MILLER, LOUIS E.

MILLER, LOUIS E. (pseudonym of Louis E. Bandes ; 1866–1927), Yiddish editor and labor leader. Miller was born in Vilna and became involved in socialist and revolutionary activities in his boyhood. He fled from Russia at 14 and participated in émigré revolutionary circles in Berlin, Switzerland, Paris, and, after 1886, in New York. In the U.S. Miller worked in a shirt factory, and helped found the first shirtmakers union among Jewish workers. Miller was also deeply involved in the political life of socialist and other labor organizations. In his early years he remained close to organizations which used Russian as their language, but in 1889 he represented the Yiddish-language-oriented United Hebrew Trades at the Second International in Paris.

Miller was most influential as editor and writer in Yiddish. In 1890, with Philip *Krantz, Morris *Hillquit, and Abraham *Cahan, he founded the Yiddish-socialist Die Arbeiter Zeitung (1890). In 1897 he joined Cahan in launching the daily Forward (1897). In 1905 he broke with Cahan, the editor in chief of this daily, and founded his own paper Die Wahrheit (1905) which stressed Jewish national aspirations no less than socialism. When World War i broke out, he espoused the cause of the Allies, while most of his daily's 100,000 readers favored Germany as against czarist Russia. The paper continued to lose circulation, and he preferred to resign rather than to keep silent. He attempted several journalistic ventures after 1917, but never regained his earlier influence with the Yiddish reading masses.

bibliography:

Rejzen, Leksikon, 2 (1927), 409–14; lnyl, 5 (1963), 628–31.

[Alexander Tobias]