Schluter, Hermann b. October 8, 1851; Elmshorn, Holstein d. January 26, 1919; New York City
Pioneer historian of the working class and working-class movements, especially among German Americans. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, an era when most studies in German Americana were written by ethnocentric searchers for evidence of the contributions of Germans to American history, Schluter wrote critical studies engaging major historical issues.
Much of his life in the United States was devoted to Socialist journalism and organizing. For twenty-five years he was the editor of a major German American newspaper, the Socialist Volks- zeitung (People’s Newspaper) in New York. He belonged to a generation of Socialists who knew Friedrich Engels personally and were among Engels’s correspondents.Schluter grew up in abject poverty. Like many a nineteenth-century labor leader, he was an autodidact. He went through an apprenticeship as a cabinetmaker. Perhaps as early as 1871 he was in Chicago. There he was involved in the formation of a furniture workers’ union and the founding of the Workers’ Party in Illinois. Schluter served as secretary of the furniture workers and as editor of a Socialist newspaper. Returning to Germany in 1876, he became a full-time editor. Under Bismarck’s Anti-Socialist Law (1878-1890) Socialist papers were banned, but many copies circulated clandestinely. By 1883 Schluter and other Socialist leaders had fled to Switzerland. Under pressure from Germany, the Swiss eventually expelled the German editors of the party organ, Der Sozialdemokrat (The Social Democrat), including Schluter. They found refuge in London and continued to publish their journal. In 1889 Schluter, probably with the approval of his Socialist comrades, went to New York. When the Anti-Socialist Law lapsed in 1890, many of the sentences meted out in absentia under it were rescinded, but Schluter’s two-year sentence remained standing.
Under his editorial guidance, the New York Volkszeitung eventually shifted from an affiliation with the Socialist Labor Party to one with the vibrant new Socialist Party founded in 1901. The circulation of the daily edition stood at 20,000 in 1890 and 18,000 in 1915; that of the Sunday edition at 29,000 in 1905 and 20,000 in 1915 (Arndt and Olson 1976, 406). The Volks- zeitung was the most important foreign- language Socialist journal in the United States from 1890 to its demise in 1932.
While living in New York, Schluter wrote several books examining the history of workers in international perspective. Much of this work has never been translated into English. An exception is his Brewing Industry and the Brewery Workers’ Movement in America (1910), a fine example of his comparative, materialist analysis of labor organizations. As an ethnic industry in which virtually all bosses and own- ers—and most workers—were German, brewing in nineteenth-century America displayed the strengths and limits of ethnic solidarity. In his studies of labor Schluter never lost sight of the big questions: How do workers’ movements develop? What conditions are conducive to their growth? What is the role of trade unions? What is their relationship to political movements and parties? Is socialism an ethnic import in the United States? Do ethnic identities obscure class relationships? Does ethnicity both promote and hinder the formation of a class-conscious proletariat? In Lincoln, Labor, and Slavery (1913) Schluter argued that the activities of German American opponents of slavery were crucial to the early history of the Republican Party and the election of Abraham Lincoln to the presidency. Although this thesis has been challenged, Schluter’s formulation of it remains classic.
He died in New York, a victim of the influenza epidemic of 1919. Scores of labor and Socialist organizations and thousands of people mourned his passing. His body lay in state in the Yorkville section of Manhattan at the Labor Temple, which had grown out of the Workers’ Educational Association, one of many organizations that he helped to found.
Walter Struve
See also Bismarck’s Anti-Socialist Law;
Socialist Labor Party
References and Further Reading
Arndt, Karl J. R., and May E. Olson. The German Language Press of the Americas, 1732-1968. Vol. 1: United States of America. 3rd rev. ed. Munich and Pullach: Verlag Dokumentation, 1976.
Poore, Carole. “Introduction to Hermann Schluter.” In Die Anfange der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung in Amerika. New York: Peter Lang, 1984.
Schneider, Dorothee. Trade Unions and Community: The German Working Class in New York City, 1870-1900. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1994.