Wilhelm Rosenberg

Wilhelm Ludwig "William" Rosenberg (1850-unknown, 1930s) was a German-American teacher, poet, playwright, journalist, and socialist political activist. He is best remembered as the head of the Socialist Labor Party of America from 1884 to 1889.

Wilhelm Ludwig Rosenberg was born in Hamm, Westphalia, Germany in January 1850. Rosenberg was university educated, and worked as a teacher of Latin and French in Frankfurt am Main.

Rosenberg was politically radical from an early age and was a contributor to Die Neue Welt (The New World), a German socialist newspaper.

Rosenberg was forced to emigrate from Germany in 1880 under the pressure of the Anti-Socialist Laws of 1878, landing in America. Rosenberg resumed life as a language teacher in Boston for the Berlitz School of Languages. He joined the fledgling Socialist Labor Party of America (SLP) around this same time. Rosenberg subsequently moved to Chicago, where he served as editor of a succession of politically oriented newspapers, including Die Fackel (Sunday edition of the Chicagoer Arbeiter-Zeitung, 1881-1884), the SLP's official organ, Der Sozialist (1885–1889),Der Tramp (New York, 1888), and Vorwärts, (New York City, from 1892).

While in Chicago, Rosenberg wrote politically charged plays to be performed in the several working-class theatres of the city. One of these dramas, Die Nihilisten (The Nihilists), was performed in honor of the Paris Commune in 1882 and featured three future defendants in the 1886 Haymarket affair — Michael Schwab, August Spies, and Oscar Neebe — playing leading roles. The play dealt with legal proceedings against a group of Nihilists in Tsarist Russia, who were sentenced to exile in Siberia, and finally freed by their comrades following the overthrow of the Tsar. In the May 18, 1882 performance in North Side Turner Hall, the role of the liberators was played by members of the local Lehr-und-Wehr Verein (Education and Defense Society), an armed workers' militia movement sweeping the German-American radical community in the Chicago area at the time. The implications of this casting could not be missed.

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