Bismarck's Anti-Socialist Law (1878-1890)
Concerned with the growth of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) in the 1870s, Chancellor Otto von Bismarck sponsored passage in the German Reichstag of the Ausnahmegesetz zur Abwehr sozialdemokratischer Ausschreitungen (Exceptional Law for Vigilance against Social Democratic Activities, or the Anti-Socialist Law) on October 19, 1878.
This law suppressed Socialist publications, issued arrest warrants for party leaders, outlawed trade unions, and suppressed public demonstrations. Its passage damaged the SPD, which rallied during the 1880s and grew to become the largest faction in the Reichstag by 1912.A state-of-siege aspect of this law enabled the police to expel persons who were considered “dangerous to public security and order.” These laws forced many Socialists and skilled workers to leave Germany for other places in Europe and North America. German immigrants swelled the ranks of American labor organizations. Waves of machinists and toolmakers, artisans and craftspeople were hired in factories in Milwaukee, Chicago, and Pittsburgh. These workers reached the New World with memories of a hostile central government, experience with a political party, and an awareness of the value of organizing labor. The most noteworthy refugees from Bismarckian repression to surface on the landscape of American socialism were the radical Johann Most and the Lassallean Paul Grottkau. Once established in the United States, the Socialist emigres from Germany tended to be drawn to the radical fringe of labor politics. Anarchists and Socialists, most of the accused “Haymarket bombers” in Chicago were German immigrants who had left their homeland in the wake of the anti-Socialist law. An arch-foe of SPD leader Wilhelm Liebknecht, Johann Most wrote a manual on bomb making and spent much of his New York residency in Blackwell Island prison.
He was arrested first in connection with the Haymarket Square bombing andstayed on the radical fringe of the workingclass movement, writing in German only until his death in 1906.
Labor politics in the United States gravitated toward trade union sponsorship. Socialists scored electoral triumphs in a number of U.S. cities (Milwaukee in 1910 was their most striking victory), but the Germans fleeing from Bismarckian oppression never found a strong party base. American socialism evolved as a marginal political movement, but it was articulated with a strong German accent. Socialist newspapers were published in German by the end of the nineteenth century in New York, Chicago, and most major cities. German working-class immigrants contributed organization and ideology to American labor politics leading up to World War I.
Gareth A. Shellman
See also Anarchists; Chicago; Haymarket; Liebknecht, Wilhelm; Milwaukee; Most, Johann; New York City; Socialist Labor Party
References and Further Reading
Dominick, Raymond H. Wilhelm Liebknecht and the Founding of the German Social Democratic Party. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982.
Lidtke, Vernon L. The Outlawed Party: Social Democracy in Germany, 1978—1890. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966.
Uberhorst, Horst. The German Element in the U.S. Labor Movement. Bonn: Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, 1983.