Wilhelm Rosenberg

[1] Rosenberg was politically radical from an early age and was a contributor to Die Neue Welt (The New World), a German socialist newspaper.

[8] One of these dramas, Die Nihilisten (The Nihilists), was performed in honor of the Paris Commune in 1882 and featured three future defendants in the 1886 Haymarket affair — Michael Schwab, August Spies, and Oscar Neebe — playing leading roles.

[8] The play dealt with legal proceedings against a group of Nihilists in the Russian Empire, who were sentenced to exile in Siberia, and finally freed by their comrades following the overthrow of the Tsar.

[9] In the May 18, 1882 performance in North Side Turner Hall, the role of the liberators was played by members of the local Lehr-und-Wehr Verein (Education and Defense Society), an armed workers' militia movement sweeping the German-American radical community in the Chicago area at the time.

[9] By 1883 the membership of the SLP had fallen to an estimated 1500 members in just 30 Sections, a depressing atrophy which had led to the abandonment of the organization in April of that year even by its nominal head, Corresponding Secretary Philip Van Patten.

The party's recuperation was assisted by a downturn of the economy in 1883, however, with widespread unemployment providing an impetus to membership for many, as the SLP tripling in size and doubling the number of its Sections over the next two years.

[15] Others, following the lead of the influential daily New Yorker Volkszeitung (New York People's News), declared socialist politics to be premature and urged that the SLP confine its efforts to extending its influence in the trade union movement.

[17] In a last-ditch attempt to prevent a split the SLP's Control Committee, based in Philadelphia, intervened in the conflict by suspending both of the rival NECs from office and moving the date of the 7th Convention to October 12.

[18] The frequent changes of locale caused wags remaining in the SLP to refer to the Rosenberg SDF as "the traveling faction" or "the party on wheels.

[20] There was subsequently some effort towards unity of the two factions, with Thomas J. Morgan put forward for Mayor of Chicago in 1891 as the joint nominee of the official SLP and the Rosenberg organization.