Illinois Staatszeitung
One of the leading German American daily newspapers during the nineteenth century. The Illinois Staatszeitung (Illinois State Newspaper, ISZ) was founded as a weekly in 1848 in Chicago, where it was edited and published.
At its peak between the Civil War and the early 1890s, the ISZ was one of the most widely read German American papers. The paper’s articles were reprinted and credited by many German- language papers throughout the United States and in Germany. The ISZ was a prime illustration of the influence of the relatively small group of Forty-Eighters as German American opinion leaders. Between 1850 and 1890, the ISZ was edited by known Forty-Eighters—among them Lorenz Brentano—who opposed slavery and were among the early supporters of the Republican Party. Like many German American papers, the ISZ fought attempts to introduce Prohibition laws beginning in the 1850s. The paper ceased publication soon after World War I.The first issue of the ISZ appeared on April 7, 1848, in Chicago. The founder of the weekly was Robert B. Hoeffgen. In 1851 he hired the Forty-Eighter George Schneider as editor. Schneider had been among the local leaders of the 1848 and 1849 revolution in the Palatinate. He fled the Prussian troops and a death sentence, emigrating to the United States. In 1850 he founded and edited the St. Louis Neue Presse (New Press) with his brother. With Schneider as editor, the ISZ began to identify with the emerging Republican Party. Schneider and other German immigrants were among the founders of the party in Illinois. The ISZ claimed to speak for most German immigrants in Chicago as an ethnic group. And, indeed, the paper did serve as a platform for numerous Vereine and as the hub of the growing German community. The editors took a firm stand against attempts to ban the sale and public consumption of alcohol, especially on Sunday.
Conflicts over Prohibition laws were symbolic battlegrounds over the “place” of (German and Irish) immigrants in midnineteenth-century America.
In the mid- 1850s, the ISZ proliferated: since the early 1850s the paper appeared daily, and its circulation reached 1,000 copies. In 1854 a Sunday edition, Der Westen (The West), was added.Several Forty-Eighters worked as editors for the paper during the 1850s and 1860s: Eduard Schlaeger, Georg Hillgart- ner, Heinrich Binder, Daniel Hertle, Wilhelm Rapp, and beginning in 1859, Lorenz Brentano (1813—1891), a prominent liberal politician from Baden. The paper strongly backed Abraham Lincoln’s bid for the presidency during the 1860 campaign. During the Civil War, the ISZ emerged as one of the leading German American newspapers. Its circulation rose to almost 10,000 copies. In 1861 and 1862 Brentano took over as the main editor, he bought the paper from Hoeffgen and Schneider, but sold a large minority share in 1863 to the local Republican politician Anton Casper Hesing. Like Schneider, Brentano was active as a Republican in state and city politics. During the Civil War he became one of the leading and most respected German Americans in Chicago and beyond. Like Carl Schurz, Brentano successfully made the transition from a respected German 1848 revolutionary to an influential American liberal politician. Brentano left the ISZ in 1867, selling his majority share to Hesing. He served as U.S. consul general in Dresden from 1872 to 1876. In 1876 Brentano was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from a Chicago district.
The ISZ’s new owner, Hesing, an immigrant from Vechta in Oldenburg and one of the leading Republican “bosses” in Chicago, used the paper for his intertwined political and economic interests. In 1869 he turned the ISZ into a stockholding company, keeping the majority of shares. The ISZ added a publishing business, printing German-language pamphlets and books in addition to the paper. Brentano’s successor as main editor was Hermann Raster, another Forty-Eighter. During the 1870s, the ISZ reached its peak. The 1871 Chicago Fire hardly affected the paper, which moved to Milwaukee for a short time.
Its circulation remained between 7,000 and 10,000 during the 1870s. One of the major English-language papers, the pro-Republican Chicago Tribune, had a circulation of about 30,000 at the same time. The ISZ continued to support the Republican cause on the national level. Locally, it served Hesing’s personal interests, which did not always coincide with the agenda of the Chicago Republicans. Hesing’s involvement in several scandals, which even led to a jail sentence in the mid-1870s, did not hurt the paper’s image.The ISZ welcomed German unification, broadly supporting the German Empire and Otto von Bismarck. However, like many German American papers still edited by Forty-Eighters, the ISZ opposed the rising antisemitic movement in Germany. In 1880 and 1881, the ISZ and several other German American papers, like the New Yorker Staats-Zeitung (New York State Newspaper), condemned the national hero Bismarck for instrumentalizing the antisemitic movement. During the 1860s and 1870s, the ISZ successfully appealed to many German-speaking Jewish immigrants in Chicago. It regularly covered, for example, events in the small Jewish community in Chicago, most of whose members hailed from central Europe and identified strongly with German Kultur and Bildung. Several rabbis had articles published in the ISZ on theological subjects that appealed mostly to Jewish readers. Likewise the paper managed to bring many other small groups of the heterogeneous and only loosely connected German immigrant group into its camp.
During the 1870s, however, in a period of heavy German immigration to Chicago and the Midwest, the ISZs strong position gradually eroded, when several other German-language papers were started in Chicago. Increasingly, newly arriving German immigrants identified with socialism. The Chicago Arbeiter Zeitung (Chicago Workers’ Newspaper), founded in the late 1870s, and several smaller papers became the mouthpieces of the growing Socialist movement—which the ISZ fiercely opposed.
During the notorious Chicago Haymarket riots of May 1886, ISZ editor Raster called for severe punishment of the mostly German anarchists who were suspected of having attacked the police. The Chicago Arbeiter Zeitung took the opposite position. In the 1890s, the ISZ lost its position as the leading German paper in Chicago. In 1891 the influential editor Raster died. With him the founding generation of the Forty-Eighters passed. The owner, Hesing, who for all his personal flaws had managed the paper skilfully, died in 1895. By the mid-1890s several other German-language papers had firmly established themselves in Chicago, the Chicago Arbeiter Zeitung, the Freie Presse (Free Press), and especially the Abendpost (Evening Post). The ISZ still maintained a high circulation of more than 10,000 copies, but the quality of its journalism and thus its prestige was deteriorating. In 1897 the paper was saved from bankruptcy by Raster’s widow. Rising debts forced her to seek a merger with the Freie Presse in 1901. The ISZ continued to be published daily under its name with independent editors, and its circulation remained high with up to 20,000 copies, but it had to share the market with several other large German-language papers. Apart from changing economic and technical conditions, as well as management errors, the gradual downfall of the once-mighty ISZ after 1900 also reflected the slow erosion of the still-large German American community network from within during the same period. Causes included the decreasing immigration of German speakers, the loss of German as a spoken language among the second generation, and declining membership in the Vereine. The last issue of the ISZ was published on July 11, 1922. The paper was merged with the Burgerzeitung (Citizens Newspaper) and continued to appear under its name as the Sunday edition Burgerzeitung und Illinois Staatszeitung for a few more years.Tobias Brinkmann
See also Chicago; Forty-Eighters; Haymarket; Illinois; Milwaukee; New Yorker Staats- Zeitung; Newspaper Press, German Language in the United States; Schurz, Carl
References and Further Reading
Hinrichs, Beate. Deutschamerikanische Presse zwischen Tradition und Anpassung: Die Illinois Staatszeitung und Chicagoer Arbeiterzeitung 1879-1890. Frankfurt am Main, New York: Peter Lang, 1989.
Hofmeister, Rudolf A. The Germans of Chicago. Champaign, IL: Stipes, 1976.