August Spies - in Chicago

In Chicago

Spies settled in Chicago, where he became an upholsterer, involving himself in trade union activities due to the injustices he witnessed, Spies joined the Socialist Labour Party in 1877. He emerged as a leader of the SLP’s radical tendency, a faction that provoked a split in the party by parading through the streets in military uniforms and shouldering muskets. After the English-speaking section of the SLP attempted to combine with the reformist Greenback Labor Party in 1880, Spies helped engineer a takeover of the party’s executive committee and ousted the compromisers. When the national leadership of the SLP denounced the Chicago radicals and removed their newspaper the Arbeiter-Zeitung from its list of party organs, Spies led the formation of a revolutionary alternative to the SLP. In 1883, Spies was a leader in the Revolutionary Congress held in Pittsburgh that formally launched the International Working People’s Association.

Spies had joined the staff of the Arbeiter-Zeitung in 1880, becoming editor in 1884. Two years before the Haymarket incident, Spies younger brother Wilhelm was killed by a Chicago police officer.