Anarchist Studies Volume 3, 2003 No.1

Between 1884 and 1910, Chicago anarchists produced the world’s first anarchist daily newspaper, the Chicagoer Arbeiter-Zeitung, a newspaper written, read, owned and published by a vibrant immigrant working-class community. This paper situates the Arbeiter-Zeitung in that community, and examines its policies and the institutional arrangements that governed it. In an important sense the paper was a cultural, as well as a political, institution. The Arbeiter-Zeitung was the first Chicago working-class daily to sustain publication in any language for more than a few years, and it relied almost entirely on the local community and upon local resources to do so. While the Arbeiter-Zeitung may have failed in its broader revolutionary project, it largely succeeded in providing Chicago’s German-speaking working class with its own daily organ of mass communication for forty years Ð a medium through which workers could voice their aspirations and support their struggles.