CHAPTER THREE

BOMBS AND BOMBAST

TRIALS OF SOCIALIST NEWSPAPERS

He has put the Federal courts on trial before the working class of the United States.

CHARLES KERR, “Fred Warren Goes to Jail”

Eight inches of virgin snow featherbedded the streets of Caldwell, Idaho, population twenty-two hundred, the day before New Year’s Eve 1905. Frank Steunenberg stamped a crease into the white comforter blanketing the road as he shuffled home. Life had quieted down during the more than five years since the former governor had declared martial law and called federal troops to Coeur d’Alene to quash miners trying to organize. Troops had rounded up every male resident of union-controlled Burke and locked up more than a thousand of them; hundreds more later were stuffed into boxcars under conditions so severe that several died. Eugene Debs warned Steunenberg his “day of reckoning” awaited, but the strife must have seemed far in the past to the portly gentleman farmer headed home on that quiet night. As he pulled open his gate latch, however, a tremendous explosion shattered the arctic silence and shredded his legs. He died an hour later.¹

Steunenberg’s unsolved murder set off a “struggle for the soul of America,” as historian J. Anthony Lukas subtitled his definitive account. Print media served as the prime battlefield as mainstream and radical journalists vied for the public’s hearts and minds. The popular press spun a tale of murderous, vengeful miners, while the radical press led by the Appeal to Reason placed industrial capitalism on trial. The shadow of Haymarket hung over the case as its significance took on epic proportions in the U.S. labor wars. Appeal editor Fred Warren charged into the Steunenberg case as if it were a “holy crusade,” according to Lukas.² The Appeal’s aggressive coverage accelerated the Post Office Department’s decade-long campaign to shut it down. The Steunenberg case offers a window to explore the extensive legal and extralegal persecution that imperiled radical journalists in the early 1900s, pushing them into becoming pioneering champions of a free press. This chapter examines the radical press’s role in reporting on state-sanctioned violence against workers who tried to organize. It shows how visual rhetoric, in addition to verbal rhetoric, figured in socialist press accounts of nearly forgotten labor wars across the land that culminated in the 1914 Ludlow Massacre.

The Appeal’s Call to Arms

Radicals suspected the Mine Owners Association planted the bomb, but police arrested miner Harry Orchard as he nursed a New Year’s Day cocktail in Caldwell’s Saratoga Hotel bar. Infamous Pinkerton investigator James McParland wangled a questionable sixty-four-page confession from Orchard. Labor organizers despised McParland even more than they did most Pinkertons because his dubious testimony in the 1870s’ Molly Maguires trials had helped send ten Irish-born miners to the gallows.³ Orchard implicated three leaders of the Western Federation of Miners in the Steunenberg murder: President Charles Moyer, former executive board member George Pettibone, and General Secretary William “Big Bill” Haywood, the towering, one-eyed ex-miner whose booming voice regaled his hardscrabble audiences with humor and insouciance toward socialist theory. “I’ve never read Marx’s Capital, but I have the marks of capital all over me,” was one of many folksy aphorisms that won the volatile Haywood a loyal following.⁴ One admirer was the Appeal’s George Shoaf, who called the WFM leader “the god of my idolatry.”⁵ The WFM was the most class-conscious and militant labor organization in America, and Haywood a fierce advocate of direct action in the form of strikes, work slowdowns, boycotts, and sabotage. He had helped found the Industrial Workers of the World in Chicago, just months before the Idaho bombing. McParland orchestrated the kidnapping of Haywood and his colleagues in Denver on February 17, 1906, using extradition papers that falsely claimed the trio had been at the scene of the murder. At dawn, a special train secretly whisked them to Idaho, where they faced murder charges.

The “Kidnappers Special” enraged radical journalists who turned the case into a national cause célèbre. A Supreme Court ruling that declared the kidnapping constitutional stoked the fire.⁶ The ISR editorialized, “There is not the slightest doubt … that this is all part of a deliberate plot to railroad these innocent men to the gallows.”⁷ All the socialist papers denounced the arrests and called for action. In Wilshire’s, Ernest Untermann likened radicals’ reaction to the Battle of Lexington: “In a twinkling I seemed to see red signals blazing through the night, and Paul Revere multiplied by ten thousand, riding through the darkest America and shouting: ‘Up, up, men, the plutocrats are coming!’”⁸

Wilshire’s described the mainstream news framing that the radical press corps sought to counter: “Dynamite scares, bomb discoveries, resolutions against agitators by prominent citizens who don’t sign their names, denunciations of Debs by imaginary ‘Socialists,’ accounts of mysterious strangers purchasing dangerous chemicals at local drug stores, etc., etc., follow each other in rapid succession.”⁹ ISR claimed the “continuous pounding of the Socialist Press” forced the Hearst newspaper chain to defend the trio. ISR called for parades and open-air meetings to educate the public about the case’s ramifications for labor.¹⁰ Some fifty thousand marchers converged at New York’s Grand Central Station at a protest chaired by Morris Hillquit.¹¹ H. Gaylord Wilshire called for a general strike to protest the Idaho events, which he called the “greatest crime against a free people in modern history.”¹² Wilshire’s also dispatched Joshua Wanhope to Caldwell, where the future Call Sunday editor conducted a three-hour prison interview with Haywood and his codefendants because the sheriff was unaware the magazine was socialist.¹³

Except for two local reporters, however, Shoaf was the only journalist at the preliminary hearing.¹⁴ His Appeal account typified the hyperbolic coverage to follow: “There will be stories of martyrdom to narrate besides which only that of Christ will stand comparison.” In future stories, he claimed, “it will be proved that Steunenberg was assassinated by the paid emissary of some outraged cattle king.” In his next figurative breath, he promised, “I will not appeal to lurid rhetoric.” Shoaf once again cast himself as protagonist when he claimed that “death and danger” stalked him as he investigated the crime.¹⁵ Beneath this hubris, however, Shoaf offered a provocative analysis of the case that tied it to the industrial development of the West, particularly by the Rockefellers’ eastern juggernaut, Standard Oil. Shoaf and Warren pressed their investigation off and on for more than a year.¹⁶

The March 10, 1906, Appeal raised the stakes by featuring a page-one essay by Debs so incendiary that Warren ran it by J. A. Wayland. The publisher green-lighted its publication even though it could mean the suppression of the newspaper and the arrest of Debs, Warren, and Wayland for inciting armed rebellion. The bold red banner headline declared, “Arouse Ye Slaves,” above an essay that vowed revolt by millions if the defendants were convicted and executed. “There have been twenty years of revolutionary education, agitation, and organization since the Haymarket tragedy, and if an attempt is made to repeat it, there will be a revolution and I will do all in my power to precipitate it,” Debs wrote.¹⁷ The call to arms departed from the Appeal’s usual advocacy of ballots over bullets, an indication of how the Haywood trial had enflamed radicals. The Appeal claimed its March 10 issue made the trial front-page news across the nation’s capitalist press.

The Postal Campaign to Silence the Appeal to Reason

Debs’s essay also precipitated a decade-long federal campaign to shutter the Appeal. Instead of outright censorship, the government wielded the powers of the Post Office Department. Postal suppression was subtler but nearly as crippling to the distribution of ideas. “The mails,” as legal scholar Morris Cohn stated in 1932, “are the arteries of current intelligence.” Because of the federal government’s “wide powers” over the mail, Cohn argues, “it holds the pulse of the nation in its control.”¹⁸ Postal censorship is as old as the nation.¹⁹ Colonial postmasters usually were party newspaper publishers who excluded opposition newspapers from the mail. In 1836, the postmaster general allowed local post offices to refuse to mail abolition literature, even though Congress had rejected President Andrew Jackson’s bill to exclude antislavery material from the mail. In the early nineteenth century, Congress inadvertently empowered the Post Office to discriminate when, to promote culture and nation-building, it set lower mail rates for newspapers. The Classification Act of 1879 extended the reduced second-class mail rate to magazines. Six years later, Congress halved the second-class periodicals rate to a penny per pound, a fraction of the eight cents per pound charged for third-class advertising materials. First-class rates for letters and postcards were even higher (fourth class was parcel post). Requirements for second-class mail included that the periodical maintain a paid circulation, appear on a regular basis, and “be published for the dissemination of information of a public character or be devoted to literature, the sciences, or some special industry,” according to scholar Jane Kennedy.²⁰ This federal subsidy stimulated the emergence of mass-circulation magazines and big-city newspapers that in the 1880s ballooned into American mass media.²¹

Second-class mail rates also gave the Post Office extraordinary powers of censorship, as scores of dissident periodicals would discover over the next two decades. To suppress dissident publications, the post office used the vague requirement that second-class journals’ information be “of a public character.” Official Appeal historian George Allan England stated losing second-class mail privileges was financially “equivalent to a deathsentence” for a publication.²² The post office had first tried to rescind the Appeal’s second-class mail status in 1901, on the grounds it had no paid circulation. Wayland used his newspaper to publicly combat the ruling. The postmaster general’s letter appeared on the Appeal’s front page alongside Wayland’s outraged response.²³ When 64,193 Americans signed statements attesting they were paid subscribers, the post office dropped the case.²⁴

Haywood coverage offered officials another opening to suppress the Appeal. The post office deemed the 4 million copies of a mammoth March 31, 1906, “Rescue Edition” unmailable under an arcane rule that limited second-class rates to no more than double a newspaper’s paid circulation. The rule “hampers the Appeal very much in its work,” Warren rued, as the Appeal’s paid circulation totaled only three hundred thousand.²⁵ Upton Sinclair denounced the move as a ruse for censorship. “Rule after rule, which had been moldering forgotten in the dusty archives of officialism [sic] has been resurrected and applied to the Appeal,” Sinclair wrote. “This is the first time in our country’s history, so far as I know, that an official censor has presumed to set bounds upon the utterance of political passion.”²⁶ The post office proved more powerful than the attorney general, who discovered no criminal law applied when President Theodore Roosevelt, a favorite target of Appeal writers and cartoonists, attempted to prosecute Debs and Wayland for the incendiary “Arouse Ye Slaves” essay.²⁷ Canada, however, did ban the Appeal as seditious. Warren traveled north and, coupled with protests by Canadian socialists, persuaded authorities to lift the ban.²⁸ In 1907, the U.S. post office demanded $5000 in excess postage for another mammoth special, the February 16 “Kidnaping Anniversary Edition.” Warren rushed to Washington, D.C., and persuaded postal officials to reverse the ruling.²⁹

Debs bragged the special edition set a world circulation record. He cited staggering statistics: one hundred men and women in three shifts daily printed, folded, and counted twenty-five thousand copies per hour. The 2,270,636 copies of the kidnapping edition required ten barrels of ink, six carloads of paper, three thousand mailbags, and ten U.S. mail cars.³⁰ Sensational campaigns and self-promotion stemming from the Steunenberg case, in fact, ramped up Appeal general circulation to 760,000 by 1913. David Paul Nord found that from 1901 through 1912 the Appeal devoted 12.3 percent of its content to promoting itself. An additional 3.4 percent of articles that described government persecution of the Appeal, however, indicate how dangerous it was for even the nation’s largest radical periodical to dissent.³¹ Once again thwarted, the Post Office was not done with the Appeal.

A Media Circus in Boise

The fifty or so reporters who descended on Boise for Haywood’s trial, which began May 9, 1907, created one of the century’s earliest media circuses. The atmosphere surely prepared defense lawyer Clarence Darrow, hired by AFL leader Samuel Gompers, for his defense of Tennessee science teacher John Scopes’s right to teach evolution eighteen years later. Former railroad lawyer Darrow was a freethinker and pacifist who supported the radicals’ call for redistributing wealth, although he never joined the Socialist Party.³² His beliefs contrasted to Gompers’s pragmatic focus on organizing only skilled-craft unions and collective bargaining, which made him the scourge of many radicals.³³ The mainstream press corps included the Associated Press’s Martin Eagan, Joseph Pulitzer’s Chicago bureau chief, and a San Francisco Examiner reporter who filed for the Hearst papers. McClure’s and Harper’s Weekly assigned correspondents. Lukas deems former Montana prosecutor C. P. Connolly’s reportage for Collier’s Weekly the best and most balanced.

Shoaf was the most flamboyant of an unprecedented number of radical journalists covering the trial. Their presence indicated the high stakes radicals believed the trial’s outcome had for the working class. They reframed the mainstream narrative to put capitalism on trial. “Not Haywood but the capitalist class of America is the one on trial, not just a murder trial of a union man, but a trial of the entire modern world,” editorialized Forverts publisher Abraham Cahan on its July 4 front page.³⁴ Cahan blanketed the Lower East Side newspaper’s front page with editorials, wire service stories, and telegrams from Socialist publisher Hermon Titus about the distant trial nearly every day for three months. Titus was so committed that in 1906 he again moved the newspaper he founded in Seattle from Toledo to Caldwell through the trial proceedings the following summer. Cahan and Titus’s passion reflected the significance radicals nationwide accorded the trial. Socialist reporters countered what they labeled a governmental frame-up with highly charged stories that accused generic “capitalists” of falsehoods and plots. Titus’s Forverts account of Orchard’s testimony, for example, labeled one antiunion prosecution witness a liar.³⁵ In the Socialist, Titus’s wife, Hattie, filed colorful sidebars.

She was one of several female radical journalists in Boise. Others included Olive Johnson of New York’s People and well-known socialist organizer Ida Crouch-Hazlett of the Montana News, who also filed stories for the Milwaukee Social-Democratic Herald. Margherita Arlina Hamm filed for Progress, Cheerful Moments, and Wilshire’s alongside her husband, Wilshire’s correspondent John McMahon, and Untermann.³⁶ As indicated by the use of her maiden name, Canadian-born Hamm was an independent “New Woman” who covered the Chinese-Japanese and Spanish-American wars, worked in a Lower East Side settlement house, authored a half-dozen books, and belonged to the Royal Geographical Society.³⁷

Other radical periodicals covering the trial included the IWW’s Industrial Union Bulletin, the Idaho Unionist, and the Pittsburgh Leader. Shoaf’s Appeal trial stories filled nearly a third of the four-page Chicago Daily Socialist for two months.³⁸ Wilshire questioned the blanket coverage, indicating that more than vindicating labor motivated some radical publishers. “My own idea is that it may be possible that this Moyer-Haywood business is not so conducive to getting up subscribers as a good many of the socialists seem to think,” he wrote Warren.³⁹ Crouch-Hazlett, who had a personal score to settle with the Appeal’s Shoaf, expressed her disdain for Wayland’s Appeal to an Idaho Statesman reporter. The charge would be repeated more than once over the next few years: “It is printed to selling purposes—not to help the party.”⁴⁰

Crouch-Hazlett’s words in the mainstream press were unusual because of tension between the rival journalistic camps. Radical journalists in Caldwell were ostracized and worse. An armed detective trailed Hamm until she smacked him across the face with a newspaper, Johnson received threats slipped under her hotel room door, and someone opened Crouch-Hazlett’s mail.⁴¹ While mainstream reporters sat at tables inside the courtroom rail, the radicals behind it scribbled on a shelf attached to its back. Socialists were unwelcome when McParland wined and dined the mainstream press corps in his elegant hotel suite or while holding court in the lobby. Wilshire’s McMahon observed capitalist reporters “growing fat and red-faced on the viands and wines of a generous prosecution.”⁴² Shoaf mocked McParland’s schmoozing: “Particular emphasis is placed upon the horrors of the dynamite explosion and the press writers are psychologized into believing that dynamite is hid in chunks all over Ada and Canyon counties.”⁴³ Bodyguards broke three radical photographers’ cameras when they tried to snap McParland’s picture.⁴⁴ Governor Frank Gooding excluded radicals when he escorted reporters from the AP, the New York Times, and the New York Sun to an exclusive prison interview with the state’s star witness. Meanwhile, Darrow hacked away at Orchard’s bad character, pressuring him into admitting he was a paid informant for mine owners. Darrow’s eleven-hour closing argument moved jurors to tears. They acquitted Haywood on July 29, 1907. Radicals claimed the howl they raised saved Haywood’s life—and perhaps the nation from class war. Editor Warren took his activism one step farther.

Battling Censorship, Boosting Circulation

Back on January 12, 1907, the Appeal’s front page had offered a “$1,000 in gold” reward for anyone to kidnap former Kentucky governor William Taylor. Since being indicted as an accessory in the assassination of a political rival, Taylor had been living as a fugitive in neighboring Indiana, which refused to extradite him. Warren seized the opportunity to publicize the illegality of the “Kidnapping Special” that netted Haywood. “Let us put it up to the capitalist courts to treat a capitalist as it does a workingman,” Warren’s notice informed readers, “and make the case so prominent that it will rivet the attention of the entire civilized world.”⁴⁵ Besides challenging the justice system’s fairness, Warren’s offer put the Appeal in the spotlight. The newspaper moved from reporting to making news.⁴⁶ The Appeal mailed more than fifteen thousand circulars to its sales army in envelopes that restated the reward offer. The message on the outside of the envelopes enabled the Department of Justice to enlist postal law to charge Warren with “sending scurrilous, defamatory and threatening matter through the mails.”⁴⁷ Although a guilty plea would have resulted only in a small fine, Warren and Wayland chose to fight the charges as a violation of the First Amendment guarantee of a free press.⁴⁸

The Appeal unabashedly equated boosting circulation with combating censorship during the two years that the government dragged out the legal proceedings. The July 18, 1908, front page urged readers to obtain one thousand subs to stop the post office “press muzzle”; on August 1 it featured order blanks for subs titled “‘My Reply to the Press Censor.” The Appeal paid more attention to its postal case than to presidential candidate Debs’s “Red Special” whistle-stop rail tour that was attracting mainstream media.⁴⁹ Appeal coverage unsurprisingly followed the case’s freepress frame. Warren wrote the front-page account of his conviction, for which he received a six-month jail sentence and a $1,500 fine. He vowed to fight on. “The impotent edict of a capitalist court is as the buzzing of a beetle against a tornado,” Warren blustered.⁵⁰ The U.S. Court of Appeals rejected Warren’s First Amendment argument in late 1910. “The comrades here are all jubilant at your going to jail,” Shoaf teased from New York. “All of them agreed that going to jail would mean a tremendous increase in the circulation of the Appeal to Reason and would do more to crystallize the radical sentiment in this country against the courts and other institutions of Capitalism than the sending of Berger to Congress.”⁵¹

Warren’s bravado combined with his marketing savvy did boost Appeal circulation in a campaign that was simultaneously a heroic stand for a free press and a shameless publicity stunt. The Appeal published at least eight hundred thousand copies of a “Jail and Gallows” edition in which Warren compared himself to lynched Illinois abolitionist editor Elijah Lovejoy.⁵² Warren’s defense became his newspaper’s biggest story, and his martyrdom a favored subject of Appeal cartoons.⁵³ A front-page item penned by Sinclair that warned, “If they can crush the Appeal, they can crush our whole propaganda,” was accompanied by a form for readers to pledge another subscriber every week until his case was dismissed—five per week, should Warren be jailed.⁵⁴ The newspaper stayed on the offensive, including Shoaf’s exposé of the federal prison at Leavenworth that accused an official of sodomizing a sixteen-year-old inmate. The story elicited another indictment on a charge of sending obscene material through the mail.⁵⁵

Other socialist newspapers showed solidarity and seemed unbothered by the Appeal’s big circulation gain. Radicals revered First Amendment ideals because they were vital to sustaining their social movement. The Call quoted Debs that Warren’s prosecution marked “the climax of a long series of outrages perpetrated by the courts to muzzle the press and silence protest against corporation misrule.”⁵⁶ Outrage over the Warren case marked one of the few times in which anarchist Mother Earth agreed with the yellow socialist Call.⁵⁷ ISR even urged readers to subscribe to the Appeal.⁵⁸ Kerr predicted Appeal circulation would zoom to a million if Warren served his six months. “He has put the Federal courts on trial before the working class of the United States,” Kerr wrote.⁵⁹ Progressive Woman published a Shoaf account that blamed the case on a government conspiracy to suppress the Appeal.⁶⁰ Wilshire’s, even as the Appeal’s circulation surged past its own, supported its competitor.⁶¹ Segments of the popular press also expressed their appreciation, like Cosmopolitan magazine’s left-leaning publisher John Walker, who personally thanked Warren for his free-press fight.⁶²

Sinclair proposed in the Appeal that if Warren was jailed, “there should be a series of public meetings in every city and town, and parades of protest larger than ever.”⁶³ In late 1911, President Taft canceled the jail term and reduced the fine to $100. Warren offered Appeal subscriptions, but the government never bothered to collect. The suit cost the Appeal some $12,000, a huge sum at the time, which nearly crippled the newspaper.⁶⁴ Its battles were not over, however, and its fight for a free press was just one among many waged by radical periodicals when they attempted to report on labor’s side of industrial warfare.

Persecution and Prison

Jail was a routine risk for radical journalists. The experience of a twenty-four-year-old machinist turned strike-bulletin editor illustrated the perils they faced when they challenged corporate powers. When, in 1914, the Illinois Central Railroad Company threatened the jobs of thirty-five thousand workers who had been fighting nearly three years for the right to organize, Carl Person obtained a used typewriter to report on the ensuing strike. “He girded himself with a shotgun called Publicity and pulled the trigger with the forefinger of organization,” wrote Floyd Gibbons, later famous for World War I reportage that cost him an eye. The bulletin marked another exercise in participatory journalism. “Every one of the 35,000 strikers was a reporter, a photographer and an agent for the Strike Bulletin,” Gibbons stated. A thirty-two-page Graveyard Special edition documented violence against strikers. Person was beaten after another exposé but went back to work. Railroad detectives and U.S. marshals raided his makeshift office and charged him with several federal counts related to “reflecting injuriously” on the railroad. Out on bail, Person shot an assailant in self-defense, according to Gibbons, and was indicted for murder. Once out on bond, after five months in jail, the editor returned to his typewriter. As did so many strike stories, Person’s ended with an appeal for funds.⁶⁵

In Pennsylvania, authorities charged three editors of the weekly Free Press with seditious libel during a 1910 strike in New Castle. Although the federal Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 that criminalized criticism of the government had expired a century earlier, seditious libel remained a crime in many states. It proved an effective way to suppress the press. ISR deemed the Free Press trial critical because of its First Amendment implications. A guilty verdict would mean “the editors of any Socialist periodical could be ha[u]led into court on a trumped up charge of sedition and jailed, thus stifling freedom of the press.”⁶⁶ When the judge declared a mistrial, fifteen thousand people marched to a celebratory rally.⁶⁷ In California, the socialist San Diego Herald editor told a more horrific tale of extralegal persecution. A citizens committee kidnapped A. R. Sauer in 1912 because his newspaper attacked police brutality against IWW organizers. His “crime” was publishing affidavits by Wobblies detailing attacks on them. “We were no sooner on the road than the kidnappers began to talk about hanging me to a bridge,” the editor recalled. They dumped him in Escondido instead and threatened to kill him if he returned to San Diego.⁶⁸ When Sauer did, vigilantes sacked his office.⁶⁹

Young Alexander Scott, editor of socialist Weekly Issue in New Jersey, received a one-to-fifteen-year sentence for his editorials decrying police violence during the 1913 Paterson silk mill workers’ strike. He was convicted of promoting “subversion and destruction of or hostility or opposition to any or all government” under the state’s antianarchy act. Police confiscated all five thousand copies of its strike edition because an editorial called police “brutal strike breakers” and “lawless anarchists” on the mill owners’ payroll. When Scott turned himself in after speaking to a strike rally of seven thousand people, nearly half of the crowd trailed him to the police station while they hooted the police, who attacked them. Police arrested people just for holding a copy of the newspaper issue.⁷⁰ Partly thanks to the Call’s financial and editorial support, the New Jersey Supreme Court threw out his conviction in 1914 but upheld the statute.⁷¹

A front-page cartoon that year lampooning evangelical preacher Billy Sunday landed the socialist monthly Melting Pot in a St. Louis court. It illustrated a long piece by irreligious editor Henry Tichenor, who also edited the National Rip-Saw, which raked Sunday’s capitalist ties.⁷² Tichenor’s journalism has been likened to “the style, if not the quality, of Henry L. Mencken” by scholar Irvin Wyllie: “Like Mencken he was strong on the attack, a mortal enemy of Puritanism, superstition, and quacks.”⁷³ A grand jury indicted Tichenor and publisher Phil Wagner, who also owned the much larger Rip-Saw, on charges of circulating defamatory and scurrilous literature though the mail. Columnist Kate Richards O’Hare wryly declared it impossible to libel the flamboyant preacher, but the suit was no joke. The pair faced up to thirty-five years in prison. Conviction could bankrupt Wagner and close both the Melting Pot and the Rip-Saw.⁷⁴ As in the Warren case, the offending Billy Sunday cartoon was illegal because it appeared on the outside cover of the mailed material. Like Warren, Tichenor and others used their press to defend themselves. The Melting Pot published a satirical cartoon from the front page of the Catholic Tribune to demonstrate that prosecutors were singling out radical periodicals for prosecution. A judge dismissed the case after fining each $100.⁷⁵

Covering Labor’s Side of the West Virginia Mine Wars

One of the most blatant violations of the right to a free press occurred amid the bloody West Virginia mine wars in which at least fifty people died in 1912–13. After the state declared martial law in the valley between Paint and Cabin creeks, it charged fifty-one miners with conspiracy to murder. The military also locked up socialist C. H. Boswell, editor of the Labor Argus in Charleston. It did not immediately shutter the newspaper, but a sentry stood guard over W. H. Thompson, editor of the Socialist and Labor Star in nearby Huntington, when he filled in for Boswell.⁷⁶ Authorities shut the Star down and jailed him in May.⁷⁷ As a precaution, Thompson had moved the Star’s Huntington operations, hauling an ancient flatbed press and trays of old mismatched hand-type up to an old house on a hill. He designated former ISR illustrator Ralph Chaplin as honorary Star associate editor. The young artist had left Chicago to work at a Huntington portrait studio, but as reports of manhandling by mine guards increased, he began soapboxing for the strike committee. He helped raise funds to buy shoes for miners’ barefoot children with Mother Jones, who arrived toting in a handbag her trademark wardrobe of a shiny black dress frilled with lace at the throat. Appeal to Reason became a vocal ally of the suppressed Argus. Besides mailing the Appeal to the West Virginia newspaper’s subscription list free of charge, Warren telegraphed a protest to the governor and flooded the county with the Appeal, currently running an investigative series by the audacious John Kenneth Turner excoriating the state’s mistreatment of miners.⁷⁸

Turner had recently gained fame as author of Barbarous Mexico, a 1911 exposé of President Porfirio Díaz’s atrocities against his people. The onetime printer’s apprentice published his own California weekly newspaper by age seventeen, and worked as a broncobuster, day laborer, ranch cook, and teacher before joining forces with the Appeal in 1910.⁷⁹ Shoaf, ironically, considering his own penchant for exaggeration, described Turner as “imaginative and too much inclined to color the facts.”⁸⁰ Turner once explained how he emphasized the “human, individual note” to draw readers into stories: “Leave the reader at the end with all the facts that he could get out of a dry article but leave him stirred up as no cold facts alone could stir him.”⁸¹ True to form, Turner slipped into coal country masquerading as a New York magazine writer. He plied mine guards and militia officers with liquor to get the story.⁸² “I have figured in exciting episodes,” the Appeal quoted Turner in a barrage of plugs for the upcoming series (although not enough to satisfy the reporter).⁸³ Turner claimed his life was endangered, although it is difficult to determine how credible were his fears, since he often exaggerated risks. “I was spotted and followed before I had been off the train five minutes,” he wrote Warren from Charleston. “I may have to kill a man yet.”⁸⁴ Once out of West Virginia, he claimed mine owners’ agents blackjacked him. His letters to his editor indicate Turner’s pro-union agenda inclined him to color his coverage. Although he found the union leaders weak, he warned Warren, “Of course, we can’t touch that end of it in our story.”⁸⁵

Turner suggested Warren pin West Virginia coverage on a campaign for the release of Mother Jones.⁸⁶ The military was holding her incommunicado on charges she stole a machine gun that had been used to mow down strikers. Jones was as beloved by miners as she was loathed by officials. Born in Cork, Ireland, around 1837, the former dressmaker turned to labor agitation after a yellow-fever epidemic killed her husband and four children in 1867.⁸⁷ Journalists framed her as a grandmotherly hell-raiser, and she capitalized on her persona of militant motherhood.⁸⁸ Everyman magazine described her as “John Brown in petticoats.”⁸⁹ Her flair for publicity included a Children’s Crusade in 1903 in which she marched seventy-five child miners from Pennsylvania to Roosevelt’s home in New York. The president declined to meet them, but the stunt helped spur the movement that barred child labor a decade later.⁹⁰

Mother Jones’s age and gender enhanced her appeal because she contradicted the stereotype of burly male miners. Debs appealed to West Virginians’ manhood to strike in demand for her release.⁹¹ Gender also informed his likening of her to a warrior: “This brave woman has fought the battles of the oppressed with a heroism more exalted than ever sustained a soldier upon the field of knowledge.”⁹² Arguably, no woman appeared more often in radical press imagery. ISR’s January 1913 cover featured a photograph of her alongside a child in West Virginia captioned, “New Shoes for the Striking Coal Miners’ Children.”⁹³ A cartoon the next year showed her facing down a bayonet-bearing cavalry in Colorado’s volatile coal fields.⁹⁴ Chaplin, under the pseudonym “A Paint Creek Miner,” wrote a poem about her for ISR.⁹⁵ The Appeal called her a “tower of strength” in West Virginia.⁹⁶ The miners urged Jones to accept military demands she leave the state as a condition for her release, according to Turner, who visited her twice. “But she told them to go to hell.”⁹⁷ The Appeal published a front-page photograph of the pair at Cabin Creek.⁹⁸ The newspaper took credit when the military finally released Jones after nearly four months in solitary confinement, editorializing, “It shows clearly that one of the strongest weapons in the hands of the workers is publicity through the Socialist press.”⁹⁹ Warren declined Turner’s suggestion, however, that the newspaper call for miners to “arm themselves to restore constitutional government in West Virginia.”¹⁰⁰

The valley’s labor turmoil also embroiled the Greenwich Village-based intellectual socialist journal the Masses. It charged the Associated Press “Truth trust” with deliberately suppressing news about the violence in an editorial accompanied by Art Young’s cartoon, Poisoned at the Source, which portrayed a man pouring “Lies” into the well of public opinion.¹⁰¹ Both Young and editor Max Eastman were indicted under criminal libel charges filed in New York City on the grounds the figure defamed AP president Frank Noyes. The pair faced up to a year in jail and $1000 fines. “The hope of democratic civilization lies in the dissemination of true knowledge,” associate editor Floyd Dell protested in the journal’s defense. “A criticism of the Associated Press is a criticism of the very heart of the hope of progress for mankind in America.”¹⁰² In contrast, the New York Times’s editorial stance defended the hegemonic interests: It castigated the Masses’s accusations as “glaring falsehoods and owlish stupidities” undeserving of First Amendment protection. After the case languished for two years, the district attorney dropped it.¹⁰³

Chaplin said violence he witnessed against the miners withered any journalistic inclination to be “objective and ‘constructive.’” He editorialized for “direct action” to free a jailed strike leader, and strikers recited his vitriolic sonnet, “Mine Guard.” The county exploded when guards in an armored train fired upon a homeless strikers’ tent colony in the dead of night, allegedly in retaliation for the murder of two mine guards, who supposedly kicked a pregnant woman to death. “Vengeance stalked the green valleys of West Virginia,” Chaplin recalled.¹⁰⁴ Authorities rounded up seventy-five miners, locked them in bullpens, and charged them with murder, for which they would be tried in secret military court. Chaplin rushed to the tent colony clutching a notebook and Kodak camera to report for ISR. He and a colleague bluffed their way past soldiers at Cabin Creek to get within view of Jones haranguing her captors. Hundreds of shootouts erupted between armed miners and soldiers stationed all over. Rumors of violence on both sides grew more embellished—for example, a tale that strikers decapitated mine guards and posted their heads on fence posts.

Chaplin likened the miners to the minutemen, patriotic iconography that underlined radicals’ claim they were the legitimate heirs of the highly mythologized American Revolution heroes’ direct action against tyranny. “Back of it all,” wrote Chaplin of the strike, “was a bitterness born of living in company shacks on company property, of using company scrip at company stores, of being baptized and married in a company church, and of being buried in a company graveyard.” Chaplin escaped the lethal valley to write his article, but when he returned to Huntington he received word of an imminent raid on the Labor Star. A pack of mountain men delivered a wagonload of firearms and barricaded the doors and windows with type cases. “We’ll show ’em that they can’t stomp out free speech in these hills,” grumbled one old man.¹⁰⁵ No raid occurred that night, but on May 9, militiamen ransacked the plant and chucked all stock paper, type, and equipment into the swollen Ohio River. A more militant Chaplin left for Cleveland, where he embraced the IWW’s direct-action agenda and began working for Solidarity, the Wobblies’ official eastern journal.

The Appeal’s Turner headed west, where he witnessed West Virginia’s state-sanctioned violence replicated in the southern Colorado mine fields owned by corporations that John D. Rockefeller Sr. controlled. More than seventy-five people died in an unsuccessful strike to gain the right to unionize, most by gunshot, between fall 1913 and April 1914. ISR accounts in December 1913 discussed the National Guard’s “brute force” and Gatling guns trained on striking miners’ camps; ISR claimed 147 bullet holes pierced a single tent.¹⁰⁶ When Turner arrived in March, he described the armed guards’ menace in inimitable Appeal fashion: “A coward at heart, the Colorado militiaman, drunk or sober, can do nothing and say nothing without a hand on his revolver.” Turner also was skilled in the tools of conventional reportage, and he quoted official affidavits in which women charged the militia with sexual harassment and attempted rape. A miner’s wife related, “Two soldiers grabbed me by the breast and tore open my dress.”¹⁰⁷

The violence culminated in the Ludlow Massacre on April 20, 1914, when two women and eleven children who sought shelter in a bunker beneath a tent suffocated after the National Guard torched the strikers’ tent colony. The discovery of their charred bodies ignited ten days of rampage that came the closest to industrial war America ever has experienced.¹⁰⁸ The tragedy even mobilized the mainstream press, whose cartoonists joined the radicals in portraying Rockefeller as evil incarnate.¹⁰⁹ John Sloan produced the massacre’s most indelible image for the Masses: in his atypically coarse grease-pencil rendering, a miner fires a pistol at an unseen enemy, with the burnt corpse of a little girl draped over his other arm.¹¹⁰ The drawing telegraphed the artist’s unapologetic endorsement of armed self-defense.

Radicals’ Alternative Visual Rhetoric

The image epitomizes the power of visual rhetoric, which aims to persuade through a combination of imagery mediated by text. Sloan’s iconic image is perhaps the most significant of the radical cartoons that functioned to nurture group identity and mobilize collective action. Leslie Fishbein asserts that radical artists’ visual rhetoric comprised “a new genre of politically conscious art intended as a weapon in the class struggle.”¹¹¹ Cartoon historians Steven Hess and Sandy Northrop note that artists sketching in tiny, widely dispersed radical periodicals “were doing work generally well above the caliber seen in the popular press.”¹¹² Michael Cohen credits the radical cartoonists with creating a “class politics of laughter.”¹¹³ The dichotomized imagery compressed knotty Marxist theory into the visual equivalent of seven words: capitalism was the root of all evil. This telegraphic message served radicals well; it made their mission easily comprehensible to workers, many of whom spoke little or no English. The cartoonists’ corpulent capitalist stood as a universal symbol for the vast, largely unseen economic forces redefining the American workplace.

Radical cartoonists could trace their subversive roots back to French painter Honoré Daumier (1808–1879), whose caricatures of King Louis-Philippe landed him in prison.¹¹⁴ Daumier influenced Thomas Nast (1840–1902), the first great American political cartoonist whose “Tammany Tiger” symbolized New York’s corrupt Democratic Party. His 1871 crusade transformed Tammany’s William “Boss” Tweed into a corpulent symbol of evil.¹¹⁵ Illustrated German satirical magazines such as Simplicissimus also influenced the German-dominated radical movement in nineteenth-century America and inspired German-born Joseph Kepple’s Puck, a lushly illustrated satirical humor review.¹¹⁶ In the 1890s, Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst made illustrations a daily part of newspapers. By 1900, hundreds of political cartoonists were satirizing American society.¹¹⁷ Popular-press cartoons safely confined their social criticism to the ubiquitous trusts—an octopus served as metaphor—but rarely explored the plight of the working class.¹¹⁸

Radical periodicals employed an alternative visual rhetoric. Untiringly didactic and perpetually optimistic, radical cartoons ranged from crude sketches to fine art. They enlisted symbolism, stereotypes, satire, juxtaposition, inversion, metaphor, and irony to stir emotions. As Call publishers boasted, “Its cartoons are as purposeful as they are trenchant with wit and humor.”¹¹⁹ A Rip-Saw cover, for example, juxtaposed an outsized devil overseeing the tiny masses in a hellish scenario worthy of Hieronymus Bosch.¹²⁰ Radicals conversely juxtaposed size to empower workers. To make the point that the working class was stronger than the capitalist class, the capitalist in a 1903 Appeal to Reason cartoon only reached the ankle of the burly, bare-armed worker—another stock image.¹²¹ Ryan Walker’s comic strip series, Henry Dubb, relied on another stereotype.¹²² The hapless worker ignorant of socialism was so popular Walker took the character on tour. In 1905, Warren arranged forty dates between Kansas and New York in which Walker sketched Dubb in scenarios discussed by a traveling partner.¹²³

Walker’s work enlivened the New York Times, Mail, Express, Puck, Life, and Judge before he heard Debs and converted to socialism. “His uncanny power for seizing the spirit of things and impaling it upon the moving line places him among the great cartoonists of the world,” bragged the Call, which periodically employed Walker’s talents. “A very great tenderness for the unhappy and the suffering and a great love for humanity fill his soul.” Reform publisher William Marion Reedy called him “The Art Evangel of Socialism.”¹²⁴ Walker’s cartoon of a corpulent capitalist awaiting Haywood at a hangman’s noose in the run-up to the Steunenberg trial filled the entire front page of the Socialist, which used so many illustrations in its early years that publisher Titus initially billed it as a “cartoon weekly.”¹²⁵ Walker believed most socialist papers too type-heavy. He wrote an editor, “A page of cartoons, occasionally, if necessary—whether by me or some on else—lends a new dress to the Appeal—and I know that cartoons are popular. Especially from the socialist point of view.”¹²⁶ Walker, however, declined Warren’s 1914 offer of $40 to work full time for the Appeal.¹²⁷ He continued to send cartoons from the bungalow he and his wife, Maud, mostly made themselves in New Jersey’s Orange Mountains.¹²⁸

Ryan Walker’s cartoon, Waiting!, illustrates the class divisions the Haywood trial symbolized for many workers. Socialist, August 18, 1906.

Unlike those of the humorous Walker, Robert Minor’s (1884–1952) cartoons hit like a hammer. The hugely successful New York World illustrator donated his fiercely anticapitalist images to radical journals such as the Call, Blast, Masses, and Mother Earth in the 1910s.¹²⁹ Minor made a revolutionary impact on his profession in his first job at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch when he switched from pen and ink to a thick grease pencil on textured paper.¹³⁰ Its thick, dark lines simplified drawings because they could not render detail. Minor explained the lack of “affectation in style” forced attention to the idea behind a drawing.¹³¹ An example is his stark 1916 Masses grease-pencil drawing of a Cossack-clad guard bayoneting a striker in Pittsburgh.¹³² The “art-spokesman of humanity” drew pictures “with a prehistoric man’s war club,” as the Rip-Saw put it. “He smashed them onto the paper.”¹³³ The rough naturalistic look of grease-pencil artists became the signature style of the social realists’ working-class portrayals. Socially conscious grease pencil cartoons, left-leaning commercial cartoonist Rollin Kirby claimed, “imply an audience of more mature thought than do those of the cheery bucolic nature which abound in this country’s press.”¹³⁴ Their simple, direct style challenged frivolous popular magazine art that Masses editor Eastman dismissed as “monotonous.”¹³⁵

Symbolism was the commonest technique for telegraphing radical thought. The pro-politics Call, for example, portrayed the socialist vote a fist smashing the head of “Capitalism.”¹³⁶ A hog devouring small business symbolized capitalism in an Appeal cartoon.¹³⁷ Another Appeal cartoon inverted patriotic symbolism when it depicted three aproned workers playing the fife and drums as in the iconic Revolutionary War motif.¹³⁸ Instead of the Stars and Stripes, they hoist a red banner, the universal socialist symbol that connected a far-flung imagined community of radicals.¹³⁹ The U.S. flag usually served as satirical code, as in an ISR cartoon criticizing the government’s alleged abandonment of democratic principles.¹⁴⁰ Radical cartoonists also appropriated the potent symbol of crucifixion, as in a 1908 Call cartoon that showed a child laborer nailed to a cross.¹⁴¹ Besides imagery, text played a key role in framing the illustrations’ subversive messages. F. M. Dowell, in the blasphemous National Rip-Saw, for example, relied on wordplay in a caption when he likened a minister “Praying in Church” to a capitalist “Preying in the Factory.”¹⁴²

Robert Minor’s grease pencil conveyed the brutality of the labor wars. Pittsburgh, Masses 9 (August 1916).

The often graphic, angry cartoons of the radical press remain testimony to the many violent confrontations between labor and employers throughout the 1910s. The Call, for example, illustrated Lower East Side garment workers’ solidarity against “The Boss” in 1913.¹⁴³ The Masses’s Young displayed his lighter touch in a cartoon of a miner giving “Capitalism” the bum’s rush from a big Michigan strike in 1909.¹⁴⁴ Bayonne! a 1915 Mother Earth cover by Minor, featured a prototype of Minor’s classic brainless Perfect Soldier in the muscle-bound brute who chokes a worker during the lethal New Jersey strike.¹⁴⁵

Sloan’s Ludlow illustration is arguably the most powerful of the prewar radical press because it uses no text to mediate the message.¹⁴⁶ Neither does it rely on predictable symbolism. And its subject notably fights back: its visual rhetoric calls for resistance. The Masses’s Ludlow cover shows Sloan’s growth as an artist as well as immortalizes a ruthless episode of American history. Others shared Sloan’s wrath. ISR reprinted his cartoon on its June 1914 cover; inside, it devoted twenty-three pages, five articles, cartoons, and photographs to what it called “The Class War in Colorado.” Editor Leslie Marcy’s lead article ended with a message to John D. Rockefeller Jr., who had embarked on the first image makeover orchestrated by public relations pioneer Ivy Lee to reframe the family reputation: “In spite of your prostituted press, your fawning preachers and college professors, your subsidized judges and their laws, the war is on and will continue until the despised miner shall be master of the mine.”¹⁴⁷ Ironically, given the IWW’s vastly overblown reputation for violence, its official organ, Solidarity, blamed the United Mine Workers for getting entangled in the violent standoff. Solidarity charged that its rival’s failure to enlist workers in other industries in coordinated direct action assured the Colorado miners’ defeat. “They are ISOLATED through the want of solidarity of their fellow workers,” it stated. The charge reflected the Wobblies’ plan for One Big Union of all workers. It also reiterated their claim that the IWW’s call for direct action was nonviolent. “The power of guns is as nothing compared with the power to paralyze industry and stop the flow of profits.”¹⁴⁸

Photographs Bear Witness

The Ludlow atrocities inspired radical periodicals to publish a new kind of visual rhetoric even more shocking than their cartoons. ISR’s June 1914 account of Ludlow included some of the earliest photographs of dead human beings to appear in mass media. Originally published in Cheyenne’s Wyoming Labor Journal, one image showed the body of strike leader Louis Tikas, his face visible above a sheet that covered him from the neck down. Another showed a young boy neatly laid out as if ready for public viewing.¹⁴⁹ Their deaths held instrumental value for editors, who deployed the images to shock and mobilize, key functions of visual rhetoric. As Susan Sontag observes of war photographs, images of the dead create powerful visual rhetoric: “They reiterate. They simplify. They agitate.”¹⁵⁰

Photography also documented police violence against workers. ISR reprinted a Chicago Daily Socialist front-page photograph that showed police pushing female garment workers during a strike in which one woman was killed.¹⁵¹ A thirty-two-page “Graveyard Special” edition of a 1914 Strike Bulletin was a “damning pictorial indictment” of violence against strikers by the Illinois Central Railroad Company, including photographs of the dead and wounded. “A skeptical public was not asked to believe the printed word of condemnation; it was confronted with photographic proof,” Gibbons wrote in ISR.¹⁵²

The text-heavy magazine became an unlikely pioneer in magazine photojournalism when Kerr took over as editor in 1908. ISR’s photographs reflected its heightened graphic sensibilities as type grew taller, leading between lines wider, and white space more abundant. Some of its first photographs illustrated big crowds welcoming candidate Debs during his 1908 “Red Special” whistle-stop rail campaign at hundreds of stations in thirty-three states during the sixty-five days leading up to election day.¹⁵³ Most imagery was more somber as the magazine used photography to document strikes or charges of industrial malfeasance.¹⁵⁴ For example, photographs documented tent cities that sprang up after a mining company evicted workers from their homes.¹⁵⁵ Lewis Hine’s photographs accompanied Carrie Allen’s alarming story in 1911 about child labor in cotton mills.¹⁵⁶ Another, on the effects of phosphorous poisoning in match factories, offered a grotesque photograph of a woman whose necrosis was destroying her teeth, gums, and jawbone.¹⁵⁷ ISR even took its images on the road. “For several years the Review has had its photographers in the thick of every strike and the class struggle in many lands,” stated an ad for a stereopticon lecture, “The March of the Machine,” in spring 1913. “We have gathered the best working class group of photographs in America.”¹⁵⁸

Captions were integral to the photographic frames. For example, the propagandistic caption to a photograph of Bethlehem Steel workers’ dilapidated housing read, “Welcome to All-Interior Slave Pen—Gary.”¹⁵⁹ A photo of a bandaged worker was captioned “Beaten Up by Police” in an ISR account of a 1910 IWW free-speech fight in Spokane.¹⁶⁰ Captions created meaning for eight photographs that illustrated John Murray’s highly readable narrative about a 1909 uprising among Mexican peasants, a portent of the Mexican Revolution that captured the American radical imagination over the following decade. For example, one caption beneath a photograph of a shirtless man carting a big basket read: “A ‘contract laborer’: In Mexico you can buy more labor for less money than any place in the world.” Another, captioned “Old Age and Poverty,” went on: “The Mexican peon has no hope of ever owning a foot of land or saving a centavo.” It appeared below the photo of a white-bearded man holding a cane in his hand and a bundle on his back.¹⁶¹

Conclusion

Socialist and other radical journals enlisted verbal and visual rhetoric to tell labor’s side of what can only be called the American labor wars. Socialist journals functioned to provide much-needed voice for workers in their accounts of the Haywood trial, the West Virginia coal mine wars, the Ludlow Massacre, and countless other conflicts. They countered hostile media hegemony that largely framed labor as a mob. Illustrations by Sloan, Minor, and Walker added a visceral charge to the socialist press mission to forge group identity and mobilize collective action. Hyperbole and outrage characterized the socialist press challenge to political and economic hegemony that sanctioned corporate violence. Old-fashioned American hucksterism may have informed the Appeal’s campaign to free Haywood, but the newspaper never backed down from its fight for basic American constitutional rights, such as a free press. The lengths to which the U.S. government went to silence the Appeal—along with the barrage of varied forms of harassment other radical journals faced—are indicative of how threatening authorities found their message.

Radical press pages may ring shrill, but they indicate how difficult it was for workers to be heard in an information environment dominated by the corporate behemoths, almost always with federal and state governments at their backs. Only the most egregious violence, like the Ludlow Massacre, stirred mainstream media. The Appeal’s claim it saved Haywood’s neck has merit. Not even the outbreak of war in Europe in August 1914 alarmed socialist journals as much as the domestic industrial conflicts. “The war is here!” cried a banner note across the Appeal’s front page. “If John D. Rockefeller succeeds in conquering his rebel slaves his next step will be to subjugate the workers in every state of the union.”¹⁶² By the end of August, when most of the mainstream press focused on Europe, Appeal headlines screamed, “CIVIL WAR IS THREATENED IN AMERICA.”¹⁶³ And that was on page two. All-out civil war never erupted, perhaps in part because some reforms satisfied labor and moguls like the Rockefellers adopted the new panacea of public relations. Hard-won labor rights remain tenuous, however, as evidenced by nationwide protests in 2011 in support of Wisconsin state workers when the legislature abolished their right to collective bargaining.¹⁶⁴

Unfortunately for socialist newspapers and their publishers in the 1910s, too many of their wars were with each other, draining energy from crusades to empower workers and campaigns to elect socialists. Militants charged the Milwaukee Leader and New York’s Call were the products of political machines that had sold out to reactionary trade unions. Gradualists grumbled the Appeal was shrill, ISR too militant. A number of struggling socialist publishers increasingly resented the Appeal’s circulation boom. Critics began to reconsider the Socialist policy forbidding a party newspaper. In the midst of this tumult, the Appeal began investigating another bombing that would blow up in its face.