Willi Schlamm

William S. (Willi) Schlamm (originally: Wilhelm Siegmund Schlamm; June 10, 1904 – September 1, 1978) was an Austrian-American journalist.

Biography

Schlamm was born into an upper middle class Jewish family in Przemyśl, Galicia, in the Austrian Empire. He became a Communist early in life, and when he was 16 years old was invited to the Kremlin to meet Vladimir Lenin. After completing secondary school, he became a writer with the Vienna Communist newspaper, Die Rote Fahne. He left the Communist Party in 1929 and joined the left-wing magazine Die Weltbühne in 1932.^[1]

Later, Schlamm later moved to the United States, where he worked for Henry Luce, the publisher of Life, Time and Fortune magazines. He became a U.S. citizen in 1944.^[2]

Schlamm encouraged William F. Buckley, Jr. to found the conservative magazine, National Review, with Buckley as the sole owner. Schlamm became a senior editor but was later fired by Buckley.^[3] He then became associate editor of the John Birch Society's journal, American Opinion.^[4] After writing for conservative magazines, he returned to Europe in 1972, where he published the magazine Die Zeitbühne. He died in 1978 in Salzburg.^[5]

Schlamm is remembered for having coined the saying, "The trouble with socialism is socialism. The trouble with capitalism is capitalists."^[6]

Notes

1. Lange
2. Lange
3. Regnery, pp. 63-64
4. Bjerre-Poulsen, p. 205
5. Lange
6. Bridges and Coin, p. 51

References

• Bjerre-Poulsen, Niels. Right face: organizing the American conservative movement 1945-65. Denmark: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2002 ISBN 87-7289-809-7
• Bridges, Linda and Coyne, John R. Strictly Right: William F. Buckley, Jr. and the American conservative movement. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2007 ISBN 0-471-75817-5
• Lange, Ansgar. Eine Kassandra von rechts: William S. Schlamm und seine Fundamentalkritik der frühen Bundesrepublik ("A Cassandra from the Right: William S. Schlamm and his fundamental critique of the early Federal Republic"). In: Eigentümlich frei, 10 April 2009.
• Regnery, Alfred S. Upstream: the ascendance of American conservatism. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 2008 ISBN 1-4165-2288-3