You'll pardon any spelling errors or solecisms in this post. I've just come back from a two-martini Good Friday lunch.
Philologos, the Yiddishkeit-loving language maven at The Forward, celebrates the Jewish weekly's anniversary issue with a potted — but flawed — history of the paper's socialist origins (hat tip: Norm):
The second Vorwärts, named for the first, was started as a daily in Leipzig in 1876 as the official organ of the German Social-Democratic Party, which had been founded a little more than a decade earlier. Its first editor was William Liebknecht, a leading socialist politician who, years later, at the time of the Spartakus uprising in 1919, was murdered together with Rosa Luxemburg by the German police, and it, too, had its brushes with the law. Closed by the Prussian government in 1878 as part of an anti-socialist campaign, it started up again in 1891 in Berlin, again under Liebknecht’s editorship; it supported a socialist revolution but opposed Lenin and Bolshevism, and continued to publish until 1933, when the Nazis banned it soon after taking power. In 1948 it was re-founded as the Neuer Vorwärts, and since 1955 it has been the German left-wing monthly Vorwärts .
Thus, when Cahan founded the Yiddish Forverts in 1897, the German Vorwärts was a going concern. Presumably he wanted the name, despite its shopworn character, precisely because it was well known in radical Jewish circles and was a way of declaring where the Forverts intended to stand politically — namely, in the 19th-century social-democratic tradition and in favor of revolution but against the Leninist “dictatorship of the proletariat.” In this respect, it accomplished with one word what many editorials might have been needed to do.
William Liebknecht should read Karl Liebknecht (William was Karl's father and also Marx's babysitter.) And as Norm points out, Lenin hadn't discussed the dictatorship of the proletariat by 1897, though I suspect this is just sloppy phrasing on Philologos' part.
Also, you wouldn't now it from this description but the Forverts crowd hosted Trotsky during his tour of New York — a slight retrogression from the anti-Leninist social democracy it purported to represent. Trotsky left Gotham concluding that the Jewish socialists were milquetoast Mensheviks and not real revolutionaries.