Richard Bartholdt was a U. S. Representative from Missouri.
Background
Richard Bartholdt was born on November 2, 1855, in Schleiz, German, the son of Gottlob and Carolina Louise (Wagner) Bartholdt. Democratic ideals, social betterment through education, and anti-militarism were principles implanted in the parental home; music was there cultivated, and the excellent Gymnasium of his native town gave him a fundamental training in the classics. Though Schleiz was the seat of the very conservative government of the Prince of Reuss, Richard's immediate home environment was dominated by the liberal spirit of his father, a "forty-eighter. " Democratic ideals, social betterment through education, and anti-militarism were principles implanted in the parental home; music was there cultivated.
Career
At seventeen he succumbed to the lure of America. He had relatives in New York and thither he sailed, arriving "on a stormy April day" in 1872. On the advice of his cousin Col. Henry E. Roehr, veteran of the Civil War, who inherited and published the Brooklyn Freie Presse, young Bartholdt started his career by learning the trade of type-setter in the job-printing department. "To have a trade to fall back on" proved useful, though the proud young immigrant felt comforted in his menial tasks only by the illustrious example of Benjamin Franklin and Horace Greeley. He found employment continuously in Philadelphia, then in Skippack among the Pennsylvania Germans, and finally in St. Louis on the Anzeiger des Westens.
After gaining his American citizenship and studying law on an extended visit to Germany, he returned to the United States, now as reporter on the Brooklyn Freie Presse. As legislative correspondent in Albany for his paper he observed the operation of state politics and subsequently widened his experience as foreign editor of the New Yorker Staats-Zeitung. In 1885 he accepted a call to the editorship-in-chief of the St. Louis Tribune, a German evening daily. Family ties probably had an influence in this change of residence, for on June 27, 1880, he had married Caecilia Niedner of St. Louis, of an established Missouri German family.
Bartholdt brought his paper into line with public interests and in local politics gave particular attention to the public schools and the cause of sound education. He was a member of the St. Louis school board from 1888 to 1892 and during the last year its president, when he was elected to the Fifty-third Congress of the United States from the 10th Missouri district. The Republican party reelected him successively for a period of twenty-two years, 1893-1915.
In Congress he took particular interest in questions concerning immigration, but Missouri had cause to be most grateful for the initiatory and energetic part taken by Bartholdt in bringing the world's fair to St. Louis in 1904 and combining with it the centennial celebration of the Louisiana Purchase; for his efforts in getting Congress to back the undertaking with the necessary millions, and securing the indispensable support at home - all culminating in a remarkable economic, cultural, and even financial achievement. Bartholdt won international distinction as president of the Interparliamentary Union for the Promotion of International Arbitration, and as founder and president for eleven years of that organization's American group in Congress. The greatest hope of his life was the elimination of wars by arbitration.
He took a leading part in all peace conferences, merging the work of the Interparliamentary Union with that of the Second Peace Conference at The Hague, and continuing as American representative in all peace movements until the outbreak of the First World War. At the ceremony of the unveiling of the statue of General von Steuben at Lafayette Square, Washington, December 7, 1910, Bartholdt was one of the principal speakers, and on his motion in Congress a replica of this statue by the sculptor Jaegers was sent as a gift to Germany from the United States, the presentation made by Bartholdt on September 2, 1911, at Potsdam.
Following his twenty-two years of service in the House of Representatives, Bartholdt retired voluntarily. Election to the United States Senate might have kept him in Washington. "The war caused so sharp a division among our people, " writes Bartholdt with pardonable sarcasm, "that, as I saw it, a man of German blood would have had about as much chance as a grasshopper in a coop of hungry turkeys. At least for the Senate".
After the World War Bartholdt favored reconstruction policies of peace and conciliation and opposed prohibition as an infringement upon personal liberty. In his retirement he wrote his autobiography, From Steerage to Congress (1930). It contains the frank confessions of this German idealist facing the stern realities of his adopted country, the land of his dreams. His disillusionments, his broken heart, and his unswerving fidelity furnish a picture of historical and human interest. A gesture of recognition for his lifelong efforts to better the relations between the American and German people came late in life through the award of an honorary faculty membership of the University of Jena. It was a ray of sunshine illuminating his seventy-seventh year. Bartholdt died of pneumonia at his home in St. Louis.