Louis Miller

Louis E. Miller (1866-1927), born Efim Samuilovich Bandes, was a Russian-Jewish political activist who emigrated to the United States of America in 1884. A trade union organizer and newspaper editor, Miller is best remembered as a founding editor of Di Arbeiter Tsaytung (The Workers' Newspaper), the first Yiddish-language weekly published in America, and a co-founder with Abraham Cahan of the Jewish Daily Forward, the country's first and foremost Yiddish-language daily.

After leaving the Forward in 1905 due to editorial differences with Cahan, Miller established a Yiddish daily newspaper of his own, Di Warheit (The Truth), which attained a measure of success until its readership was shattered with the coming of World War I.

Efim Samuilovich Bandes was born to a Jewish family in April 1866 in Vilna (today's Vilnius, Lithuania), then part of the Pale of Settlement of the Russian Empire. While barely a teenager, Efim (who later took the name Louis Miller) and his older brother joined a revolutionary circle headed by Aaron Zundelevich, seeking the overthrow of the anti-semitic Tsarist regime in Russia.

This revolutionary career in imperial Russia was quickly short-circuited by the Tsarist secret police, however, with study circle leader Kundelevich arrested for his political offenses in 1879. To avoid a similar fate, the Bandes brothers were forced to flee the country, briefly living in a series of European metropolises that included Zurich, Berlin, and Paris.

Efim Bandes arrived in New York City in 1884 and soon took on a new Americanized name, Louis Miller. Miller worked for a time in one of the city's sweatshops, an experience which would later move him towards trade union activity.

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