Adolph Germer

Germer was instrumental as one of the leaders of the SPA's "Regular" faction in orchestrating a series of suspensions, expulsions, and "reorganizations" of various Left Wing states, branches, and locals and thereby controlling the pivotal 1919 Emergency National Convention of the SPA, and thus forcing the Left Wing to establish new organizations of their own, the Communist Labor Party of America and the Communist Party of America.

A staunch antimilitarist and unflinching adherent of the party's anti-World War policies established at its 1917 Emergency National Convention held in St. Louis, Germer was indicted in Chicago by a grand jury under the Espionage Act on Feb. 2, 1918.

This secret indictment was made public on March 9 and a trial of Germer and 4 other top members of the Socialist Party began before Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis on Dec. 6, 1918.

The trial ended Jan. 4, 1919, and on the 9th day of that same month the jury found Germer and his associates (Victor L. Berger, J. Louis Engdahl, Irwin St. John Tucker, and William F. Kruse) guilty.

Germer was freed on $25,000 bail pending appeal, a sum put up by a man who was soon to be a political nemesis, the millionaire left wing socialist William Bross Lloyd.

After the bitter 1919 convention, Germer resigned his post as Executive Secretary of the SPA and was replaced by his friend Otto Branstetter.

[1] In that year he left the nearly bankrupt national party to work for the relatively more prosperous Local New York as an organizer, a position which he retained through 1922.

In 1926, Germer returned to Chicago, where he worked for a large real estate firm, remaining in that occupation until the onset of the depression in 1930.

It this capacity, Germer was a participant in the organizing campaigns and strike activities of the auto and rubber workers of the upper Midwest.

The main part of Germer's papers are held by the State Historical Society of Wisconsin located at Madison and are available on microfilm.

Another smaller assortment, relating to his activity from 1945 to 1947 with the World Federation of Trade Unions, reposes at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.