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

Introduction: The Rise of a Nineteenth-Century Radical Press

conclusion INTRODUCTION the Rise of a nineteenth-centuRy Radical PRessº º º 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 1 2 Black, white, and Red all oveR¡ ¡ ¡ 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 Rad- intRoduction 3 icals 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...