DISSIDENT VOICES/COMMON THREADS III

Although the generation of dissident publications that emerged during the early years of the twentieth century consisted of only two genres, that small contingent nevertheless added several more intriguing items to the list of overarching characteristics that define the “voices of revolution.”

DISSIDENT JOURNALISTS WHO ARE UNCONVENTIONAL IN THEIR THOUGHTS ALSO TEND TO BE UNCONVENTIONAL IN HOW THEY CONDUCT THEIR PERSONAL LIVES

An editor of a nineteenth-century publication occasionally broke societal taboos—Moses Harman orchestrating the “free marriage” of his sixteen-year-old daughter to his thirty-seven-year-old co-editor of Lucifer, the Light-Bearer comes to mind. During the early 1900s, however, such maverick practices moved toward becoming the rule rather than the exception. Both of the journalists who led the dissident press boldly into the twentieth century made personal decisions that defined them as unique individuals—one eccentric, the other notorious.

While Robert S. Abbott was using the Chicago Defender to better the lives of oppressed African Americans living in the South, his own personal life was one of conspicuous consumption—grand tours of Europe, a chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce limousine, a mansion filled with expensive antiques. In addition, while Abbott’s decision to divorce his first wife to marry his second was unusual, his insistence that both women address him, even in the most intimate of settings, as “Mr. Abbott” was at the very least quirky, and some could justly say bizarre. Finally, the dark-skinned Abbott’s marriage to women half his age and with skin so light that they could have passed for white also broke social proscriptions that were firmly in place during the early years of the twentieth century—as well as the twenty-first.

Margaret Sanger carried societal rule-breaking to even greater heights, making several decisions that established her as the epitome of the name she gave her first dissident magazine: Woman Rebel. Keeping the name “Sanger” when she remarried broke from a long-standing tradition, as did requiring her second husband to agree—in writing—that his wife would maintain her personal freedom during their marriage. These somewhat unusual activities paled in comparison to her decision to engage in multiple sexual affairs during both of her marriages—sometimes juggling two lovers, in addition to her husband, at the same time. Perhaps the decision that arbiters of proper behavior find the most disturbing involved Sanger’s children; for a woman to travel to Europe for a year without even saying goodbye to her three children—aged ten, six, and four—was not so much a break with convention as a betrayal of the responsibilities of parenthood.

DISSIDENT JOURNALISTS ON THE VANGUARD OF SOCIAL CHANGE SOMETIMES BECOME SYNONYMOUS WITH THEIR MOVEMENTS

The nineteenth-century dissident press provided two examples of editors who were so committed to eradicating particular evils that they came to personify, in the public mind, those campaigns. William Lloyd Garrison and Ida B. Wells-Barnett were widely known as the chief prophets of, respectively, the anti-slavery and anti-lynching crusades. In the early twentieth century, the two leading dissident editors both assumed—and willingly so—the roles as the very embodiments of the movements they founded.

When African American men and women of the early 1900s thought of the Great Migration, they immediately thought of Robert S. Abbott. Indeed, during the height of the massive demographic shift, southern blacks often sent their letters directly to Abbott, asking not only for his general advice but also for a job and a place to stay when they came to Chicago. Critics of the migration connected it to Abbott as well, making him the target of threatening letters written by hate mongers and of public denunciations by southern politicians—including a U.S. senator from Louisiana who accused Abbott of being the sole cause for blacks abandoning the South. Likewise, when scholars of African American history mention the migration, they immediately cite the dissident editor’s catalytic role in it, one writing that Abbott “set the migration in motion” and another identifying him, because of his role in the phenomenon, as “the greatest single force” in the entire 200-year history of African American journalism.

Margaret Sanger is perhaps even more widely connected with the Birth Control Movement. Literally thousands of women addressed their inquiries about contraception not to Woman Rebel or Birth Control Review but specifically to Sanger. It was not surprising, then, that when Sanger died fifty years after founding the movement, the New York Times published her obituary on the front page and labeled the dissident editor the “best-known advocate” of birth control, who had lived long enough “to see much of the world accept her view that family planning is a basic human right.” That the names Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement are synonymous has remained securely intact since her death. Any book, article, or encyclopedia entry about birth control—and there have been thousands of them—would be utterly incomplete if it did not describe the central role of the founder of that crusade and the woman who fully deserved the apt appellation: “The Outstanding Social Warrior of the Century.”

THE MOST SUCCESSFUL DISSIDENT EDITORS ARE ACCOMPLISHED NOT ONLY AT JOURNALISM AND ACTIVISM BUT ALSO AT DEVELOPING STRATEGY

One stringent gauge of the success of a particular editor’s efforts to effect social change is to consider whether he or she witnessed a radical transformation not only in society’s thoughts but also in its actions, vis-à-vis the issue at hand, in his or her own lifetime. This is such a rigorous standard that perhaps the only dissident editor from the nineteenth century who cleared the bar was William Lloyd Garrison. Further analysis suggests that one of the reasons why the abolitionist editor triumphed so remarkably may have been that he was a masterful provocateur—gaining attention for his cause by, among a long list of techniques, creating media events such as publicly burning the Constitution.

In the early twentieth century, two more editors joined Garrison in this elite category of exceptional dissidents. Abbott and Sanger both saw dramatic change, largely because they also proved their mettle as extraordinarily gifted strategists.

When Abbott’s Chicago Defender was on the brink of failure, he had the vision to change his tactics and replace the tepid community news that African Americans were accustomed to reading with more spirited content; although the techniques were both untried and controversial, Abbott began lampooning racist government officials, denouncing black oppression, and sensationalizing the news with front-page banner headlines—many of them in bright red ink and huge letters—in keeping with his audacious promise to create “The World’s Greatest Weekly.” Abbott further demonstrated his talents as a strategist by recruiting black sleeping-car porters to distribute the Defender throughout the South and by producing the militant editorial content that made his paper the country’s largest black publishing venture. Spurred on by his success, the dissident editor next developed the successful formula—vilifying the South, glorifying the North, creating “migration fever”—that helped propel hundreds of thousands of African Americans to abandon their homeland and that made Robert S. Abbott a black press legend, as well as a millionaire.

The elements in Margaret Sanger’s visionary strategy were also incredibly effective. An early enrollee in the all-publicity-is-good-publicity school of media relations, Sanger readily admitted that she made the content of Woman Rebel “red and flaming” to attract comment from the mainstream press; on cue, leading papers across the country responded with a flurry of sensational stories maligning her as a “vile menace” and “raving maniac.” Pleased that the stories and editorials had moved birth control into the national spotlight, Sanger continued to play the commercial press like a violin. Writing articles that dared postal officials to arrest her on obscenity charges, giving lectures on the steps of local police stations to ensure that she would be arrested and jailed on disorderly conduct charges, calling for every woman in America to pledge that not a single baby would be born anywhere in the country for five years—they were all examples of Sanger’s genius at attracting publicity. Other of her tactics were equally successful. Using her pretty face and diminutive size to full advantage, she donned a simple and classic little black dress when she took her message to members of America’s social and intellectual elite, coming away with major financial donations as well as the necessary clout to make birth control an accepted practice.