DISSIDENT VOICES/COMMON THREADS I

The three earliest genres of the American dissident press crusaded on behalf of very different causes—labor rights, the abolition of slavery, and women’s rights—and were spread over a time span of almost half a century—from William Heighton founding the Mechanic’s Free Press in 1828 to Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan Brownell Anthony selling The Revolution in 1870. Despite these distinctions, the first generation of dissident publications not only shared several common traits but also established themes that would continue to define the journalistic “voices of revolution” for the next two centuries.

THE DISSIDENT PRESS SPEAKS ON BEHALF OF THE OPPRESSED

Factory workers, slaves, and women were all members of poor and powerless groups that the prevailing forces in American society had, by the early to middle nineteenth century, shunted to the margins of society. African Americans and women could neither vote nor otherwise participate, in any meaningful way, in public life; laborers were rapidly being disenfranchised, too, because of the growing economic and political dominance of what Heighton so poignantly labeled the “aristocracy of wealth.” The men and women who founded the nation’s first voices of journalistic dissent refused to accept these limitations and set out to level the playing field.

THE DISSIDENT PRESS GENERALLY FACES SEVERE FINANCIAL HARDSHIP

Publications seeking social change are driven by a commitment to and passion for a particular cause, not by the profit motive that propels most commercial media. Many dissident papers are started on a shoestring and remain financially unstable throughout their often-truncated lives. Because the three earliest genres of the dissident American press crusaded on behalf of concepts that were unpopular with the dominant segments of society, the editors of the publications faced severe monetary problems. Denied the revenue that mainstream papers received from major advertisers and large circulations, the editors were forced to beg their readers for support, to endure lives of poverty and deprivation, and to incur onerous debts.

William Heighton pleaded with his readers to subscribe to his paper and patronize his small stable of advertisers—“Your patronage is most desperately desired,” he wrote in 1830. William Lloyd Garrison lived on the edge of destitution; before he was married, he survived on water and stale bread, and when he had a wife and seven children, he depended on wealthy patrons to give him barrels of flour and other foodstuffs to feed his family. The Revolution’s founders had to sell their paper after only two and a half years of publication, leaving Susan Brownell Anthony with such a hefty debt that it took her six years of making speeches to pay it off.

THE DISSIDENT PRESS RECEIVES NEITHER SUPPORT NOR SYMPATHY FROM THE MAINSTREAM PRESS

The experiences of the editors of the nonconformist papers published in the early to middle 1800s established that the Brahmins of American journalism would be consistent detractors of their radical counterparts. Commercial papers in New York denigrated the early labor editors as “rabble” and “the slime of this community.” The New York Herald was no less critical of William Lloyd Garrison, ridiculing the abolitionist editor by referring to his “bald head, miserable forehead, and comical spectacles,” while demeaning the slaves he was so determined to free by describing them as “thick-lipped, pig-faced, woolly-headed, baboon-looking negroes.” Mainstream papers were hostile toward female dissident journalists as well, referring to Susan Brownell Anthony as a “poor creature,” “unfortunate woman,” “unsexed woman,” and “hermaphrodite spirit.”

THE DISSIDENT PRESS DIFFERS FROM ITS ESTABLISHMENT COUNTERPARTS BY ADOPTING THE CONCEPT OF AN OPEN FORUM

Having themselves been denied access to mainstream newspapers, the earliest dissident editors were committed to publishing not only their own ideas but also those of their readers—including ideas in direct conflict with their own. William Heighton demonstrated this concept when he made room for a lengthy letter from a man who was so outraged by the long workday in Philadelphia factories that he insisted that—despite Heighton’s clear opinion to the contrary—European laborers were better off than American ones. The editors who advocated the abolition of slavery and equal rights for women followed Heighton’s lead. William Lloyd Garrison was so determined to provide an open forum, in fact, that he published items from readers that degraded the editor himself—one such article described Garrison as a “fanatical traitor” and another demanded that he be hanged.

DISSIDENT EDITORS ARE PROACTIVE AGENTS OF CHANGE

As men and women who were passionate—sometimes to the point of being obsessed, perhaps even fanatical—about their chosen cause, the first generation of advocacy editors demonstrated that theirs would be a brand of journalism so dedicated to effecting social change that they would not limit their activities merely to printing newspapers. For them, journalism was not a professional calling for its own sake but a means to reach people with ideas, a way to organize and propagandize for a cause.

William Heighton and fellow labor editors Robert Dale Owen and Frances “Fanny” Wright of the Free Enquirer and George Henry Evans of the Working Man’s Advocate not only reported and editorialized against injustices—such as long work days—but also took their demands directly to the Philadelphia City Council and prepared resolutions for several state legislatures, then lobbying for the proposals to be enacted. Indeed, Heighton plunged into the rough-and-tumble of political activism by calling for the creation of a third party for working men—with his Mechanic’s Free Press serving as its official organ.

William Lloyd Garrison, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan Brownell Anthony expanded on Heighton’s model by creating media events, provoking contentious debates, organizing public rallies, making personal appeals to elected officials, and presenting thousands of speeches on behalf of the causes to which they dedicated not just their newspapers but their very lives.

THE DISSIDENT PRESS HAS IMPACT

Although each of the causes championed by the first generation of journalistic rebels was initially, when the publications were founded, far too radical for the majority of the public to accept, the bold ideas that were put forth in the publications eventually filtered into the mainstream of American thought—some decidedly more slowly than others—to become embraced by society as a whole. That laborers should have rights, that slavery is an abomination, that women are fully equal to men—they all became precepts that were not only accepted by reasonable-thinking Americans but were also integrated into the definition of democracy.

MANY OF THE ISSUES CHAMPIONED BY THE DISSIDENT PRESS ARE TIMELESS

Although great strides were taken to right the wrongs illuminated by the early labor press, abolitionist press, and women’s rights press, the concepts underlying this triumvirate of crusades continue to be very much alive more than a century after the publications helped propel them onto the national agenda. The Liberator was fundamentally concerned with race, The Revolution with gender, and the labor publications with class. If asked to identify the three most impenetrable issues facing the American people today, many observers of contemporary society would still automatically list race, gender, and class.