The Workingmen's Party had changed the name of the organization to the Socialist Labor Party (it will generally be rendered in English throughout the 1880s as "Socialistic Labor Party," a more stilted rendition of the German name of the group, Sozialistischen Arbeiter-Partei) at a convention in Newark, New Jersey, in 1877.
There is an upsurge of support for the new organization, reflected in the proliferation of the socialist press.
Between 1876 and 1877, no fewer than twenty-four newspapers are established that either directly or indirectly support the SLP.
Eight of these are English-language publications, including one daily, while fourteen are in German, including seven dailies.
Two more papers are published in Czech and Swedish, respectively.
Just two years later, in the wake of an economic crisis, not one of the privately owned English newspapers still survives.
The party had established its own English-language paper, The National Socialist, in May 1878, but had managed to keep the publication alive only one year.
The year 1878 had seen the establishment of another paper that will prove to have considerably more longevity, the German-language New Yorker Volkszeitung (New York People's News).
The Volkszeitung, which includes material by the best and the brightest of the German-American socialist movement, including Alexander Jonas, Adolph Douai, and Sergei Schewitsch, and Herman Schlüter, will quickly emerge as the leading voice of the SLP during the last decades of the nineteenth Century.
