When Joseph Frick died at Allegheny General Hospital in 1891, the newspapers didn’t mince words.
“Herr Frick has had a remarkable career. His effort while in this country seemed to be entirely devoted to a violent denunciation of the government,” the Pittsburgh Press said. “He hated the country of his adoption because it was his nature to do so.”
Frick had earned the reputation. He began his career as a “Forty-eighter” — one of the German revolutionaries forced to flee their homeland after a failed 1848 democratic revolt. During the following decades in Pittsburgh, he represented the local International Workingmen’s Association (of Karl Marx fame), was present at the creation of the U.S. anarchist movement and organized revolutionaries across western Pennsylvania.
A red Forty-eighter
What’s known of Frick’s early life is available mostly in obituaries. According to the Pittsburgh Press, he was born about 1818 in Baden, one of the patchwork of German states that existed before the country’s unification. In 1848, when a French democratic revolt spread across Europe, Frick reportedly joined the radicals in his home state, where a civil war had broken out (Friedrich Engels also served in Baden’s revolt).
Frick fled the country for Switzerland when the rebels were defeated. “[He] was not allowed the freedom of speech he desired in that country, and came to America,” a journalist said. Other German rebels — from moderate liberals to early communists — made their way to the U.S., with many settling in Pittsburgh and Allegheny City (today’s North Side).
It’s not clear when Frick arrived here, or to what extent he was immediately active in politics. At least one Joseph Frick — possibly a relative — served in the all-German 74th Pennsylvania Infantry in the Civil War. Census records suggest he lived in Pittsburgh with a wife, Caroline, and adult children as of 1870.
The First International
Frick appears to have been active in the International Workingmen’s Association, the “First International” in which Karl Marx played a key role. The world’s first major cross-border socialist movement, the First International split along factional lines before headquarters were moved to the U.S. It was in the International’s final days, during the economic crisis of 1873, that its U.S. sections led a series of heavily publicized protests for unemployed relief.
In December of that year, at a South Side conference “comprised principally of German workingmen,” Frick was named head of a citywide jobless movement tied to the International. “Our existence depends upon unity,” he said in German before a large audience.
The International was a shell of its former self, however, and U.S.-based German radicals soon found new political homes. In 1876, socialists took the first steps toward an independent party, and a year later Frick was described as a “prominent organizer” in its ranks. Another local member was Otto Weydemeyer, translator of Marx’s Capital and son of a renowned U.S. communist. Frick and Weydemeyer’s comrades attacked the reformist “greenback” politics in vogue among local workers in the wake of the earth-shattering 1877 railroad strike.
The new Socialist Labor Party underwent its own political twists and turns, and it seems Frick soon found himself in the anarchist wing of the workers’ movement. He soon became the city’s most prominent anarchist, even offering the greeting speech to the delegates of the 1883 convention that established American anarchism.
“Force met with force”
Pittsburgh in the 1880s was home to a thriving German radical milieu. There was a German Trades Assembly, a workers’ paper (the Arbeiter-Zeitung) and a collection of at-times mutually hostile socialist and anarchist groups. Groups of anarchists met often, including at a hall on Spring Garden Avenue (one such meeting featured red and black flags, and a U.S. coat of arms including “two policemen rampant” and “a gallows couchant”).
At an 1887 North Side meeting of German workers, when a speaker asked who sympathized with the executed Haymarket anarchists, everyone in attendance stood. Frick “arose and wanted to know what was to be done by the laboring classes when force had been used against them,” a reporter said. “He asserted that force must be met with force.”
Frick spent the following years organizing across the region, where he worked as an agent for Johann Most’s anarchist journal Freiheit. By 1889, in his 70s, he was called “the acknowledged leader of western Pennsylvania anarchists” and reported personally organizing new cells in Westmoreland and Beaver counties. A reporter transcribed quotes from a lengthy interview:
Is not every dollar of the capitalists’ money stained with the blood of the poor working man? I am willing to shed blood, if necessary, but I am an old man, and I do not expect to live much longer. Someone will rise to take my place, and in time the capitalists and rulers of the people will be overthrown. I, an anarchist, and proud of it, may die; but anarchism will not die until its object is obtained.
That year, for his 71st birthday, the widower Frick reportedly got a flattering write-up by comrades in the Arbeiter-Zeitung.
Final years
His later years weren’t without tragedy: In 1888 his family learned that Frick’s son, Julius, had died months earlier at a mental institution without any word being sent to his loved ones. “Buried, and with none of us at his side!” Julius’s brother shouted at a city office, in a scene reported in the local press.
Frick himself fell ill in 1891 — apparently struggling with a mental illness of his own — and was committed to Allegheny General Hospital. He died there on April 1. Frick’s will, written in German, was carried out by local radicals.
On the day of his funeral, “fully 1,000 people of the Teutonic type” packed a funeral parlor to hear a eulogy by Most, one of the nation’s most prominent anarchists. Frick lay in a red necktie, with red ribbons wrapped around the casket and red flowers in the mourners’ lapels. A reporter described the scene:
Women with babies in their arms were allowed to remain standing, and all deference to the gentler sex was overlooked. The assemblage was so large that it required much exertion from persons desiring to see the corpse to get near it. . . . After relating Frick’s history, [Most] began a harangue against the Christian church, which evoked a cynical smile from his hearers. He closed with the remark that he hoped heaven would reward Herr Frick for his service to the cause.
In the decades after Frick’s death, U.S. anarchism would undergo more changes, eventually to be eclipsed by the Socialist Party and the Communist movement. But during his decades, he was present for every step of the early anti-capitalist movement — from the revolutions of 1848 to the Haymarket Affair.
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