Ludwig Lore
Ludwig Lore was an American socialist magazine editor, newspaper writer, lecturer, and politician, best remembered for his tenure as editor of the socialist New Yorker Volkszeitung and role as a factional leader in the early American communist movement. During the middle 1930s, he wrote the daily foreign affairs column "Behind the Cables" for the New York Post. Later still, he was charged with having secretly worked recruiting potential agents and gathering information on behalf of the Soviet foreign intelligence network.
Background
Ludwig Lore was born to working class parents of ethnic Jewish extraction in Friedeberg am Queis in Lower Silesia on June 26, 1875. Lore attended gymnasium in "Hirschberg, and later graduated from Berlin University, where he studied under political economist Werner Sombart. Upon completion of his education in 1892, Lore went to work in the textile industry. He remained in that industry until emigrating to the United States in 1903. While in Germany, Lore joined the Social Democratic Party of that country, holding office in the party and standing as an SPD candidate for political office.Career
Socialist period
Lore emigrated to America in 1903 and first settled in the state of Colorado where he worked at various jobs. While in Colorado, Lore joined the fledgling Industrial Workers of the World.Lore later moved to New York City where he joined the staff of the German-language socialist daily, the New Yorker Volkszeitung, becoming Associate Editor of the publication within a few years and editor-in-chief during World War I. Under Lore the paper had more the feel of a tabloid magazine than a typical straight newspaper, an orientation which is said by American historian Paul Buhle to have "suited his personality and approach."
Lore did periodically participate in various electoral campaigns of the Socialist Party of America, such as traveling to Altoona, Pennsylvania to address a German-language street meeting in support of the November 1908 Presidential effort of Eugene V. Debs. He appeared in elections in 1914 for the Socialist Party as "Delegate-at-Large to Constitutional Convention." He was also involved in the cooperative movement as a director of the American Wholesale Cooperative Company, formed in Brooklyn in 1910 upon a capital investment of $20,000.
Lore was an early and active opponent of World War I, speaking at an anti-war meeting in New York City in August 1914 that was attended by 4,000 people. Lore shared the platform a host of other prominent socialist leaders, who condemned the war in English, Russian, French, German, Polish, Italian, Hungarian, Yiddish, and Latvian for their international immigrant audience.
With American entry into war in the wind in the spring of 1917, the Socialist Party rushed to hold an Emergency National Convention in St. Louis. Lore was elected as a delegate to this gathering and was chosen as a member of the convention's Platform Committee — although he did not take part in the writing of the party's controversial anti-war statement, remembered as the St. Louis Manifesto.
Following American entry into the war, Lore remained steadfast in his opposition. On May 30 and 31, 1917, the Socialist Party organized an event in New York City touted as the First American Conference for Peace and Democracy, aimed at joining various anti-war groups into a common effort to bring a speedy end to the European conflagration. As an anti-war emigrant from the German empire, Ludwig Lore played a prominent role at this gathering, delivering a speech to the gathering at the first day's session in which he expounded upon the peace efforts being made in Germany by the Social Democratic Party to bring about immediate peace.
Records indicate the following election efforts:
- November 2, 1915: New York Assembly - Kings County, District 07: lost with 2.62% vote
- November 7, 1916: New York Assembly - Kings County, District 09: lost with 6.24% vote
- November 7, 1917: New York Assembly - Kings County, District 20: lost with 18.69% vote
- November 4, 1924: New York Assembly - Kings County, District 14: lost with 0.79% vote
Communist period
Lore was a founding member of the Communist Labor Party of America, an organization which, following a decade of splits and mergers, ultimately evolved into the Communist Party USA.
During this interval, Lore's New Yorker Volkszeitung was brought into the communist orbit, albeit neither fully nor wholeheartedly. The paper professed what was essentially a Communist interpretation of international events and advocated a general Communist policy at home, yet was only partially and unwillingly dragged into the mire of the bitter factional Communist Party politics of the 1920s.
One historian notes:
For the veteran, the struggle for political, electoral socialism in the United States had taken decades of self-sacrifice and many reversals. Readers of the paper had never been happy with the 'underground' mentality of the early Communist movement, because they viewed hyperrevolutionary rhetoric as the worst possible response to repression. The formation of a legal Workers Party in 1922, and the beginnings of a political campaign structure, encouraged them greatly.Lore was two times a candidate of the Workers Party of America, running for Lieutenant Governor of New York in 1922 and for U.S. Congress in the New York 14th District in 1924.
In 1924, Lore became an early victim of Party factionalism. James P. Cannon led the charges against Lore, which he summarized as misconception of the strategy and tactics of the Communist International and wrong analysis of the economic and political forces operating within the framework of present-day America. He went on to denounce him for "Loreism.". C. E. Reuthenberg continued to denounce Loreism in 1925. In August 1925, the party expelled Lore.
Post-Communist period
Lore was an independent thinker who was reluctant to take political orders, a personal characteristic which made him unsuited for the increasingly centralized Communist movement of the late 1920s. In addition, his well-known personal fondness for Leon Trotsky, established during Trotsky's time living in New York, during which he wrote for The Class Struggle, made Lore an easy target for factional opponents.In 1925, fearing proto-Trotskyist indiscipline, Lore was brought up on charges before the executive of the Workers Party's German Language Federation. When the executive refused to expel Lore, changes were made in the composition of the body to make Lore's expulsion inevitable. Lore was expelled from the organization later that same year.
As editor of the Volkszeitung, Lore attempted what has described as a "balancing a feeling for a theoretical Marxist line with a more sensitive reading of American political culture," in which he "tried, and ultimately failed, to develop a communism that would meet the demands of the aging generation of radical German-Americans in the 1920s and 1930s."
By the end of the 1920s, the Volkszeitung had lost some of its radical edge, taking the form of a more vaguely "socialistic" labor and cultural publication, complete with wire service photos and non-political fare such as radio listings and classic literature. Lore sought to occupy political space in between social democracy and communism, a position roughly akin to that of the Independent Labour Party in Great Britain.
As the 1920s came to a close and the Communist Party moved into an ultra-sectarian phase known as the "Third Period," Lore found himself disaffected from his old party comrades. His Volkszeitung continued to defend the policies of the Soviet Union, however, and sought to support CP-sponsored initiatives in which radicals of various stripes could work together for common objectives, such as the International Workers Order and the International Labor Defense.
In 1931, Lore gave up the editorship of the ailing Volkszeitung to become a freelance journalist.
In 1934, Lore joined the editorial staff of the New York Post. For the Post, he wrote a daily foreign affairs column called "Behind the Cables," in which he often emphasized the threat to world peace implicit in the rise to power of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party in Germany. The Post used to run prominent ads for the column.
During World War II, Lore appeared regularly on WEVD radio. One of his first appearances was on August 8, 1939, on a symposium about the "Danzig Dispute" with Michael Kwapiszewski and Marko deDominis.
His last appearance was on June 3, 1942, on a Round Table program titled "Battle Front and Home Front" with Christopher T. Emmet Jr.
He left the Post in January 1942, when he "took over a special government assignment," according to the New York Times.
Personal life and death
In 1909, Lore married Lily Schneppe ; together they had three boys.Ludwig Lore died on July 8, 1942, at his home on Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn, New York.
Legacy
Espionage allegations
During his freelance interval, Lore was recruited to work for the foreign intelligence network of the Soviet Union, working under the code-names "Leo" and "10."According to historians Haynes and Klehr, the exact date of Lore's termination by Soviet intelligence is not known and no record of him is said to be found in secret police archives after April 1937.
In fact, according to Lore's case file, on July 2, 1937, Moscow Centre instructed its New York "illegals" to break off the relationship with Lore and "to take measures to avoid any hostile actions" on his part.