Oscar Neebe and Conrad Seipp

In April of 1886, Brewers and Maltsters were organized and received a $15/month wage increase with a time decrease to 10 hour work days. Oscar Neebe and Charles Hepp were key to these organizing efforts. Seipp Brewing was the first and largest brewery to sign.

In the trial, Salomon said that he would prove that Oscar Neebe was indicted solely on the evidence of certain persons who, out of spite, desired to disagree with him. (CDT 6-3-86)

In his autobiography, Oscar Neebe states that Julius Grinnell, the prosecutor for the Haymarket trial, told him personally that a few prominent Germans had reported that Oscar was a very dangerous man, and Oscar surmised that these prominent Germans were a few German democratic beer brewers of Chicago. He believed that it was to please them that he received 15 years in the penitentiary for daring to organize their employees. He noted that the brewers could not forget that they now had to pay their workers $15 more per month for only 10 hours/day work.

In the preface to the 2nd edition of Henry David's Haymarket book, John F. Kendrick, a neighbor of Oscar's is quoted as saying that Oscar told him that while in prison and after, he found satisfactory evidence that he was railroaded because the Seipp Brewing Company was out to get him for organizing their brewery wagon drivers, and that they spent judiciously $90,000 to do it.

Conrad Seipp had immigrated from Germany in the 1840s.  His summer estate at Lake Geneva, Black Point, is open to the public and its Facebook page indicates that Seipp had fought for the royals in the 1848 German revolution.

The Chicago Tribune, in reporting his death, quoted someone as saying that "During the anarchist troubles he always expressed himself sorry for the dupes of pernicious teachers, but for the loafers of the Most order he had only words of the strongest contempt. When the brewers went out on strike, it was a notorious fact that only 3 men from Seipps went out, and they were . . . "

Julius Grinnell and Conrad Seipp seemed to have been friends. Grinnell gave the eulogy at Seipp's funeral, praising him as a man "who upheld the laws when anarchy and riot threatened."