Diplomat journalist politician
Friedrich Hassaurek was born on October 8, 1831, in Vienna, Austria. Franz Hassaurek, his father, was a wealthy merchant and litterateur who speculated disastrously and died impoverished in 1836. His mother, Johanna Abele, a sister of Baron Vincenz von Abele, then married Leopold Markbreit.
Friedrich studied at the Piaristen Gymnasium, where he proved a quick student and was editing a school paper at the outbreak of the revolution of 1848.
Imbued with radical ideas, Friedrich joined the Student Legion and was slightly wounded fighting the imperial troops. After the failure of the revolution, he fled to Cincinnati, Ohio. Arriving in April 1849, he wrote articles for the German-American press and soon was appointed assistant editor of the Ohio Staatszeitung with an intermittently paid salary of $3. 50 a week. Within a year he was able to establish with $100 borrowed capital the weekly Hochwaechter, through which the adolescent editor proclaimed vehemently the socialistic views of the most radical and anticlerical German revolutionists. In it he published serially his novel "Hierarchic und Aristokratie” and waged a successful campaign against the fraudulent practices of agencies which were swindling German immigrants.
Having become known as an impetuous and able public speaker in both German and English, Hassaurek debated religious questions with Methodist ministers in 1852 and three years later successfully ran for the City Council as an Independent. After his admission to the bar sold his newspaper. Almost at once he attracted attention as a lawyer by preventing the conviction for murder of Loeffler, an insane German criminal.
A delegate to the Chicago convention which nominated Lincoln in 1860, he was rewarded by appointment in March 1861 as minister to Ecuador. In 1864 he came home to campaign for Lincoln’s reelection and obtain the exchange of his half-brother, who was in Libby Prison. Returning to Ecuador in March 1865, he resigned after a year to become editor and part-owner of the Tägliches Cincinnatier Volksblatt. His backing of Tilden in 1876 caused a disagreement with the Republicans in control of the Volksblatt, and he retired from active editorship to spend a year traveling in Europe and writing delightful letters which the paper published. On his return he again became editor, and in disgust at both major parties conducted the paper on strictly non-partisan lines. In the hope of improving his broken health, he again went to Europe in 1882. Though he still wrote steadily, his strength gradually failed until he died in Paris.
(About the author: Friedrich Hassaurek (1831 - 1885) was a...)
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Espousing ardently the anti-slavery cause, Hassaurek organized the Republican party in Cincinnati, a Democratic stronghold, and by his brilliant oratory did much to attract to the new party the large German vote. In few year he lost his earlier socialistic beliefs and with great ardor opposed every policy which savored of paternalism, holding that the one essential function of government was the protection of private rights. Such views led him to criticize the Republican method of reconstructing the South, and in 1872 he joined the liberal movement which supported Greeley for the presidency.
A political orator and journalist of brilliant attainments, Hassaurek was equally persuasive in English and German and possessed a sense of humor which made him especially popular as an after-dinner speaker.
Hassaurek's third wife was Eunice Marshall.
