Emil Herman

A three-time candidate for Congress on the ticket of the Socialist Party of America, Herman is best remembered for his imprisonment by the Wilson administration due to his political activity in the outspokenly anti-war Socialist Party of America during World War I. Emil M. Herman was born August 22, 1879, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire town of Kamnitz (now part of the Czech Republic), the son of a farmer of ethnic German extraction.

[1] The family emigrated to the United States in 1882, settling first in Alexander, Arkansas before moving to Kansas City, Missouri, where Emil attended grammar school.

[3] He remained with the SLP until 1899, when he exited to join instead the Social Democratic Party of America (SDP) headed by Eugene V. Debs and Victor L.

[4] When the SDP united with Slobodin and Hillquit's East Coast-based group of former SLP members in 1901 to form the Socialist Party of America (SPA), Herman continued his political activity in that new organization as well.

[1] Herman's first run for political office came in the spring of 1904, when he ran for Seattle City Council on the Socialist Party ticket.

At trial the prosecution produced its evidence against Herman seized in the raid on his office, including the pamphlets The Great Madness, Mental Dynamite, and The Menace of Militarism.

"[8]In the wartime climate of superheated nationalism and anti-German sentiment, the German-American socialist organizer Herman was convicted under the Espionage Act of 1917 for possession of these "seditious" materials and sentenced to 10 years in prison.

While serving time at McNeil Island Federal Penitentiary in Washington state, Herman remained a member of the Socialist Party's governing National Executive Committee.

At the time of his reaffiliation to the SPA, Herman declared in a published article that the Communists had "swallowed hook, bait, and line of the programs imposed upon them" by "agents of the Department of Justice," and thus been driven underground.

[11] Herman again opened up an office in Everett, where he served as the secretary for the Northwest District for the now-atrophied Socialist Party in the years after his release.