At the turn of the century, strong socialist and labor organizations supported a broad range of newspapers and journals across the United States. With membership in trade unions numbering in the millions after 1900 and socialist parties garnering hundreds of thousands of votes every year, journalists who explored radical causes found an audience for their own publications. The radical press ranged from the socialist An Appeal to Reason and Solidarity, published by the INDUSTRIAL WORKERS OE THE WORLD (IWW), to the Woman Rebel, edited by feminist birth control advocate Margaret Sanger. Radical publishing houses such as Haldeman-Julius and Charles H. Kerr supplemented newspapers and journals with books and pamphlets on social and political issues.
At a time when major newspapers dominated the urban markets and printing costs escalated, radical newspapers continued to thrive in rural areas, where they appealed to farmers as well as workers, as did the socialist Appeal. Inspired by SOCIALISM, and taking seriously the need for alliances across class and region, radical editors sought ways to influence public opinion far beyond the formal membership of socialist and labor organizations. Their investigative reporting on urban poverty and hazardous working conditions inspired the work of the muckrakers, reform journalists who directed their critical gaze at political corruption, business monopolies, and employer abuses.
By the turn of the 20th century, there were literally thousands of union newspapers published by city labor federations and national trade unions. They had a readership that numbered in the hundreds of thousands. Labor journals of the time ranged from the relatively conservative American Federationist, the journal of the American Federation of Labor, and Labor, published by the railroad unions, to other more militant labor publications. The American Federation-ist had been established to communicate Federation policy and record its organizational progress. For the most part, it served chiefly as an organ for union members and labor organizers. Assistant editor of the Federationist between 1901 and 1909, Eva McDonald Valesh, had a long career in mainstream and labor journalism. During her tenure on the Federationist, she reshaped the journal to better educate public opinion and provide publicity; and she gave it a more professional look. It remained, however, the creature of its national leadership. In contrast, the IWW’s Solidarity served as a forum not just for its editor’s agenda. A radical labor newspaper, it served as a forum for rank-and-file writings, songs, poems, and editorial comments. Solidarity was blessed with pungent humor and writing with a wide range of perspectives from the lyrics to Joe Hill’s labor anthems to the cartoon satire of Mr. Block.
The image of labor in the period embraced a broad masculine labor, but its prose also revealed stories and viewpoints sympathetic to women workers. In the pages of both the Federationist and Solidarity could be found articles on women’s labor organization as well as fiction and advice columns for women. Coverage of women’s local labor campaigns and new tactics in organizing women workers, however, were extremely limited; and there was no national network to share information. Women’s labor advocates who organized the National Women’s Trade Union League published Life and Labor to answer this need. Edited by Australian feminists Alice Henry and Stella Franklin, the journal incorporated some of the best labor reporting with editorial matter on citizenship, education, and politics for women.
Shifts in radicalism brought forth a new generation of radical newspapers and journals. By 1910, broadly defined radical publications such as The Masses, edited by Max Eastman and featuring the prose of writers such as John Reed and Mary Heaton Vorse, and anarchist Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth touted birth control, sexual emancipation, and Freudian psychoanalysis in addition to traditional working-class and populist issues. Experimental arts journals provided a new forum for modern poetry and criticism, with such publications as Seven Arts and Little
Review (edited by Margaret Anderson) leading the way. Edited by Harriet Monroe, Poetry, the premier journal for modern poetry, published its first issue in 1911.
By 1910, there were more than 300 socialist newspapers and journals alone. Every major city had labor-oriented socialist newspapers as well, including the Milwaukee Leader, the New York Call, and the National Rip Saw (St. Louis), as well as ethnic journals such as the Arbeiter Zei-tung (New York). Under the editorship of writer Abraham Cahan, the Jewish Daily Forward, published in New York, became a national Yiddish newspaper with a circulation of more than 200,000. Anarchist journals, from Alexander Berkman’s short-lived the Blast to the Freie Arbeiter Shtimme drew audiences far beyond the small number of committed anarchists.
World War I changed the political environment in which radical journals had thrived. Prior to the war, government censorship had focused largely on questions of sexual morality and language under the Comstock Laws (see Volume 6). Comstockery, as it was lampooned, had harassed editors and presses about the publication of works such as Theodore Dreiser’s The Genius and James Joyce’s Ulysses, which had been serialized in the Little Review. While publishers became more willing to take on the censors for the cause of free speech, government censorship had a dampening effect on publishing.
With the entry of the United States into the world conflict, the federal government turned against radical newspapers during the war to suppress discussion of and opposition to military conscription and the war effort. Under the Trading with the Enemy Act, Congress assigned the U. S. Postal Service the responsibility to censor private mail and deny mailing privileges to newspapers and journals critical of the war. It also required all foreign-language publications to submit translations before printing, a time-consuming and expensive requirement that forced many publications simply to close their doors. Under Postmaster General Albert S. Burleson, this broad-based authority was used to exclude publications not only for their opposition to the war but for any content he construed as anti-American. During the war, The Masses, International Socialist Review, Appeal to Reason, and the Milwaukee Leader, among others, were denied mailing privileges and hence lost subscribers and revenue. Some were forced to stop publication.
After the war, the antiradicalism of the Red Scare shut down many radical and labor newspapers. While directed at immigrant radicalism and militant trade unionism with its wave of deportations and criminal syndicalism cases, the effort to suppress radical organizations also ensnared mainstream labor unions and labor newspapers. The decline of the labor movement in the face of organized opposition had led to a similar decline in the information available about labor and working class organization throughout the world. The Federated Press, a labor news service established at the 1919 nominating convention of the Farmer-Labor Party, set out to address that need. Under the editorship of Robert M. Buck, the Press had a subscription list of 32 labor and farmer-labor newspapers, a small base that almost immediately undermined the service. It nearly collapsed financially in 1921-22, but under the new editor, former war resister Carl Haessler, the Federated Press survived and sometimes even thrived until 1956. At times, the Press’s subscription list numbered more than 100 newspapers and journals. With the aim of rebuilding the devastated labor movement, the Federated Press had as its primary objective changing the pro-business and antilabor political environment. To do so, it had to take on the news media monopoly and create a national—and even international—network of labor and working-class reporters who shared information from all corners of the country and even the world.
During the 1920s, the Federated Press ran its own national Labor Letter and also sent out wire service stories on strikes and organizing campaigns, periodic updates on the campaign to free Sacco and Vanzetti, and reports from the road on workers’ lives and struggles, as in the reporting of Art Shields and Esther Lowell. Writer Mary Heaton Vorse sent in her reports from the Gastonia Strike and other labor protests. Harvey and Jessie O’Connor worked for the Federated Press in a similar capacity, with Harvey sometimes taking on editorial duties. Anna Louise Strong reported from Russia in the Federated Press’s early years. Lawrence Todd sent reports from Washington, D. C., on Congress and federal policy; Louis Lochner reported on the political upheavals in Weimar Germany. While the Federated Press sometimes appeared a largely voluntary effort, as its reporters were often paid poorly, if at all, it managed to report on all the major issues of the 1920s and establish a firm basis for the revival of the labor press in the 1930s.
At the same time, the Russian Revolution changed the nature of radicalism in the United States. Newly formed communist parties, sympathetic to the Soviet Union, seceded from older, more conservative socialist organizations. Labor unions divided along similar political lines, which rendered them ineffective in responding to the new conservativism. Antiunion activity both during and after World War I brought about the decline in union membership. All of these forces led to the closing of many small labor and radical publications. At the same time, a new generation of radical newspapers and journals, stimulated by new communist parties and the fomenting of revolution abroad, emerged on the scene.
In the 1920s, Masses editor Max Eastman joined with Floyd Dell to edit a new journal, the Liberator. V. F. Cal-verton, an intellectual affiliated with the Greenwich Village group, began his new journal, Modern Quarterly, which kept radical theory and avant-garde literature before the public. The Communist Party launched its Daily Worker and radical labor groups began to publish infrequent numbers of newsletters and journals. City central labor unions, faced with steep declines in membership, still managed to keep their newspapers afloat. With the woman suffrage movement victorious, the old suffrage journals closed their doors, to be replaced with the Woman Voter (League of Women Voters) and Equal Rights (National Woman’s Party). Neither attained the same loyal following as their suffrage predecessors. Only with the revival of radical fortunes in the wake of the Great Depression did the alternative press again thrive.
See also journalism; labor and labor movement.
Further reading: Joseph Conlin, ed, The American Radical Press, 1880-1960 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1974); Elizabeth Faue, Writing the Wrongs: Eva Valesh and the Rise of Labor Journalism (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 2002); William O’Neill, Echoes of Revolt: The Masses, 1911-1917 (New York: Quadrangle Books, 1966); Elliot Shore, Talkin’ Socialism: J. A. Wayland and the Role of the Press in American Radicalism, 1890-1912 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1988).
World History
