page_title: Paul Grottkau
section_title: Milwaukee years
hierarchical_section_title: Paul Grottkau / Biography / Milwaukee years
caption_attribution_description: English: 1882 drawing of the rolling mills at Bay View, Milwaukee. Derived from public domain image uploaded at http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Milwaukee_1882.jpg
context_page_description: Paul Grottkau was a German-American socialist political activist and newspaper publisher. Grottkau is best remembered as an editor alongside Haymarket affair victim August Spies of the Chicagoer Arbeiter-Zeitung, one of the leading American radical newspapers of the decade of the 1880s. Later moving to Milwaukee, Grottkau became one of the leading luminaries of the socialist movement in Wisconsin.
context_section_description: Forced out of his editorial position in Chicago, Grottkau left the city to establish a paper of his own in Milwaukee, Wisconsin — the Milwaukee'r Arbeiter-Zeitung (Milwaukee Workers' News), issued three times a week.  The paper commenced publication in 1886.
  Grottkau became one of the leaders of the militant Milwaukee Central Labor Union, a group which, together with the Knights of Labor, coordinated a march in that city on May Day 1886 as a means of agitating for establishment of the 8-hour day. About 16,000 people participated in the May Day festivities, with several thousand marching in support of the Central Labor Union and the Knights of Labor. This gathering and march proceeded without incident, but the groundwork seems to have been laid for further activity.
  On Monday, May 3, 1886, a general strike was called on Milwaukee's breweries, with as many as 1,000 men marching on Falk's Brewery in an effort to close the facility. Masses of brewery workers joined the protest and by that evening some 14,000 brewery workers were out on strike. That same afternoon several hundred Polish workers went to the railroad shops located in the Menomonee Valley to appeal to the 1400 railway shopmen working there to join the general strike. Most refused to quit work and law enforcement authorities were called upon to break up the group of strike agitators.
  The Polish strike leaders proceeded to the Reliance Iron Works, where fire hoses were turned on them, with the effect that "the catapult power of the stream shot some of the men clear across the street." About 20 policemen appeared on the scene and began clubbing the wet strikers with their hickory nightsticks. Governor Jeremiah Rusk was notified by telegraph and several units of the National Guard were dispatched to Milwaukee from their station in Madison, arriving on the scene the next morning.
  At about 7 am, some 600 or 700 men, armed with clubs, assembled and began to march on the steel rolling mills located in the Bay View area of the city.
  The protest degenerated into violence, with the so-called "reign of terror" recalled by one contemporary adherent of law and order:
  Idle workmen paraded the streets; men willing to work were urged to join the demonstration and in many cases compelled to do so; crowds armed with paving blocks, billets, and other improvised weapons of the street overturned hucksters' stands, invaded manufacturing establishments, and even attacked them. As the riotous proceedings grew to large proportions and the city seemed about to be stretched at the mercy of a mob, a deadly fire from the rifles of state militiamen was poured into a crowd of Polish workmen and ended the lawlessness which had threatened to grow beyond control.
  The same historian noted that despite the firing of shots, "not one person was wounded in the volley," noting:
  Many of the mob, as they saw the rifles aimed, threw themselves flat upon the ground, others sought shelter behind woodpiles and telegraph posts and fences. Notwithstanding, it seemed providential that the ground was not strewn with dead and dying. Many buildings in range of the rifles were perforated with bullets ...
  In the afternoon of Wednesday, May 5, 1886, strikers again assembled to march on the company town of Bay View. This time, new orders had been issued to the members of the National Guard by Governor Rusk — that, in the event of the repeat of mob tactics, the guardsmen should this time shoot to kill. Guardsmen blocked the road. When the approaching strikers were 1000 yards away, commanding officer Major George P. Traeumer gave the command to fire and a hail of bullets was unleashed on the crowd. The number wounded will never be known, having been carried away by the fleeing crowd, but eight people died in what is today remembered as the Bay View Massacre. Included among these was an old man who had been feeding chickens in his yard and a young schoolboy.
  In the aftermath Paul Grottkau was arrested, ostensibly as the perpetrator of the strike, and sentenced to one year in prison. Grottkau served only six weeks of this
caption: Rolling Mills of the Milwaukee Iron Company at Bay View, objective of strikers involved in the May 1886 Bay View Massacre, a disturbance for which Grottkau was imprisoned.
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