War of the German newspapers
Asurprising number of University of Arkansas professors have discovered that one does not have to be a historian to contribute to the field of Arkansas history. Retired professor of music James Greeson, for example, has done a tremendous amount on Arkansas-born composers Florence Price and Conlon Nancarrow.
More recently, two associate professors in the World Languages Department have dived into state and regional history. Linda Jones has adopted French colonial Arkansas as one of her research fields, and we will be hearing more from her on this interesting topic. Kathleen Condray has developed a strong interest in the history of German-speaking Arkansans, and she is working on a book on the state’s primary German language newspaper, the Arkansas Echo.
In preparation for that book, Condray has published an account of a newspaper “war” which erupted in 1892 between two German language journals, Das Arkansas Echo and Die Staatszeitung, both published in Little Rock. While both newspapers survived this confrontation, the intensity of the competition gives vivid testimony to Condray’s comment that “Arkansas’ German immigrant community was not as monolithic and unified as it might seem in retrospect.”
Shirley Sticht Schuette, author of the entry on Germans in the Encyclopedia of Arkansas History & Culture, has noted that Arkansas has never been home to large numbers of German-speaking people. In 1900, for example, only 5,971 first-generation Germans lived in Arkansas, out of a total population of 1.3 million.
German immigration to Arkansas reached its peak in 1882, the same time that huge numbers of German speakers were migrating to America. Most of the Germans arriving prior to the Civil War were Protestants and Jews. Schuette has noted the interesting fact that “approximately 200 German Jewish merchants lived in the state at the beginning of the Civil War.” Of that number, more than 70 of these merchants fought in the Confederate army.
German Catholics began arriving in Arkansas in larger numbers following the Civil War, due in large measure to the work of Edward Fitzgerald, Bishop of the Diocese of Little Rock. In 1877 Fitzgerald signed an agreement with Little Rock and Fort Smith Railroad land commissioner Col. W. D. Slack, which set aside lands in Logan County for a German Benedictine colony. The following spring another agreement was signed which provided lands in Faulkner, Conway, and Pope counties for Catholic colonies associated with the Holy Ghost Fathers.
German-language newspapers arose to serve the needs of the new immigrants. The first German newspaper seems to have been the Staatszeitung, established in 1869. Another early German newspaper was the Arkansas Volksblatt of Fort Smith.
According to Professor Condray, the Arkansas Echo evolved from Der Logan County Anzeiger, “which was published by Conrad Elsken and had a circulation of around 400 before it was moved to Little Rock and re-incorporated as the Echo.” Elsken (18501931) was a prominent Logan County businessman and political leader from Paris and later Subiaco.
Given the state’s small German-speaking population, the editor of the Staatszeitung, Philip Dietzgen, viewed the Echo as a competitor. However, the fact that the competition was so intense is surprising. The first issue of the Echo was sabotaged when someone broke into the paper’s offices and destroyed the frames containing the already laid-out first edition.
Echo editor Carl Meurer blamed Dietzgen for the vandalism, and as Condray has written, “the incident touched off a year-long newspaper war, which devolved into lawsuits, threats of violence, and a fistfight between the editors that made national news.”
It is most likely that Dietzgen or someone associated with the Staatszeitung was the guilty party in the vandalism since “one of the vandals cut himself on a form, and the blood droplets led out the door and down the stairs, where they stopped in front of the offices of the SZ.”
The German newspaper war is difficult to follow because only a few issues of the Staatszeitung have survived, while as Condray has noted: “Every issue of the Echo … has survived, preserved by the German-speaking Swiss monks at Subiaco Abbey.”
From reading the Echo as well as coverage in the Arkansas Gazette, Condray has been able to piece together an account of the conflict. Both sides leveled charges and countercharges at each other, including alleged obscenity and libel. The Echo editor, a devout Catholic, accused Dietzgen of being a Lutheran and— perhaps worse—a Republican. Both newspapers were opposed to the growing prohibition movement, but the Echo claimed the Staatszeitung was soft on the issue.
By November 1892, after almost a year of sniping, the situation worsened when Echo editor Meurer assaulted Dietzgen. The altercation attracted the attention of the Arkansas Gazette, which quoted Meurer as blaming the fight on “a slanderous and libelous article in the Zeitung … Meurer pleaded guilty to simple assault before ‘Squire [Justice of the Peace] Peay.’”
The Gazette coverage of the fisticuffs attracted interest outside Arkansas, with accounts of the fight being published in the Kansas City Gazette and other out-of-state newspapers.
As you might expect, many German-speaking Arkansans were appalled by the ongoing feud and physical confrontations. Readers wrote letters to the editor appealing for an end to the conflict. One writer in particular was outraged by the embarrassment caused German Arkansans by the bickering: “… it has already been nauseating for a long time to read about such [behavior] from Germans.”
Eventually Dietzgen gave up the fight and moved to Kansas City, where he purchased the German-language Kansas City Presse. The Staatszeitung quit publishing in 1917 and the Echo lasted until 1932—even surviving the rabidly anti-German prejudices brought on by World War I.