Black, White, and Red All Over: A Cultural History of the Radical Press in Its Heyday, 1900-1917

Conclusion: Radical Media in the Twenty-First Century

294 Black, white, and Red all oveR 294¡ On July 13, 2011, the Canadian magazine Adbusters introduced on its blog the Twitter hashtag #OccupyWallSt. Inspired by the Arab Spring protests in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, Adbusters proposed a protest against the corporate greed run amok on symbolically rich Wall Street. Since 1989, the satirical Adbusters: Journal of the Mental Environment, a self-described “revolutionary magazine with a revolutionary agenda,” has skewered consumer culture and corporate globalization with visceral imagery, sly spoofs, and cogent commentary.1 Although fewer than two hundred protesters bedded down on September 17 in Zuccotti Park—which Occupiers renamed Liberty Square—millions of Twitter Tweets soon propelled the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement to some twenty-five hundred cities worldwide. Social media were OWS’s conduit to the people. Cell-phone cameras flashedimagesaroundtheworldofprotesterschantingtheTumblr-launched OWS catchphrase, “We are the 99 percent.” Hundreds of thousands of independent Facebook pages, Twitter hashtags, and viral videos on YouTube. com mobilized protesters in the global movement that claims no leader. Anyone interested could click on occupywallst.org to learn how to start a local occupation via meetup.com, download the Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-Dissidents, share opinions in online forums, watch live streams of Occupy events on globalrevolution.tv, seek advice in chat rooms on which conclusion CONCLUSION Radical media in the twenty-fiRst centuRyº º º The jury is still out on whether the Internet will fulfill its promise of liberation. charles lindholm and jose pedro zúquete, The Struggle for the World: Liberation Movements for the Twenty-First Century conclusion 295 supplies to bring to an occupation, search for Occupy actions, get directions to them, keep up with OWS General Assembly resolutions, browse the strikingly subversive posters spawned by OWS, or donate money, food, shower space, trucks, or time. Information online was infinite and evolving.¡ ¡ ¡ The parallels between Occupy’s concerns and those of radicals a century ago are striking, as is the digital revolution’s impact on social movement media. As 2013 began, Occupy Wall Street remained the most visible manifestation of an online culture of rebellion that is the twenty-first century incarnation of the American radical print culture nearly decimated during World War I. Before comparing online radical media’s role in the twentyfirst -century, however, the conclusion will consider the fate and legacy of the prewar radical press that set so many precedents for Occupy’s media innovations. an end to the “universal censor” The Post Office continued to refuse second-class mail status to radical periodicals until 1921. The year began badly for proponents of a free press, when the Supreme Court ruled second-class postal rates a privilege and not a right.2 Milwaukee Social Democratic Publishing Co. v. Burleson upheld the Post Office’s right to continue to deny second-class status to the Milwaukee Leader although the war was over. Justice Louis Brandeis’s dissent, however, argued that Congress never empowered the Post Office to rule on any material yet to be published. “If such power were possessed by the Postmaster General, he would, in view of the practical finality of his decisions ,” Brandeis stated, “become the universal censor of publications.”3 The same year, the Court of Appeals of the District of Columbia also ruled in the government’s favor in the Call’s half-million-dollar suit against Postmaster General Albert Sidney Burleson. Since the sedition section of the Espionage Act had been repealed after the war ended, Burleson had justified his denial of the Call’s request for reinstatement of its second-class rate on Section 211, the Comstock laws’ incitement clause.4 Like the Leader, the Call continued to publish and provide a voice and information for its working-class readership despite the suppression. The remnants of the radical press had turned to Moscow in 1919 when the left wing of the Socialist Party splintered further into the Communist 296 Black, white, and Red all oveR Labor Party and the Communist Party of America (although the former soon merged into the latter). Eighteen Communist newspapers appeared in New York alone by 1920, although radical press historian Joseph Conlin argues they lacked the prewar radical press’s verve. He dismisses Communist journals as dull, dense, and doctrinaire—possessed of what he calls “plain pigheadedness.”5 The best-known was the Daily Worker, which originated as the weekly Ohio Socialist (1917–19) published in Cleveland by the Socialist...