INTRODUCTION

THE RISE OF A NINETEENTH-CENTURY RADICAL PRESS

Let the voice of the people be heard—

ALBERT PARSONS

Albert Parsons and his three fellow editors looked like ghosts standing on the gallows. White muslin shrouds draped their bodies from neck to toe, hiding the thick leather straps that pinned their arms at their sides and the handcuffs that locked their hands behind their backs. White hoods tied at their necks made them faceless before some two hundred spectators at their execution in Chicago’s Cook County jail. Outside, bayonets affixed to the Winchester rifles of three hundred police officers glinted like a necklace around the building.

As guards fastened nooses around their necks, each of the men shouted a farewell in defiance of the sheriff’s orders. “Let me speak, Sheriff Matson,” Parsons called out last. The anarchist editor of the Alarm newspaper believed in the word. His voice rose as if he were launching into another of the hundreds of speeches he had delivered to tens of thousands of workers:

“Let the voice of the people be heard—”

The trap floor snapped open and guillotined Parsons’s final word. Less than eight minutes later, at 12:06 P.M. on November 11, 1887, Parsons and fellow anarchists Arbeiter-Zeitung editor August Spies and Der Anarchist editors George Engel and Adolph Fischer were dead and the Haymarket martyrs born.¹

These anarchist editors were part of the radical press that sprouted like wheat fields across the United States in the late nineteenth century. Hundreds of radical newspapers and magazines in their heyday between 1900 and 1917 offered sharp critiques of the emerging corporate state that remain relevant in light of gaping twenty-first-century social inequity. Anarchists, socialists, and the Industrial Workers of the World opposed capitalism and demanded workers own the wealth they produced. This revolutionary demand pit them against the one percent of Americans who acquired half the nation’s wealth in what Mark Twain termed the “Gilded Age,” the gaudy decades from Reconstruction to the late 1890s when rococo mansions and golden cufflinks flaunted the divide between rich and poor.² The New York Tribune counted 4,047 millionaires in 1899, the year someone pinpointed John D. Rockefeller’s wealth at $815,647,796.89.³

At the opposite end of the income scale, 15 million immigrants poured into the United States between 1900 and 1915, as many as entered during the previous forty years. Many labored an average of eighty-four hours per week stitching clothing in windowless apartments in one hundred thousand squalid tenements packed onto Manhattan’s Lower East Side.⁴ The rise of the factory dehumanized workers in dull, repetitive, and often dangerous jobs, while the overnight eruption of industrial mining bound a new class of workers to ramshackle company towns that speckled mountainsides. An estimated thirty-five thousand American workers died annually in accidents.⁵ Even more than industrialism, the rise of corporate capitalism forced a reenvisioning of the social contract as the century turned. Sunburned farmers with brows as furrowed as the mortgaged fields they plowed stumbled beneath their debts to distant eastern capitalists. Industrial trusts were omnipotent. Strikes lit up the landscape like the new electric moving signs illuminating Broadway—nearly thirty-seven thousand strikes ignited between 1881 and 1905.⁶ Workers who tried to organize often faced private guards and government militia armed with Gatling guns and bayonets.

Relevance of the Radical Press

In this David-versus-Goliath battle between working-class Americans and industrial capitalism, radicals’ preferred ammunition was the word.⁷ Radicals revered the power of the press. As an International Socialist Review contributor declared in 1901, “The only hope of an adequate representation of the socialist movement in the field of journalism is the establishment of a socialist press.”⁸ Although capitalism never succumbed in the United States, workers’ rights to unionize, regulation of the trusts, workplace safety laws, and a federal social security net all can be traced to demands championed by the radical press in the early 1900s. The IWW’s Industrial Worker defended free speech, and anarchist Mother Earth battled for birth control. The socialist Call exposed police abuse of strikers in Bayonne, New Jersey, and the International Socialist Review reported on exploitation of pineapple pickers in Hawaii. The New Review and the Masses pounded away at the obscenity of World War I. All defended the rights of a free press.

Radical periodicals raised economic and political issues that resonate today amid overseas sweatshops and environmental pollution spawned by economic globalization. The global financial crash of 2008 resurrected scrutiny of unfettered capitalism, yet Fox News’s fear-mongering about President Barack Obama’s so-called socialist agenda revealed how the label’s stigma endures.⁹ The Wisconsin governor’s 2011 campaign to strip public unions of their collective-bargaining rights exactly a century after his state became the first to guarantee workers’ compensation reveals the precarious status of hard-won labor rights.¹⁰ The term “terrorism” turns up in Progressive Era periodicals, another link to the United States’s post-911 siege mentality. Legislation like Arizona’s 2010 “Show Me Your Papers” law, SB 1070, evokes the “one hundred percent Americanism” that helped fuel hysterical repression of the foreign-born in the 1910s, just as coinage of super-patriot “freedom fries” in 2003 recalls the World War I appetite for “liberty cabbage” (German sauerkraut).¹¹ Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer even derides environmentalism as “The New Socialism.”¹² Radicals’ obsession with the commercial press remains germane, when today’s hegemonic global media conglomerates possess unprecedented power after an orgy of consolidation commenced in the 1980s.¹³ “By any known theory of political democracy,” media critic Robert McChesney wrote in the socialist Monthly Review in the twentieth century’s twilight, “this tightly-held media system, accountable only to Wall Street and Madison Avenue, is a poisonous proposition.”¹⁴ At the same time, the digital revolution has empowered twenty-first-century social movements such as Occupy Wall Street to reinvigorate radical press traditions through online social media such as Facebook and Twitter. Now that technology has relegated the prewar radicals’ rich print culture to the past, it is fitting to revisit its role in American history.

Revisiting the Prewar Radical Press

Black, White, and Red All Over seeks to illuminate functions the of social movement media produced by the three main strains of radicalism—socialism, anarchism, and the IWW’s industrial unionism—between 1900 and 1917, when the federal government suppressed virtually all radical periodicals. As the voice of a broad swathe of disaffected Americans, the radical press added an important dissident note to public discourse during a period of turbulent social change. The book follows the intellectual thread first cast by Nicholas Salvatore’s Citizen Debs, his path-breaking biography of socialist leader Eugene Debs, by arguing that these subversive periodicals paradoxically were quintessentially American: individualist, independent, social-minded, egalitarian, defiant, and celebratory of freedom. Their egalitarianism echoed the Jeffersonian democratic ideal. Even their call for revolution resounded from the roots of the American experience. Like Common Sense author Tom Paine, radical editors on the cusp of the twentieth century also were essentially pamphleteers. Even the radical press’s advocacy role resembles that of the 1790s’ partisan press, when newspapers in the infant United States served as vituperative mouthpieces for conservative Whigs and radical Jeffersonians who funded them as they pounded out in their calumnious pages a course for practicing democracy.¹⁵

The periodicals chosen for discussion here meet historian Leon Baritz’s criteria for distinguishing radical political thought as “a commitment to, and advocacy of, transferring cultural, political, and economic power to the mass of powerless people.”¹⁶ The Marxist-influenced political radicals discussed here rejected reform as mere palliative. Their diverse journals shared a unifying belief in advocating the abolition of capitalism. That revolutionary demand distinguished them from the reform journals that proliferated in the Progressive Era—from approximately the late 1890s to World War I—when civic reformers trusted that laws and education would eradicate social and economic problems. While previous related works have viewed elements of the radical press as individual, disconnected entities, this book takes a holistic approach to synthesize the role of hundreds of anarchist, socialist, and IWW newspapers and magazines.¹⁷ The topic matters because the radical press was a major instrument of the widespread radical movement, not just a recorder of it. As historian Joseph Conlin summed up in the pioneering two-volume collection of essays on 119 radical periodicals he edited in 1974, “The radical press is the chief source for understanding the radical experience in America.”¹⁸ Their publications often were more important than the organizations and their activities themselves. Frequently they are the only records for many organizations whose records were destroyed by the federal government.

Although Conlin exaggerates the “excellent” quality of radical journalism before 1919, he correctly avers the early radical press is an important and neglected genre of American journalism history: “The thought, dreams, and activities of the radicals are recorded there, and to a great extent, only there.”¹⁹ Other books that parse the many strands of prewar American radicalism mention their periodicals only in passing. Black, White, and Red All Over seeks to reclaim the radical press’s central role in a social movement that stirred millions of Americans in the first two decades of the twentieth century.

Five Functions of the Prewar Radical Press

By focusing on the press as an intergral part of prewar radicalism, this book highlights five of its critical functions: First, radical journals provided a sense of community and identity for a farflung, diverse network of Americans disturbed by the profound inegalitarianism that ballooned with corporate capitalism. To borrow Benedict Anderson’s phrase, as a group the journals created and sustained an “imagined community” of distant readers.²⁰ Second, they were the era’s prime source of information about meetings, labor actions, lectures, party politics, and social events of the radical social movement groups. Third, they educated readers about their creeds and radicalized hundreds of thousands of them. Fourth, they provided a voice for a significant segment of Americans largely absent from mainstream periodicals who offered pertinent critiques of the corporatization of the United States. Finally, they created a radical culture that both energized and emotionally sustained the social movement’s battered believers.

This radical press was part of news media collectively known as the dissident press, advocacy press, or alternative media, which scholar Chris Atton defines as media “produced outside the forces of market economics or the state.” They are “crucially about offering the means of democratic communication to people who are normally excluded from media production.”²¹ They provide voice to social movements, grassroots entities of large numbers of people organized to promote or resist a program in defiance of cultural norms.²² Social movement media promote collection action instead of products. Sociologist William Gamson deems social movement media the “central battleground” on which social movements define themselves and their issues as they challenge dominant political and cultural structures.²³ Social movement media throughout U.S. history have played key roles in reenvisioning society. They advocated once-heretical ideas long before the popular press signed on: the abolition press called for ending slavery, the labor press for free public education, the suffrage press for votes for women.²⁴

Framing theory and social movement theory can help illuminate functions of the radical press.²⁵ Within the context of social movements, framing is a seminal part of the “negotiation over meaning” that Gamson and Gadi Wolfsfeld say occurs between social movement organizations and dominant mass media.²⁶ Word choices, headline sizes, rhetorical devices, positioning of articles, selection of articles published or sources quoted—or not—and imagery all play roles in framing events and issues. Contesting the mainstream media’s negative frames of anarchists, socialists, and the IWW was a vital function of the radical press. Headlining an essay “Thomas Jefferson’s Anarchism,” for example, was part of Mother Earth’s attempt to reframe the media stereotype of anarchists as crazy, foreign bomb throwers into paragons of American republicanism.²⁷ In an era when government granted capitalists unlimited power to control labor—power that radical historian Michael Cohen claims made American labor history “the bloodiest of any western industrialized nation”—radical press frames performed what media historian John Downing describes as the radical media mission “to disrupt the silence, to counter the lies, to provide the truth.”²⁸ He asserts their dissident views make radical media “the chief standard bearers of a democratic communication structure.”²⁹

Mainstream media tend to “suppress deviations from the prevailing political and social orthodoxies of their time and place rather than to support the right to dissent,” in the view of First Amendment scholar John Lofton.³⁰ Social movements need their own journalistic voice to counter this hostility. The “mass media often portray dissidents who engage in contentious politics as ridiculous, bizarre, dangerous, or otherwise out-of-step” with mainstream American values, according to political scientist Jules Boykoff.³¹ The “propaganda model” first described by Noam Chomsky and Edwin Herman in 1988 argues that mainstream media give little or no coverage of dissenters, while governments and big business gain easy access to the public to convey messages supporting hegemonic political and economic powers. They claim the system is so ingrained that “media news people, frequently operating with complete integrity and goodwill, are able to convince themselves that they choose and interpret the new ‘objectively.’”³² Cultural theorist Stuart Hall similarly charged that mainstream media ostracize politically deviant social movements to help preserve the dominant social order.³³ Journalism historian Mitchell Stephens acknowledges the media’s “basic pro-authoritarian role.”³⁴ Sociologist Herbert Schiller claims “control of mass media and the general information system has become a key element either in maintaining or changing the status quo. How the media treat or ignore a problem constitutes a critical exercise in power.”³⁵ Countering mainstream media hegemony that legitimatized the skewed capitalist-controlled social order was a key part of the radical press’s voice function.³⁶ The radical press did not speak in a single voice, however, which ultimately worked against the radical agenda.

A Widely Diverse Radical Press

Radical journalists agreed everyone would thrive in a cooperative commonwealth but disagreed on how to achieve the social revolution. The journals of moderate, or yellow, socialists such as the dailies the New York Call and Milwaukee Leader devoted many column inches to electoral politics, believing the ballot would gradually deliver socialism. Militant, or red, socialists, who dismissed politics in favor of the collective industrial power of workers, more likely read the monthly International Socialist Review based in Chicago. The folksy socialist weekly Appeal to Reason in Kansas advocated both political and labor activism, which partially accounted for its phenomenal popularity. Industrial Worker and Solidarity and smaller IWW organs rejected politics and disdained most socialists as clueless poseurs who never performed physical labor. The voice of migrant and unskilled labor, IWW journals spoke for industrial unionism, a global system in which worker collectives would manage society as “One Big Union.” The IWW “Wobblies” also tossed violent rhetoric as if it were a Molotov cocktail, a strategy that belied their nonviolent ideal of solidarity. The anarchist movement, never fully recovered from the Haymarket bombing, turned to a handful of periodicals that rejected all hierarchical social institutions, including not only capitalism but also government and organized religion.

The most influential anarchist journal in the 1910s was Mother Earth, published in New York by Emma Goldman, who envisioned a revolution in relations between the sexes. So did the bohemian Masses, a satirical socialist soufflé of art and radical politics. In addition to those relatively well known periodicals, hundreds of smaller radical journals that rolled off presses attested to the scope of dissatisfaction with the new economic order in every pocket of America: the Rebel in Hallettsville, Texas; Discontent in Home, Washington; Liberty in Boston; El Rebelde in Phoenix; Scott County Kicker in Benton, Missouri; the New Age in Buffalo; California Social-Democrat in Los Angeles; Labor Star in Huntington, West Virginia; and People’s Friend in Rogers, Arkansas. Progressive Woman gave socialist women a voice, and in November 1917 the Messenger became a bold new champion of African American socialism.

With the exception of less than a handful of socialist-inclined blackpress periodicals such as the Messenger, however, the study does not extend to the extensive alternative press that pioneered social reforms deemed radical by most Americans, such as votes for women or civil rights for African Americans. The book does not look at the suffrage press, trade-union newspapers, or the vast majority of the black press, because those periodicals sought to reform rather than overthrow the economic and political system. With very few exceptions, their publishers wanted to sit at the capitalists’ table, not to upend it. While the text acknowledges the significant role of the large radical foreign-language press in U.S. radicalism, it is beyond its scope to explore their role in detail. The broader labor press with which the radical press overlapped is another story explored by other scholars. Neither does this study attempt a detailed analysis of the myriad intricate, shifting, and multilayered variations of radical political ideologies and their theoretical foundations. Other scholars have filled countless pages on the topic. This book focuses solely on the prewar radical press’s overlooked role as a vital tool for voicing radical social movement views ignored, ridiculed, or demonized by the mainstream press.³⁷ Radical editors even risked death, as Parsons’s case illustrates.

Haymarket and the Anarchists

On May 1, 1886, Parsons; his wife, Lucy; and their two children led eighty thousand people down Chicago’s Michigan Avenue as part of a nationwide general strike for an eight-hour workday. The parade marked a peaceful interlude in a year rocked by unprecedented labor strife over wages, working conditions, unionization, and hours. The eight-hour workday held enormous symbolic significance as well as practical ramifications for workers pushed to labor up to twelve hours for six or even seven days a week since the advent of gas lighting in antebellum America. The shorter workday allowed laborers to live as humans rather than like animals under harness. Parsons had argued passionately for the eight-hour day in both the Alarm and on the podium at monster labor rallies. Two days after the peaceful May Day parade, however, police killed two workers when they fired on strikers at the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company. Arbeiter-Zeitung editor Spies and others swiftly pulled together a peaceful protest at Haymarket Square on May 4. Parsons spoke but left before police showed up, after most of the crowd had dispersed. Someone threw a bomb, and police started firing. Eight officers and at least two workers died, mostly from police fire. Hundreds more lay injured.

Parsons was among eight anarchists convicted of conspiracy, although no direct evidence linked any of them to the bomb.³⁸ The editors’ words doomed these apostles of the anarchist “propaganda of the deed.” Haymarket marked the first major test of the limits of freedom of expression instigated by radical rhetoric over the next three decades. Trial Exhibit Number 30, for example, was a two-year-old Alarm editorial excoriating the profits system. It concluded: “Nothing but an uprising of the people and a bursting open of all stores and storehouses to the free access of the public, and a free application of dynamite to every one who opposes, will relieve the world of this infernal nightmare of property and wages.”³⁹ An 1885 booklet on how to make dynamite published in the Alarm added to the pile of evidence. Spies also editorialized in the May 4, 1886, Arbeiter-Zeitung that “one single dynamite bomb” would avenge the McCormick victims.⁴⁰

These diatribes made for shocking reading but grossly exaggerated the anarchist threat; most historians cite the trial and execution as a terrible travesty of justice.⁴¹ Haymarket substantiates Linda Cobb-Reilly’s assertion that “most often the anarchists were suppressed and punished for what they said rather than what they did.”⁴² Media demonized them. Scholar Nathaniel Hong’s study of more than a hundred magazines found they used fear-mongering techniques to exaggerate the anarchist threat and increase public allegiance to snowballing corporate power. “The anarchist was the constructed devil of the American civic religion in the late nineteenth century,” he concludes.⁴³ Haymarket historian Henry David observes that the tragedy “was consciously used by capital interests through a willing press” to suppress all radicals. Newspapers clamored for revenge and printed wild rumors.⁴⁴

Newspapers themselves were ballooning into a powerful corporate-controlled industry. By 1891, house-sized quadruple presses could churn out seventy-two thousand eight-page papers per hour, fat with advertisements for the new department stores that were speeding America’s consumer culture and transforming journalism’s subscription-based business model. Advertising could compromise journalistic integrity. San Francisco newspapers, for example, promised to keep mum about an outbreak of bubonic plague in 1901 to placate department stores worried about a sales drop.⁴⁵ Mass-circulation dailies like William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal and Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World jostled for as many as a million readers a day. The media moguls’ grip on news was as tight as John D. Rockefeller’s on the oil trust. Even before World War I, Hearst had begun amassing a media conglomerate that by 1929 would include twenty-eight newspapers, several magazines, news syndication services, a radio station, and a film company. Publisher Hearst’s high political profile—he twice served as a New York congressman and once ran for governor—illustrates the synergy between journalism and political ambition.

Activists First, Journalists Second

The many radical leaders who were editors likewise demonstrate the centrality of the press in social movements. They were activists first, journalists second. Ed Boyce, president of the Western Federation of Miners that officially endorsed socialism, founded the Miner’s Magazine in January 1900 to prevent wealthy mine owners from reducing union members “to a state of abject slavery.”⁴⁶ Editors were passionate—frequently polemical—in defense of the proletariat. Many were eloquent and inspiring public speakers who crisscrossed the nation, further evidence of the symbiotic relationship between social movements and their press.⁴⁷ They drove themselves hard. Socialist presidential candidate Eugene Debs, himself an editor, wrote: “The average Socialist editor works harder, longer and more conscientiously than any other person in the movement, and he does it under circumstances that would break the spirit and drive out in despair and disgust anyone not literally harnessed to the movement by chains of steel.”⁴⁸ The radical press’s impassioned activist approach diverged from the elusive ideal of journalistic objectivity that emerged as the model for mainstream news media as the 1900s progressed. Radical editors had no interest in posing as disinterested observers: Journalism merely was a means to convert the masses.

Helen Keller’s explanation in the Call of how she became a socialist underscores the radical press’s potential to convert: “By reading.”⁴⁹ Historian James Green found that an overwhelming majority of southwestern socialists were converted by reading movement literature.⁵⁰ By 1900, radical periodicals comprised a significant segment of the U.S. labor press, which originated in 1829 and ranged from nonpolitical organs that reported solely on a single union’s business to IWW’s revolutionary journals.⁵¹ Radical journals also were part of the even broader working-class press that, according to historian Jon Bekken, offered a venue “where readers could debate political, economic, and cultural issues.”⁵² They encouraged reader participation by seeking articles and letters from readers on working conditions, in an early version of what has become today’s Internet-fueled citizen journalism. Radical media drummed into readers that it was their responsibility for their periodicals to succeed by gathering subscriptions, hawking copies on the street, or donating money. They addressed readers as comrades, not consumers. Besides colorful rhetoric, virtually all journals shared in common chronic financial crisis, a conundrum for a medium that rejected capitalism. Publishers pioneered innovative funding strategies. Goldman lectured cross-country to finance Mother Earth. The International Socialist Review and the Call formed cooperative publishing societies. Many journals accepted advertising, and Appeal to Reason even marketed its own clothespins. Publishing radical periodicals was a labor of love for which their editors always could expect harassment from both their audience and authorities but never riches.

Radical publishers capitalized upon the communications revolution of technological and transportation advances that fueled astronomical newspaper and magazine growth in the late nineteenth century.⁵³ More than six thousand periodicals on almost every topic imaginable filled newsstands in 1905. Journalism historian Leonard Teel states that by 1900 hundreds of publications were “propagating socialist, radical, or anarchist views that were denied access to mainstream publications.”⁵⁴ Walter Goldwater lists 321 radical periodicals in his partial bibliography of the radical press.⁵⁵ Nathan Fine claims socialists published at least six hundred periodicals in their prewar heyday, including several dailies.⁵⁶ Socialist journalist Robert Hunter estimated in 1908 that they reached a million people.⁵⁷ The IWW published seven sanctioned newspapers in 1910 in Spanish, Polish, French, and Japanese, although Industrial Worker served as its “main organ for shaping and disseminating its views,” according to IWW historian Melvyn Dubofsky.⁵⁸ At least two dozen English-language anarchist periodicals appeared between 1880 and 1917.⁵⁹ All were central to the “social iconoclasm” that historian Christine Stansell observes made the Progressive Era quiver with the twentieth-century’s potential for a more equitable social order.⁶⁰ According to historian Lauren Kessler, despite myriad factions, all radicals believed that “journalism was essential to the cause.”⁶¹

Aside from propagandizing, radical newspapers aspired to classic journalism ideals: to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted; to provide a voice for the voiceless; to champion freedom of expression; to hold the powerful accountable to the people. Radical journals frequently upheld these ideals better than did hegemonic news media. For example, when in 1917 vigilantes rounded up some eleven hundred striking copper miners in Bisbee, Arizona, crammed them at gunpoint into railroad cattle cars, and dumped them in the New Mexico desert, the Los Angeles Times urged other towns to adopt the method to rid themselves of agitators.⁶² It was left to radical press editors to protest the deportation’s unconstitutionality.

Influence of the Immigrant Radical Press

The first editors to challenge American capitalism were foreign-born. The Forty-Eighters comprised a wave of German cultural avant-garde intellectuals fleeing failed revolutions in 1848, the year Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published The Communist Manifesto. “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles,” the pair famously declared. Marxist “scientific socialism” envisioned a state-run economy emerging from armed revolution. Social equality could only occur when workers took over the means of production, they proclaimed. The Marxist-influenced Forty-Eighter refugees had been distinguished editors, authors, or lecturers who turned to journalism in New York and Chicago and smaller midwestern cities such as St. Louis and Cincinnati. Adolf Douai wrote American travel books for Germans, edited an abolitionist newspaper in Texas, and a German-language daily until his death in 1888. Dashing Russian nobleman Serge Schevitsch doubled as a journalist-agitator at the New Yorker Volkszeitung, which prized his talent to “translate international ideas into the adopted vernacular so that friendly Irish and American-born workers could understand them.”⁶³ By the late nineteenth century, one thousand German American titles dominated the widespread foreign-language press.⁶⁴

German anarchist Johann Most ignited radical circles when he moved his polemical anarchist newspaper Freiheit to New York at the end of 1882. A tragic childhood left Most perpetually angry at authority, tempered by keen empathy for the underdog. Those qualities oiled by a mordant wit infused Freiheit, founded by the much-jailed agitator in London in 1879 at age thirty-three after authorities expelled him from Berlin. A slight, well-read man whose beard hid a maimed jaw that shamed him, onstage Most transformed into a fire-breathing oracle of class war. His editorial genius for popularizing revolutionary theory and his incendiary rhetoric soon made the German-language Freiheit the anarchist movement’s most influential journal.⁶⁵ As author of the dynamite recipe Parsons published in the Alarm, Most confirmed mainstream media’s stereotypical bomb-throwing anarchist as a foreign menace.⁶⁶

Italian anarchist periodicals such as L’Agitazione and L’Avvenire played an important transnational role in Italian American anarchist thought in the late 1890s. Conversely, the American version of La Questione Sociale, published in Paterson, New Jersey, sustained the Italian anarchist movement after the government outlawed the periodical of the same name published by Errico Malatesta, a major influence among immigrant anarchists and Wobblies. La Questione was one of dozens of short-lived Italian-language anarchist journals.⁶⁷ Although anarchy dominated among radical Italians, at its peak the Italian Socialist Federation distributed fifty-six hundred copies of the weekly Il Proletario. The radical press, as the newspaper observed, was Italian American sovversivo (subversive) culture’s most important radical institution: “The book and the newspaper are the most potent means to hasten the triumph of workers’ rights.” Aldino Felicani, editor of La Questione among other periodicals, recalled how it easy was to become a radical publisher: “We just announced that our paper would come out on such and such a date and that we needed money to publish it. That was sufficient to bring us enough money to publish the paper.”⁶⁸ Quantity rather than longevity characterized the ethnic press, which between 1880 and 1920 numbered some 3,440 newspapers that served at least thirty nationalities.⁶⁹ An exception was the Yiddish-language Forverts (Jewish Daily Forward) founded April 22, 1897, in New York and edited by Lithuanian-born Abraham Cahan, who attempted to reconcile socialism with Judaism. Circulation of the Forverts, one of thirteen Yiddish socialist periodicals in 1902, topped two hundred thousand by 1915. It continues today as a bilingual weekly.⁷⁰

The foreign-language press drew upon its ethnic communities’ institutions and resources for news, readers, and financial support.⁷¹ Although the radical foreign-language press began to dwindle in the 1900s, it remained an important repository of immigrant culture that connected readers to American radicalism.⁷² Immigrants looked to ethnic journals for news of socialist or anarchist picnics, concerts, and balls. The IWW published small newspapers in a half-dozen languages to reach its large immigrant audience. The newspapers enabled immigrants to participate in American radical movements by publishing news about local radical groups as well as Debs’s speeches in their native languages.

A New Generation of American-Born Radical Editors

Alabama-born Albert Parsons represented a new homegrown generation of radical editors. The Alarm, which he edited, was the anarchists’ most important English-language periodical. By 1885, the American movement claimed some seven thousand followers in eighty groups representing several distinct strains of anarchist thought. Nearly a third of them clustered in Chicago, dominated by labor-oriented anarcho-syndicalism, which emphasized worker solidarity and direct action to abolish capitalism. Spies’s German-language Arbeiter-Zeitung and its Saturday and Sunday editions, Vorbote and Fackel, led the Chicago anarcho-syndicalist press with their twenty-thousand circulation by the time the Haymarket bomb exploded.⁷³ The editors’ execution so profoundly affected workers that November 11, 1887, became a consecrated anniversary.

Radical media nurtured the Haymarket hanging’s public memory annually in poems, illustrations, plays, essays, elegies, and editorials.⁷⁴ Periodicals “repeatedly returned to Haymarket to understand the past and make meanings for the present,” according to literary historian Shelley Streeby.⁷⁵ The martyrs’ tale became a “redemptive narrative” for a generation of radicals, as historian Green observes.⁷⁶ Twenty years later, socialist Max Baginski wrote in International Socialist Review that the state mistakenly believed “the murdering of revolutionary individuals was identical with the annihilation of revolutionary motives and ideas.”⁷⁷ Mother Earth editor Alexander Berkman asserted in 1909, “The passage of the years merely serves to accentuate the atrocity of the deed.”⁷⁸ Berkman, Goldman, Jay Fox, William Haywood, Ricardo Flores Magón, Charles Edward Russell, and Lois Waisbrooker were among editors who traced their radicalization to Haymarket. “From the time I was twelve years old,” recalled socialist muckraker George Shoaf, “I wanted to go to Chicago to avenge the death of Albert Parsons.”⁷⁹

Two other nineteenth-century labor debacles loomed almost as large in radical memory and media. On July 6, 1892, months of strong-armed union busting at the Carnegie Steel plant in Homestead, Pennsylvania, culminated in a hail of bullets from Pinkerton National Detective Agency guards that killed seven strikers and three Pinkertons.⁸⁰ The murders burnished the thuggish Pinkertons’ reputation as brutal foot soldiers—not detectives—in industrialists’ private armies assembled to crush strikes.⁸¹ The financial Panic of 1893 that forced nationwide bank closures and compelled a host of Americans to abandon their “underwater” mortgaged homes—source of the Victorian fascination with the “haunted house”—instigated the other infamous fatal labor confrontation. In 1894, thirteen strikers died when the federal government unleashed the United States Army to stop the massive strike of the Pullman Palace Car Company, in which the American Railway Union, the nation’s first industry-wide union, boycotted all trains containing Pullman cars. Young union leader Debs spent six months in jail, mostly reading radical literature. He emerged from his cell a confirmed socialist.

The Populist Press

In the Great Plains and Southwest, the Knights of Labor dominated the American radical imagination in the 1880s, when seven hundred thousand workers joined the secret, quasi-religious society that called for cooperative ownership of mines and factories. The Knights’ Journal of United Labor preached labor solidarity along with the Knights’ idealistic but vague vision for economic reform. Leader Terence Powderly opposed strikes and political action, however, leaving his impassioned followers adrift.⁸²

Populism, a widespread agrarian revolt against capitalism that supplanted the Knights at the end of the decade, offered much more specific remedies. Populists called for government ownership of railroads, telephones, and telegraphs; the abolition of national banks; the right of labor to organize; the eight-hour day; and other moves for keeping commerce in the community and restoring individual autonomy. Their call for “free silver” essentially was a cry against the monopolistic muscle of eastern corporate interests that farmers charged were bleeding them dry.⁸³ Kansan farmers coined the term “robber barons” to describe the railroad tycoons who controlled their fate.⁸⁴ Populist People’s Party presidential candidate James B. Weaver garnered more than 1 million votes in its 1892 national election debut. The new party elected three governors, two senators, and thirteen congressmen.⁸⁵

The Populists’ leading paper—the American Nonconformist, published by Henry Vincent—boasted the loudest voice among more than a thousand tiny, struggling Populist weeklies. Many banded together in the National Reform Press Association, a “monument to the democratic intensity of the agrarian crusade,” according to historian Lawrence Goodwyn. “They struggled against poverty in its most humiliating form, against ostracism and persecution and all uncharitableness.” Vigilantes shot and killed the coeditor of the Alliance Vindicator in Texas, and arsonists set fire to the Living Truth shop in Greenville, Alabama. In 1895, Nonconformist editor Francis X. Matthews marveled at his colleagues’ tenacity: “The quality, tone and contents of their papers steadily improved until today some of the most ably edited journals of the country are found in their ranks.”⁸⁶

Populism’s anticorporate agenda particularly appealed to miners, a new class of industrial workers in Appalachia and the mountainous West. The 1896 election of Populist Davis H. Waite—editor of the pro-labor, antimonopoly Aspen Union Era—as Colorado governor underscored the symbiosis between journalism and politics.⁸⁷ In Georgia, Populist congressman Tom Watson served as editor and business manager of the Atlanta-based People’s Party Paper (1891–98). Populist ascendance was short-lived, however, as on the eve of the 1896 election the People’s Party merged with the Democrats. Although 80 percent of voters in Colorado and several other mountain states supported the Democratic and Populist Party presidential nominee William Jennings Bryan, his defeat by Republican William McKinley spelled the end of Populism. The loss also signaled farmers’ last bid as a major political force. Georgia’s fiery Watson failed miserably in two presidential bids on the Populist ticket, in 1904 and 1908, but retained state-wide influence through the 1910s as he turned his attacks to blacks, Jews, Catholics, and socialists in his anticapitalist, white-supremacist publications Watson’s Magazine (1905–6 and 1912–17) and the Jeffersonian magazine (1907–17).⁸⁸ Many other former Populists who despaired of the two-party system, however, turned to socialism.

The Influence of Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward

A science fiction novel converted tens of thousands more to socialism. Edward Bellamy’s phenomenally popular Looking Backward: 2000–1887 stirred millions with its rosy portrayal of a future socialist utopia in which all industry is nationalized. Looking Backward’s vision of the peaceful evolution of voluntary cooperative societies Americanized socialist thought because it diverged from the Marxist emphasis on class conflict.⁸⁹ Overnight, the novel fomented a new social movement, Nationalism, which briefly spawned a Los Angeles-based socialist journal, the Weekly Nationalist (1890–91). Nationalists promoted Looking Backward’s plan for social reorganization based on a government-run industrial army. Although some people feared the movement smacked of authoritarianism, Nationalists in fact were fairly tepid revolutionaries who championed the electoral process.⁹⁰ With Bellamy’s blessing, in 1890 Los Angeles Nationalists launched the first socialist candidate for Congress, dapper real-estate developer H. Gaylord Wilshire. A decade later, he would publish one of the early twentieth century’s most successful socialist magazines.⁹¹

Wilshire had much in common with another Looking Backward fan, midwestern real-estate speculator and newspaper publisher Julius A. Wayland. The Indiana native started in journalism as a child “roller boy” in a print shop for fifty cents a week. He worked his way up to apprentice, then typesetter. At nineteen, he bought the shop.⁹² Wayland fared well under the profits system but metamorphosed from a Republican to Populist to socialist in the 1880s while running his shop and profitably speculating in real estate in Pueblo, Colorado, ground zero of the West’s new corporate order. Along with his neighboring miners, farmers, and ranchers, Wayland felt himself a victim of the railroads’ “iron heel of extortion,” as he termed their freight monopoly. A Pueblo shoemaker accelerated Wayland’s radicalization when he handed him a pamphlet proposing public ownership of railroads. Wayland came back for more, including tracts by the likes of John Ruskin and Laurence Gronlund’s The Cooperative Commonwealth in Its Outlines: An Exposition of Modern Socialism. Wayland recalled, “I saw a new light and found what I never knew existed.”⁹³

Julius Wayland’s “One-Hoss Philosophy”

Wayland emulated Ruskin, a British artist and social thinker, who advocated replacing the dehumanizing wage system with cooperative communities in which meaningful work enriched members’ quality of life. As publisher of Fors Clavigera: Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain, Ruskin served as an important journalistic role model for Wayland. He threw himself into writing and speaking on socialism before it dawned on him that his journalistic background had primed him to deliver the socialist message to more people at less cost than any other method. Unlike the obtuse Ruskin, however, Wayland wrote in a down-home style that made socialism sound as American as chicken and biscuits. Wayland condensed these influences with his innate faith in American democratic ideals into a homespun “One-Hoss Philosophy” that made his Appeal to Reason exceptional among the 1890s’ simultaneously grave and sensationalist radical periodicals.

A caricature of Julius Wayland spinning some of his “One-Hoss Philosophy,” Appeal to Reason, September 12, 1903.

In July 1895, Wayland had just fled to Missouri from Ruskin, a cooperative colony he founded the previous year in the Tennessee boondocks. Wayland planned to fund his commune with profits from his first socialist newspaper, the Populist-influenced Coming Nation launched in 1893 in Greensburg, Indiana. Coming Nation’s profits never approached Wayland’s optimistic projections even though its circulation of sixty thousand made it the nation’s leading socialist periodical. He handed over Coming Nation to aggrieved Ruskinites who had sued for its ownership before he moved to Missouri. The entrepreneurial socialist felt so despondent that no less than legendary labor agitator Mary Harris “Mother” Jones had to cajole him into launching a new socialist periodical. Little did Wayland realize that the Appeal to Reason he indifferently unveiled on August 3, 1895, would rocket to a circulation above 750,000 at its peak in 1913, making it, according to biographer Elliott Shore, “the most successful institution of the socialist movement in the United States and the one national weekly newspaper that unified the movement from coast to coast.”⁹⁴

New York’s Divisive Daniel De Leon

In the East, the People, official organ of the nation’s first socialist political party, was as doctrinaire as Wayland’s newspaper was plainspoken. The Socialistic Labor Party (SLP) had been an obscure, mostly German-speaking group in New York until Daniel De Leon began editing the weekly People in 1892. A Dutch West Indies native educated in Europe, who taught international law at what is now Columbia University, De Leon, like Wayward, found socialism in part through Looking Backward. Unlike the cajoling and often humorous One-Hoss Philosopher, De Leon wielded a poison pen against anyone who diverged from his strict Marxist views. The shabbily dressed, estranged aristocrat was virulently anti-union and dismissed Populism as a “middle class, reactionary movement.”⁹⁵ A typical editorial in 1894 vilified the head of the United Mine Workers as “an ignorant man, an imbecile, as fit to be at the head of a large labor organization as a land lubber at the helm of a Cunarder.”⁹⁶ De Leon has been called the single most divisive figure in radical history. When he died in 1914, he was eulogized as both a “destructionist” and “the most powerful individual in the American Socialist movement.”⁹⁷

Total control over the party press was a basic tenet of De Leon’s philosophy. He demanded that SLP locals shut down their own newspapers because they were based on immigrant communities instead of socialism. Attempts by the acrimonious “American Lenin” to take over the new Yiddish daily Di Abendbat in the mid-1890s inspired staffers to jump ship and found the Jewish Daily Forward. Besides smiting capitalists, De Leon wielded the People to bludgeon socialist critics and dictate SLP policy. De Leon nonetheless reenergized the SLP. His editorials were the first to match the intellectual rigor of the German American socialist editors. He quickly changed his party’s official language to English, a major step toward Americanizing the movement. He also translated into English many of the works of Marx, Engels, and other socialist thinkers. Instead of ethnic news items about the community and homeland, he filled the People with Marxist theory and arguments for socialism. Historian Paul Buhle argues the SLP’s strictly Marxist, theoretical publication held little relevance for American socialism: “It made Socialists into know-it-all fanatics rather than community members one step ahead of their neighbors; and it made them agents of an organization that separated itself from their struggles in order to proclaim the absolute truth they would have to follow for their salvation.”⁹⁸

De Leon nonetheless maneuvered the somewhat unfocused SLP into supporting a system of socialist industrial unions in which workers managed industry, similar to the IWW’s vision. On July 1, 1900, the Daily People appeared as the first English-language socialist daily newspaper in America. De Leon viewed a daily party newspaper as a critical organizing tool. “No longer is it possible to pass in scornful silence the work of the ax wielder,” he editorialized. “It must be recorded in some wise because the DAILY PEOPLE published it and the readers of the daily papers demand the news.”⁹⁹

De Leon and Wayland inevitably clashed in a journalistic war that shaped twentieth-century American socialism. De Leon visited the Appeal to Reason in Kansas in summer 1896, when Wayland briefly supported the SLP, but the New York intellectual privately pronounced Wayland a hapless “Salvation Army sentimentalist.”¹⁰⁰ Wayland soon renounced what he termed De Leon’s “czar rule.” Soon their presses rattled with attacks on each other as radicals scrambled to redefine themselves after the disappointing 1896 election. In 1898, Debs followers opposed to De Leon created the Social Democratic Party of America.¹⁰¹

Milwaukee Publisher/Politician Victor Berger

One founding member of the SDP was yet another influential radical journalist/politician who personified the shift from European to American-style socialism. Victor Berger had immigrated in 1878 with his parents from what is now Romania. By age twenty-one he had worked as both a teacher and editor in Milwaukee, where the large German population supported an active socialist movement. In January 1893, Berger became editor and publisher of the Milwaukee Arbeiter-Zeitung, which he renamed the Wisconsin Vorwärts (Forward). Despite publishing in German, he viewed the weekly newspaper as a tool “to adapt scientific socialism to the American situation,” according to biographer Sally Miller.¹⁰² Berger stood at the conservative end of the radical spectrum, which believed enacting reforms through electoral politics gradually would cut a path toward the cooperative commonwealth. He was sure trade unionists could be persuaded to see the socialist light. Berger also believed newspaper ownership was requisite for political power. In 1901, Berger began publishing the SDP’s official organ, the weekly Social Democratic Herald, in English. The Herald signaled the Americanization of the radical press in the new century. Its growth and political clout over the next decade paralleled socialism’s rise as a mass movement, just as the tragic end to editor Berger’s contentious career as the nation’s first socialist congressman would parallel the movement’s demise during World War I.

Berger played a key role in the creation of the Socialist Party of America, the last in the alphabet soup of American socialist organizations. In 1899, he lent his editorial heft, along with that of the Appeal’s Wayland, to SLP dissidents who sought to push De Leon out of his editorial perch on the People. Previously in the Appeal, Wayland attacked De Leon for treating SLP members like “dumb driven cattle, to be deprived of freedom to think or speak.”¹⁰³ Via the People, De Leon ordered a boycott of the Appeal and expelled SLP locals that violated the ban—thus proving Wayland’s point. Each side laid claim to being the genuine SLP, and each issued its version of the People until a court ruled the newspaper belonged to De Leon’s SLP. Meanwhile, in 1900 Debs made his first presidential bid, under the SDP banner. He won 87,945 votes (0.63 percent of the total). It was less than half the Prohibition Party’s take but nearly 30,000 more votes than the faded Populists’ 50,989 tally and more than double the SLP’s 40,943 votes. As its miniscule numbers indicated, the fledgling socialist movement could ill afford factionalism.

Socialists’ Aversion to a Party Press

Anti–De Leon SLP dissidents and the SDP attempted to resolve the divide in a “unity convention” in Indianapolis from July 29 to August 1, 1901, in which they merged into the Socialist Party of America.¹⁰⁴ De Leon did not attend, yet his legacy exerted a profound influence on socialist journalism. The First Amendment and the press figured at the heart of the split between De Leon’s SLP and Debs’s SDP, highlighting how democratic American values clashed with inflexible European socialism. The legal wrangling over the People reinforced De Leon’s belief in a party-owned press. “A privately owned press is like a man’s coat,” he wrote in 1909. “The coat may cover an S.L.P. man today, and tomorrow an anti-S.L.P. man. There is no safety except in Party ownership.”¹⁰⁵

The new Socialist Party consciously forged a press policy that was the polar opposite of De Leon’s top-down approach to journalism; it pointedly declined to publish its own organ. The National Executive Committee approved a constitutional amendment that read, “This committee shall neither publish nor designate any official organ.”¹⁰⁶ Those ten words held huge ramifications for U.S. socialism. The policy spawned an animated media landscape in which hundreds of socialist periodicals challenged American political and economic hegemony. Unfortunately, radical newspapers filled almost as much space challenging each other. Their press was an echo chamber of the fractious infighting that sometimes made radicals their own worst enemies. Anarchist Mother Earth contributor William Owen once wrote how “disillusioned” the labor press left him. Any reader, he lamented, “will find these paid editors, this official hierarchy, turning out a literature that is picayunnishness itself; that never rises higher than organization squabbles, correspondence about the label, and the most trifling irrelevancies.”¹⁰⁷

Eternal name-calling was just one radical press shortcoming. Bombastic and dogmatic, radical journalism also offers lessons in the uses and limits of verbal and visual rhetoric by a social movement. Radicals’ millions of words offered no blueprint for operating a cooperative commonwealth, a goal more dubious because of their ceaseless squabbling. As the New York Times observed of socialism in 1903, “There is a great deal of generalization without definiteness.”¹⁰⁸ Like the Progressives, radicals believed that to make moral choices, people only needed to be educated. Their faith in the printed word seems quaint today. Doctrinaire screeds and dogma made for dull reading, and much news coverage never rose above propaganda. Racist cartoons negated calls for racial equality, while incongruously conventional views of women occasionally contradicted the journals’ calls for revolution. Even editors’ tendencies to emphasize workers’ victimization could backfire on a social movement’s need to forge an empowering collective identity. Radical periodicals could be as sensational, vitriolic, biased, and error-ridden as their nemeses in what they called the capitalist press. Polemics often dominated their pages. Sometimes radical journalists knowingly lied to readers. Calls for armed revolt by the most militant publications alienated the majority of Americans who believed in change through established institutions. Ultimately, the prewar radical press failed in its mission to persuade Americans to scrap capitalism for a cooperative commonwealth. Even radical journalist Joseph Cohen once wrote of the socialist press, “Its shortcomings are so glaring as often enough, to be one of its most striking features.”¹⁰⁹

Socialism and Social Justice

Despite its shortcomings, the radical press voiced the concerns of many Americans. “In the years before World War I,” asserts historian Jackson Lears, “Socialism was an important part of American public discourse, a complement and a goad to reformist impulses.”¹¹⁰ The vision of the cooperative commonwealth embodied an egalitarian American ethic of social justice as much as it did an economic system. A number of American radical journalists, especially those of modernist Masses and Seven Arts in the 1910s, ignored the Europeans’ doctrinaire scientific socialism. “What in hell could Karl Marx know about the U.S. It was the City proletariat that Marx knew about,” wrote Frank O’Hare, who ran the socialist National Rip-Saw in St. Louis. “He was of positively no use to us at all, in the American Socialist movement, which was so largely rural.”¹¹¹ Many socialists before World War I simply desired social justice rather than actual revolution.¹¹² Hundreds of thousands of moderate liberals voted socialist because they favored reform or protested corrupt politics.¹¹³ “It was an escape-valve for many discontented Americans, offering through the political process an alternative to the establishment,” writes historian G. Gregory Kiser.¹¹⁴ Yet, many angry Americans did not view radicalism as a mere escape valve. The existence of hundreds of radical periodicals in every corner of the country undeniably revealed widespread rage against the rising corporate state whose power seemed to violate American ideals of fair play, merit, and individual agency. Those of the most militant socialists as well as the antiauthoritarian anarchists and truculent IWW called for no less than revolution.

Like much of the radicalism in American history, the role of the prewar radical press has been largely lost or forgotten. One reason the prewar radical press has largely disappeared from memory is that the federal government went to such drastic lengths to quash it. Yet the radical press endured. Rather than an aberration, the radical press has been a constant presence on the American media landscape, most recently in 2011, as part of the Occupy Movement. Never, however, was the American radical press as vital as it was between 1900 and 1917. It played a larger role in American culture than even the vibrant underground press of the 1960s, which has received far more historical attention.¹¹⁵ In the earlier twentieth century, more radical periodicals circulated than in the 1960s, among a smaller population, without any competition from broadcast media.

Black, White, and Red All Over begins its examination of the dynamic prewar radical press in chapter 1 by exploring the socialist periodicals that surfaced in the agrarian heartland, ranging from folksy Appeal to Reason to cerebral International Socialist Review. Chapter 2 views socialists’ attempts to provide alternatives to urban daily newspapers through the prism of the Daily Call. Chapter 3 explores the crusades and sensationalism employed by the radical press led by the Appeal in its mission to champion workers. Chapter 4 illuminates the pitfalls of the Appeal’s personal, partisan journalism and the resulting divisive Socialist Party debates on a party press. Chapter 5 probes how the prolific IWW’s unskilled workers wielded journalism as a form of direct action, its much-debated and misunderstood method of combating capitalism. Chapter 6 analyzes the role periodicals played in the anarchists’ pioneering battles for a free press, free speech, and free love. Chapter 7 considers how Lyrical Left journals such as Wilshire’s and the Masses expanded the radical agenda beyond economics to encompass the arts and literature. Chapter 8 surveys socialism in the black press and scrutinizes how other radical periodicals’ treatment of race revealed the gap between radical dreams and social reality. Chapter 9 explores radical journals’ lead role in addressing key questions about women’s role in society even as their publishers’ privileging of class over gender made it almost impossible to combat sex discrimination. Chapter 10 details the federal government’s campaign to shut down the radical press during World War I. The conclusion summarizes the legacy of the prewar radical press and traces its evolution into the twenty-first century’s global anticapitalist social movement media. A final analysis traces parallels between the Occupy movement’s instantaneous social media and the radical print culture whose traditions they follow. Those parallels show that radical media are a persistent piece of American political culture, as is the social inequity they denounce. Despite its signature online technology, Occupy’s mission statement could have been pecked out on a radical editor’s manual typewriter after the financial Panic of 1893: “#ows is fighting back against the corrosive power of major banks and multinational corporations over the democratic process, and the role of Wall Street in creating an economic collapse that has caused the greatest recession in generations.”¹¹⁶