Hermann Schlüter

Born Oct. 8, 1851, in what is now Schleswig-Holstein; died Jan. 26, 1919, in New York. Historian; figure in the working-class movement in Germany and the USA.

Schlüter was involved in the socialist movement from his youth, when he became affiliated with the left wing of German Social Democracy. In the 1870’s and 1880’s he helped publish a number of newspapers and magazines of the Social Democratic Party of Germany. Schlüter emigrated to the USA in 1889. He contributed to the newspaper New Yorker Volkszeitung, and in the early 1890’s he became a member of the editorial board of the newspaper. In 1904 he represented the Socialist Party of the USA at the congress of the Second International in Amsterdam. He opposed opportunism in the German and international working-class movement.

Schlüter’s historical works, which are devoted primarily to various aspects of the working-class and democratic movement in the USA, criticize the attempts of bourgeois and social-reformist historiography to reduce the history of the working-class movement in the USA to the trade-unionist struggle. Schlüter is also the author of The Chartist Movement (1916; Russian translation, 1925), which contains an objective analysis of Chartism.