August Spies

August Vincent Theodore Spies (/spiːs/, SPEES; 1855–1887) was an American upholsterer, radical labor activist, and newspaper editor. Spies is remembered as one of the anarchists in Chicago who were found guilty of conspiracy to commit murder following a bomb attack on police in an event remembered as the Haymarket affair. Spies was one of four who were executed in the aftermath of this event.

August Spies was born on December 10, 1855 in a ruined castle converted into a government building on the mountain Landeckerberg in the Central German state of Hesse. His father was a government forestry official.

Spies later recalled that he had a pleasant and privileged childhood, one filled with recreation and study. He was educated by private tutors and trained for a career following in his father's footsteps as a government forester. His father died suddenly in 1871, however, ending the comfortable financial situation for his mother, and August determined to set out for a new life in America, a country in which he already had a number of financially successful relatives.

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.

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