About New Yorker Volkszeitung

New Yorker Volkszeitung

The New Yorker Volkszeitung, the New York People's News, was a German-language daily labor newspaper published in New York City from January 1878 until October 1932. It was the longest-running German-language daily labor newspaper in the United States, and at its demise during the Great Depression it was one of the oldest radical left newspapers in the nation, and by some accounts the only German-language daily then left in the country. Its publisher was the Socialist Cooperative Publishing Association, with offices at 47 Walker Street in New York City.

The Volkszeitung began as a paper of the fledgling Socialist Labor Party of America and became a major player in every great split that divided American socialism for half a century: the party battles of 1889 and 1899, the founding of the Socialist Party of America in 1901, and the communist split of 1919. Under its editor Ludwig Lore it entered the communist orbit after 1919, was reorganized in 1931 under a new editor as a paper endorsing the Socialist Party once more, and was finally terminated in the fall of 1932 by financial difficulties. Two months later a successor, the Neue Volkszeitung, took its place.

The German New York the Paper Served

During the nineteenth century Germans were the second-largest immigrant group in the United States, behind only the Irish. German immigration began slowly, averaging about 20,000 people a year through the 1830s and early 1840s, then exploded after the economic crisis of 1847 and the failure of the Revolution of 1848 in the German states. When that first wave peaked in 1854, some 220,000 Germans left their homeland for America in a single year. A second great wave began in 1866, after the American Civil War, and ran until the Panic of 1873, adding more than a million Germans to the population of the United States.

That immigration concentrated in major cities of the East and Midwest, among them New York, St. Louis, Chicago, Cincinnati, Milwaukee and Philadelphia. In New York the German community centered first on the Lower East Side and later also in Yorkville, sustaining German theaters, churches, unions, clubs and a dense press. A daily newspaper in German could be a serious commercial and political force in such a city, and the Volkszeitung was founded to be exactly that for the socialist half of German New York.

Foundation in 1878, After the Railroad Strike

The paper was born at a critical moment in the industrial life of the nation. For five years after the Panic of 1873, economic depression had lain heavily on the country, working-class conditions were intolerable, and the trade unions had been battered nearly to impotence. German unions suffered with the rest, and the discontent produced by the depression flamed out in the great railroad strike of 1877. The Volkszeitung began publication as a daily in January 1878, in that strike's immediate aftermath, as the voice of the German labor organizations of New York.

Contemporary labor historian William Mailly, a former national secretary of the Socialist Party, wrote in 1911 that to write the history of the Volkszeitung in full would be to record, step by step, the development of the German labor organizations of America and, indirectly, the origin and rise of the socialist political movement itself. At thirty-three years old when he wrote, the paper was already the senior institution of German-American socialism, and it would continue for twenty-one more years. Sergei Shevitch edited it from 1879 to 1890, its first long editorship, and its columns included a women's section written by Johanna Greie.

A Player in the Party Splits of 1889 and 1899

The Volkszeitung began owing allegiance to the Socialist Labor Party of America, the first organized socialist party in the United States, and it was never a bystander in that party's internal wars. It was a major player in the splits of 1889 and 1899. In the great conflict of 1899, the dissident faction backed by the Volkszeitung, headed by Henry Slobodin and Morris Hillquit, fought the party regulars loyal to the English-language party editor Daniel DeLeon, and was defeated in the struggle for the party name and machinery.

Defeat in 1899 did not end the paper's faction; it redirected it. The Volkszeitung followed the dissidents along their circuitous path out of the Socialist Labor Party and into the new Socialist Party of America when that party was formed in 1901 by the merger of the dissidents with the Social Democratic Party of Eugene V. Debs and Victor Berger. For nearly two decades thereafter the Volkszeitung remained loyal to the Socialist Party of America, serving as its most important German-language daily and as the link between the American party and the enormous German-speaking socialist world from which many of its readers had come.

The Sister Paper: The New York Call

The Volkszeitung's place in New York socialist journalism can be measured by its English-language offspring. When the dissidents of 1899 regrouped, their weekly became The Worker, and for years that circle worked to raise the money for an English daily. The result, launched on May 30, 1908, was the New York Call, the first English-language socialist daily in the city. German and Yiddish socialists had long had dailies of their own; the Volkszeitung was the German daily in that family, edited in those years by Herman Schlueter and, in the earlier period, Alexander Jonas.

The two papers lived parallel lives: both were hit by the Wilson administration's suppression of the socialist press during the First World War, both followed the Hillquit wing of the party, and both were caught in the crisis after 1919. The Call died in 1923. The Volkszeitung, with its older and deeper institutional roots in the German community, survived it by almost a decade, but the direction of the movement that sustained both was downward from the moment the party split.

Ludwig Lore and the Communist Turn of 1919

Herman Schlueter's death brought Ludwig Lore, who had been employed in the Volkszeitung's editorial department, to the editor-in-chief's chair. Lore had been an organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World before accepting the assistant editorship under Schlueter, on the understanding that the paper was a socialist working-class daily and not an IWW organ. In 1917 he had founded the Marxist theoretical magazine The Class Struggle, edited with Louis C. Fraina and Louis Boudin, which became a central publication of the party's Left Wing.

The split of 1919, which produced the first American communist parties, carried the Volkszeitung with it. Lore was a founding member of the Communist Labor Party of America in 1919 and rose into the highest councils of the communist movement. Under his editorship the paper was brought into the communist orbit, professing a communist interpretation of international events and advocating a generally communist policy at home, though historians note it was only partially and unwillingly dragged into the bitter factional politics of the Communist Party in the 1920s. There the Volkszeitung remained, Communist-line from 1919 to 1925 in the standard cataloguing of the socialist press.

Loreism, Expulsion and Independence

Lore's own position inside communism collapsed in the factional wars of the mid-1920s. In 1925 he was expelled from the Communist Party for what his enemies called Loreism, proclaimed during the struggle to be an indigenous American form of Trotskyism. The label tells its own story: Lore's communism was rooted in the German labor movement and in decades of American socialist electoral work, and it sat uneasily with the underground mentality and Moscow-directed discipline of the early communist movement, which his older readers had never liked in any case.

Expulsion from the party did not mean expulsion from the paper. Despite it, Lore remained at the helm of the Volkszeitung, charting an independent radical course for it until his departure in 1931. That a daily newspaper could follow its editor out of the party that claimed it says much about the Volkszeitung's structure: it was independently owned, published by its cooperative association, and its loyalty ran to its editor and its readers before it ran to any party headquarters. Lore had also stood as a candidate of the Workers Party in these years, running for lieutenant governor of New York in 1922 and for Congress in 1924, without success.

Reorganization in 1931

In 1931 the paper was reorganized. Lore departed, and Dr. Siegfried Lipschitz, an American correspondent of the Berlin socialist press service, succeeded him as editor. Under the reorganization the Volkszeitung formally endorsed the Socialist Party of America once again, returning to the allegiance it had held from 1901 to 1919. The endorsement was afterward noted as carrying the support of both the Socialist Party in the United States and the Social Democratic Party of Germany, reconnecting the paper to the transatlantic social democratic world in which it had been founded.

The return came too late to save it. The Great Depression destroyed the economics of the immigrant press: unemployment stripped readers of subscriptions, advertisers vanished, and the German-speaking population that had sustained a daily since 1878 was assimilating into English. The financial crisis of the 1930s prevented members of the Socialist Cooperative Publishing Association from meeting regularly, and printing had to be shut down.

Suspension in October 1932 and the Successor

The New York Times reported the suspension under the headline Volkszeitung Suspends on October 12, 1932. The paper's thirty employees were not released at the closure, a detail that reflected the cooperative character of the enterprise to the end. The daily that had begun in January 1878, fifty-four years earlier, in the aftermath of one great railroad strike, thus ended in the depths of the Depression. At its demise it was, as its histories agree, among the oldest radical newspapers in the United States and the longest-lived German labor daily the country had known.

Two months after the closure, a new publication, the Neue Volkszeitung, was launched as its successor. The Neue Volkszeitung continued as a weekly from 1932 to 1949, carrying German socialist journalism in New York through the years of Hitler, exile and war, though as a weekly rather than the daily institution its predecessor had been. The daily era of the German labor press in New York ended with the Volkszeitung in October 1932.

The Paper as an Archive of a Community

The Volkszeitung's value today is evidentiary as much as political. A published index to the deaths recorded in the paper from 1878 to 1920 abstracts some 27,000 obituaries, death notices and reported deaths: workers, mainly ethnic Germans but not exclusively, from the Greater New York area; associates of the German labor community; socialist militants from across the United States and the world; and also the local dead of the neighborhoods the paper served, including murder victims and the victims of Southern lynchings, which the paper consistently condemned. Few sources preserve the personnel of German-American socialism at that density.

That archive captures the paper's double character. It was a party paper that fought factional wars for fifty years, and it was a community paper that recorded the deaths of neighbors, celebrated the movement's festivals and kept German New York informed about itself in its own language. Its history, as Mailly saw in 1911, is close to a history of the German labor movement in America itself, from the depression of the 1870s through the founding of two national socialist and communist parties to the collapse of 1932.