1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Most, John

MOST, JOHN [JOSEPH] (1846–1906), German-American anarchist, was born in Augsburg, Bavaria, on the 5th of February 1846. He was apprenticed to a bookbinder, worked at this trade in Germany, Austria, Italy and Switzerland in 1863–1868, and then became a writer of Socialist pamphlets and paragraphs, and editor of Socialist sheets in Chemnitz and Vienna, both suppressed by the authorities, and of the Freie Presse in Berlin, being repeatedly arrested for his violent and cynical attacks on patriotism and conventional religion and ethics, and for his gospel of terrorism, preached in prose and in many songs such as those in his Proletarier-Liederbuch (5th ed., 1875). Some of his experiences in gaol were recounted in Die Bastille am Plötzensee: Blätter aus meinem Gefängniss-Tagebuch (1876). In 1874–1878 he was a member of the German Reichstag, but he failed to be re-elected, was expelled by the Socialist organization, went to France but was forced to leave in 1879, and then settled in London. There he founded the “red” organ—it was printed in red—Die Freiheit, in which he expressed his delight in June 1881 over the assassination of Alexander II. of Russia and for this was imprisoned for a year and a half. He then resumed the publication of Die Freiheit in New York. He was imprisoned in 1886, again in 1887, and in 1902, the last time for two months for publishing after the assassination of President McKinley an editorial in which he argued that it was no crime to kill a ruler. He died in Cincinnati on the 17th of April 1906.

See his Memoiren (New York, 1903).