George Schneider (banker)

George Schneider

George Schneider (December 13, 1823, in Pirmasens, Rhenish Bavaria – September 14, 1905, in Colorado Springs, Colorado) was an Illinois journalist and banker. He was a German refugee, one of the Forty-Eighters.

The son of Ludwig Schneider, a public official, he was educated in the Latin school of his native place. He became a journalist at the age of 21, and worked for several German newspapers. Strongly sympathetic with the revolutionaries of 1848, he took an active part. When the revolution in the Rhine Province was crushed by the Bavarian government's Prussian allies, he withdrew to Baden, then fled to France, and finally emigrated to the United States, arriving in New York City in July 1849.

With his brother, also an exile, he established the Neue Zeit in St. Louis, Missouri, which was devoted to the free discussion of questions of interest to the large German population of that city, including the question of slavery, to which a large majority of them were strongly opposed. During the following year the office of this paper was destroyed by fire.

In the next few months Schneider occupied a position as a professor of foreign languages and literature in a college in the vicinity of St. Louis. During the next year he relinquished this position and, coming to Chicago on August 28, 1851, entered upon his duties as editor of the Illinois Staats-Zeitung which had been established some four years previous. He remained there over ten years, in 1852 becoming the proprietor of a half interest in the paper.

It was during his connection with the Staats-Zeitung that the contest over the slavery question was precipitated by the repeal of the Missouri Compromise as a consequence of the adoption of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854. Under Schneider's management the paper took strong ground on this issue. With the exception of the Western Citizen, an avowed anti-slavery weekly journal, the Staats-Zeitung was the first paper in Chicago to array itself in absolute opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act.

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