Adolph Germer

Adoph F. Germer (15 January 1881 – 26 May 1966) was an American socialist political functionary and union organizer. He is best remembered as National Executive Secretary of the Socialist Party of America from 1916 to 1919. It was during this period that the Left Wing Section of the Socialist Party emerged as an organized faction. Germer was instrumental as one of the leaders of the SPA's "Regular" faction in orchestrating a series of suspensions, expulsions, and "reorganizations" of various Left Wing states, branches, and locals and thereby controlling the pivotal 1919 Emergency National Convention of the SPA, and thus forcing the Left Wing to establish new organizations of their own, the Communist Labor Party of America and the Communist Party of America.

Adolph F. Germer was born January 15, 1881, in Welan, East Prussia, Germany the son of a miner. Germer emigrated to the United States with his family in December 1888 and attended public school in Braceville, Illinois. He also attended a Lutheran parochial school and completed his high school coursework via correspondence school. Germer also did course work at LaSalle Extension University.

Germer went to work in the mines like his father at a very early age, first working as a trapper at a coal mine near Staunton, Illinois, at age 11. He was a member of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) from 1894.

Germer escaped a life in the mines by working as a union official. He was elected Secretary of UMWA Local 728 in 1906 and its state legislative committeeman in 1907. That same year he was elected a sub-district vice president of the union. The next year he was elected secretary-treasurer of the sub-district of the UMWA, a position which he retained until 1912. That final year he was also elected representative of the United Mine Workers to the World Miners' Congress in Amsterdam.

Germer joined the Social Democratic Party of America, forerunner of the Socialist Party of America (SPA) in 1900.

In 1912 Germer was a candidate of the Socialist Party of Illinois for the Illinois legislature.

In 1913, Germer was elected to the governing national executive committee of the Socialist Party. At that same time, he worked as an organizer for the UMWA. In December of that year, Germer was arrested while getting off a train at Walsenburg, Colorado, the site of an ongoing mine strike. Germer was held incommunicado in the local jail for nearly a week in solitary confinement and his papers searched. His wife, Mabel Germer, was also briefly arrested. Upon his release, Germer continued to work as a UMWA organizer in the bitterly fought Colorado coal strike.

In 1914 Germer was elected vice president of the Illinois Mine Workers, the state affiliate of the UMWA. He also ran for United States Senate from Illinois as a Socialist in the election held in fall of that year.