of Washington Street and Fifth Avenue rising one hundred feet from basement to roof, designed, in the words of its historians, with the monumental sensibilities of old Europe.

Scale and Standing

By 1876 the Staats-Zeitung was printing 14,000 copies an hour and was second only to the Chicago Tribune in citywide circulation. Its reported circulation reached 97,000 in 1892, at the height of German immigration and of the paper's prosperity under Raster's successors. These figures made it not a niche ethnic sheet but one of the great metropolitan dailies of the Midwest, read across the German Northwest and treated by contemporaries as a power in national as well as state politics.

Other notable staff and contributors across its history included Adolf Wiesner, who served in an editorial position from 1866 to 1867, Caspar Butz, Emil Dietzsch, August Boecklin, Henry E. O. Heinemann, Paul Grzybowski and Henry Merker. The paper's staff list reads as a roll of German-American intellectual Chicago, and a modern doctoral dissertation on the paper stresses what that meant: its Forty-Eighter editors had been academics, lawyers and journalists in Germany, and they used the newspaper to influence their immigrant community and to exert political pressure at local, state and federal levels, while maintaining close contact between the diaspora and the German homeland.

Decline After 1899

After Hesing, Brentano and Raster had died by the end of the nineteenth century, the paper began to decline. In 1899 the majority stockholders created a new board of directors and ousted the long-time treasurer, Charles Francis Pietsch. Henrietta Hesing and Margarethe Raster, the widows of Washington Hesing and Hermann Raster, controlled the property, and Theodore Brentano, Lorenz Brentano's son, became the new treasurer. Ownership by inheritance, among the heirs of three great careers, was no substitute for the careers themselves.

The deeper causes were structural as well as personal. German immigration slowed, the second generation read English, and the political world the Forty-Eighters had built, in which a German daily could help found a national party, had passed. Arthur Lorenz, editor from 1907 to 1921, inherited a paper whose golden age lay a generation behind it and whose remaining asset, its loyalty to German culture, was about to become its greatest liability.

World War I and the Sale of 1921

Until the United States entered the First World War, the Staats-Zeitung supported the German war effort. Editor Arthur Lorenz was reportedly unrestrained in that support, and the paper lost a great deal of advertising and funding as a result. By the late 1910s it was in dire financial straits. It then compounded its troubles by running an article describing members of the American Legion as vagabonds and bums and claiming the Legion had been bought with British gold to betray American labor, an attack on the veterans' organization that brought it significant controversy at the worst possible moment.

In 1921 the paper was sold for 25,000 dollars, a fraction of its former worth, and Colonel John Clinnin, an assistant United States district attorney, recommended deportation proceedings against Lorenz, a recommendation reported in the New York Times in December 1921. The Staats-Zeitung was resurrected under the name Deutsch-Amerikanische Buerger-Zeitung. Shortly before the sale, the Chicagoer Freie Presse had merged into the paper, two shrinking German dailies combining their remaining strength.

Afterlife: The Illinois Staats-Herold

The story did not quite end with the sale. Following it, the paper was resurrected and merged in the late 1920s with the Chicagoer Herold to form the Illinois Staats-Herold. That successor's circulation was around 40,000 by 1934, and it was the first German newspaper in Chicago to host a German broadcasting hour on the radio, an adaptation the old Staats-Zeitung, born in the age of the hand press, could scarcely have imagined. The Staats-Herold's president was Ernest L. Klein and its editor-in-chief Julius Klein; like its predecessor in its best years, it was Republican in affiliation. It ceased publication around 1936.

Selected articles from the Staats-Zeitung across the years 1855 to 1938 survive in English translation in the Chicago Foreign Language Press Survey, held through the Newberry Library, and the paper's records and editors' papers, notably the Hermann Raster papers at the Newberry, remain open to researchers. For historians of German America, of the Republican Party's founding, and of the immigrant press, it remains the central Chicago source: the daily through which German Chicago spoke to itself, and, for seventy years, to the nation around it.