Wilhelm Weitling, one of the many German radicals who fled into exile after 1848, noted in the New York newspaper he founded that "everyone wants to put out a little paper". The 48ers and those who came after them strengthened their immigrant culture with a seemingly endless stream of newspapers, magazines, and calendars. In these Kampfblatter, or newspapers of the struggle, German immigrant journalists preached socialism, organized labor, and free thought. These "little papers" were the forerunners of a press that would remain influential for nearly a century. From the several perspectives of the new labor history, this volume emphasizes the importance of the German-American radical press to an understanding of American social history in the age of industrialism and illuminates the complexities of the interaction of immigrant radicalism and American culture. Chicago's German-language socialist weekly, Der Vorbote, claimed in 1880 that "the history of the workers' movement in the United States is at the same time the history of the workers' press". Hyperbolic perhaps, but to judge by the energy and resources German-American radicals devoted to their press, many immigrants agreed. The radical movement in the United States met with problems as well as support. Language and culture frequently divided the radicals, and class considerations splintered the German-American community. Cultural radicals like Robert Reitzel and Ludwig Lore ran afoul of rank-and-file taste or party discipline; attempts by the New Yorker Volkszeitung to coach women on proper socialist positions resulted in bitter arguments over the importance of woman suffrage and pacifism. At the same time, social movements thatcut across ethnic lines weakened the power of a foreign-language press within the community, as immigrants began to identify with a movement rather than a language. Contributors to this volume explore these and other issues, while correcting the bias in histories of radicalism which rely on English-language sources and thus ignore the competing visions of immigrant radicals.

“Landauer is the most important agitator of the radical and revolutionary movement in the entire country.” This is how Gustav Landauer is described in a German police file from 1893. Twenty-six years later, Landauer would die at the hands of reactionary soldiers who overthrew the Bavarian Council Republic, a three-week attempt to realize libertarian socialism amidst the turmoil of post-World War I Germany. It was the last chapter in the life of an activist, writer, and mystic who Paul Avrich calls “the most influential German anarchist intellectual of the twentieth century.” This is the first comprehensive collection of Landauer writings in English. It includes one of his major works, Revolution, thirty additional essays and articles, and a selection of correspondence. The texts cover Landauer’s entire political biography, from his early anarchism of the 1890s to his philosophical reflections at the turn of the century, the subsequent establishment of the Socialist Bund, his tireless agitation against the war, and the final days among the revolutionaries in Munich. Additional chapters collect Landauer’s articles on radical politics in the US and Mexico, and illustrate the scope of his writing with texts on corporate capital, language, education, and Judaism. The book includes an extensive introduction, commentary, and bibliographical information, compiled by the editor and translator Gabriel Kuhn as well as a preface by Richard Day.

All-American Anarchist chronicles the life and work of Joseph A. Labadie (1850-1933), Detroit's prominent labor organizer and one of early labor's most influential activists. All-American Anarchist chronicles the life and work of Joseph A. Labadie (1850—1933), Detroit's prominent labor organizer and one of early labor's most influential activists. A dynamic participant in the major social reform movements of the Gilded Age, Labadie was a central figure in the pervasive struggle for a new social order as the American Midwest underwent rapid industrialization at the end of the nineteenth century. This engaging biography follows Labadie's colorful career from a childhood among a Pottawatomie tribe in the Michigan woods through his local and national involvement in a maze of late nineteenth-century labor and reform activities, including participation in the Socialist Labor party, Knights of Labor, Greenback movement, trades councils, typographical union, eight-hour-day campaigns, and the rise of the American Federation of Labor. Although he received almost no formal education, Labadie was a critical thinker and writer, contributing a column titled "Cranky Notions" to Benjamin Tucker's Liberty,the most important journal of American anarchism. He interacted with such influential rebels and reformers as Eugene V. Debs, Emma Goldman, Henry George, Samuel Gompers, and Terence V. Powderly, and was also a poet of both protest and sentiment, composing more than five hundred poems between 1900 and 1920. Affectionately known as Detroit's "Gentle Anarchist," Labadie's flamboyant and amiable personality counteracted his caustic writings, making him one of the city's most popular figures throughout his long life despite his dissident ideals. His individualistic anarchist philosophy was also balanced by his conventional personal life - he was married to a devout Catholic and even worked for the city's water commission to make ends meet. In writing this biography of her grandfather, Carlotta R. Anderson consulted the renowned Labadie Collection at the University of Michigan, a unique collection of protest literature which extensively documents pivotal times in American labor history and radical history. She also had available a large collection of family scrapbooks, letters, photographs, and Labadie's personal account book. Including passages from Labadie's vast writings, poems, and letters, All-American Anarchist traces America's recurring anti-anarchist and anti-radical frenzy and repression, from the 1886 Haymarket bombing backlash to the Red Scares of the twentieth century.

Volume 1 of the candid, no-holds-barred account by American anarchist Goldman relates her philosophical and political journey through life, beginning with her emigration from Russia to the U.S. in 1886.

If you were looking for a philosopher likely to appeal to Americans, Friedrich Nietzsche would be far from your first choice. After all, in his blazing career, Nietzsche took aim at nearly all the foundations of modern American life: Christian morality, the Enlightenment faith in reason, and the idea of human equality. Despite that, for more than a century Nietzsche has been a hugely popular—and surprisingly influential—figure in American thought and culture. In American Nietzsche, Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen delves deeply into Nietzsche's philosophy, and America’s reception of it, to tell the story of his curious appeal. Beginning her account with Ralph Waldo Emerson, whom the seventeen-year-old Nietzsche read fervently, she shows how Nietzsche’s ideas first burst on American shores at the turn of the twentieth century, and how they continued alternately to invigorate and to shock Americans for the century to come. She also delineates the broader intellectual and cultural contexts within which a wide array of commentators—academic and armchair philosophers, theologians and atheists, romantic poets and hard-nosed empiricists, and political ideologues and apostates from the Left and the Right—drew insight and inspiration from Nietzsche’s claims for the death of God, his challenge to universal truth, and his insistence on the interpretive nature of all human thought and beliefs. At the same time, she explores how his image as an iconoclastic immoralist was put to work in American popular culture, making Nietzsche an unlikely posthumous celebrity capable of inspiring both teenagers and scholars alike. A penetrating examination of a powerful but little-explored undercurrent of twentieth-century American thought and culture, American Nietzsche dramatically recasts our understanding of American intellectual life—and puts Nietzsche squarely at its heart.

How did the interplay between class and ethnicity play out within the working class during the Gilded Age? Richard Jules Oestreicher illuminates the immigrant communities, radical politics, worker-employer relationships, and the multiple meanings of workers' affiliations in Detroit at the end of the nineteenth century.