Paul Grottkau
Grottkau is best remembered as an editor alongside Haymarket affair victim August Spies of the Chicagoer Arbeiter-Zeitung, one of the leading American radical newspapers of the decade of the 1880s.
Paul Grottkau was born in Cottbus in 1846 and raised in Berlin, Prussia (now part of Germany), the son of a relatively prosperous noble family.
[2] Part of this training process involved Grottkau's learning the crafts of stonemasonry and building, activities which brought him into contract with members of the working class and first introduced him to socialist ideas.
[citation needed] In the view of historian Howard H. Quint the reason for Grottkau's willingness to cast his lot with the so-called Social Revolutionaries (i.e. the Anarchists) in the early 1880s was related not to his affinity for their paramilitary auxiliary, units of the Lehr und Wehr Verein (Educational and Defensive Society), but rather due to a desire to change the personnel and tepid policy of the SLP, exemplified by the group's National Secretary, Philip Van Patten.
[6] While the meddling of Van Patten and the Detroit-based National Executive Committee of the SLP may have been Grottkau's primary objection, he nevertheless went all the way with the anarchist wing for a time, going so far as to himself briefly join the Lehr und Wehr Verein.
[9] This new fissure was made eminently clear on the evening of May 24, 1884, when Grottkau appeared before a Chicago audience to debate the "Communist" position against Johann Most, a leading voice of the Anarchist movement.
[10] Morris Hillquit, one of the earliest historians of American socialism, recalled the affair: It was a well-matched contest, the opponents being equally well-versed in the subject of discussion and both being fluent speakers and ready debaters.
[15] That same afternoon several hundred Polish workers went to the railroad shops located in the Menomonee Valley to appeal to the 1400 railway shopmen working there to join the general strike.
[16] The Polish strike leaders proceeded to the Reliance Iron Works, where fire hoses were turned on them, with the effect that "the catapult power of the stream shot some of the men clear across the street.
[17] Governor Jeremiah Rusk was notified by telegraph and several units of the National Guard were dispatched to Milwaukee from their station in Madison, arriving on the scene the next morning.
[17] The protest degenerated into violence, with the so-called "reign of terror" recalled by one contemporary adherent of law and order: Idle workmen paraded the streets; men willing to work were urged to join the demonstration and in many cases compelled to do so; crowds armed with paving blocks, billets, and other improvised weapons of the street overturned hucksters' stands, invaded manufacturing establishments, and even attacked them.
As the riotous proceedings grew to large proportions and the city seemed about to be stretched at the mercy of a mob, a deadly fire from the rifles of state militiamen was poured into a crowd of Polish workmen and ended the lawlessness which had threatened to grow beyond control.
[8] In January 1893 Grottkau's old newspaper, the Arbeiter-Zeitung, was sold to a young Jewish schoolteacher of Austrian birth, Victor L. Berger, who relaunched the publication as the Wisconsin Vorwärts ('Wisconsin Forward').
