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

2. Dailies: Socialists Take on the Mainstream Press

CHAPTER TWO DAILIES socialists take on the mainstReam PRessº º º “There was something akin to a holy joy in working for the Daily.” william morris feigenbaum, “Ten Years of The Call”¡ At 11:02 a.m. on May 30, 1908, city editor Gordon Wood and his handful of bleary-eyed staff members put to bed the first issue of their new daily newspaper in a shabby loft at 6 Park Place in Manhattan, soon to be razed for the fifty-seven-story Woolworth Building. When the young, red-headed “printer’s devil,” or apprentice, raced up the stairs with the first papers a couple of hours later, the journalists perked up to examine their product. “We read everything in sight—advertisements as well as the regular stuff,” Louis Kopelin recalled. They grimaced at typographical errors forced by the deadline rush that littered its pages like pesky flies but overall approved of their “kid.” A few hours later, newsboys paced the Brooklyn Bridge crying out, “Wuxtry—new pa-a-a-per! Buy the Call!” That night, nearly every one of four thousand people packed into the midtown Grand Central Palace clutched a penny issue of the New York Evening Call. Nearly all had played a small role in its six-year gestation, some donating pennies to get the press rolling. They cheered wildly when New York Socialist Party chair and emcee, Morris Hillquit, held up the first copy amid the flock of flags and pennants signifying various unions, Socialist Party locals, and the Jewish Daily Forward. Edwin Markham of “The Man with the Hoe” fame read his latest overwrought poem, “A Free 55 56 Black, white, and Red all oveR Press,” written especially for the occasion. Two lines read, “Flash down the sky-born lightnings of the Pen; Let loose the cramped-up thunders of the Types.” Finally, the man whom the workers had braved a torrential rain to hear stepped onstage. They roared when Eugene Debs hoisted the Call and shouted, “Here it is, every line throbbing with the life of the working class!” Then came the closer, the reason the impoverished publishers invited the charismatic socialist leader east, where he proved as popular among urban factory workers as he had with Rocky Mountains miners. “This paper, The Call, this voice of the revolution,” Debs boomed, ”ought to have a hundred thousand subscribers from the day of the first issue.”1¡ ¡ ¡ Call circulation never came close to Debs’s goal, but by the eve of U.S. entrance into the war in 1917, its publishers claimed it was “widely quoted as the ablest expressions for the thoughts of forward looking Socialists.”2 The six-to-eight-page daily was the East’s most important socialist periodical in English. Together with the Socialist Labor Party’s (SLP) doctrinaire Daily People; the politically powerful Milwaukee Leader; debt-ridden Chicago Daily Socialist; and Oklahoma Daily Leader, created in 1917 to oppose the war, the Call comprised an exclusive if destitute club of English-language socialist periodicals that took on the dizzying demands of daily journalism . Not the least of their challenges was financing a publication officially opposed to capitalism. Socialist dailies in foreign languages fared better, an indication of the working class’s preponderance of immigrants. In 1912, New York’s profitable Jewish Daily Forward, or Forverts, published in Yiddish , claimed an enviable national circulation of 120,000, for example, and Chicago radicals in 1910 published daily newspapers in Czech, German, and Polish. These dailies could rely on their ethnic communities for support , according to labor press historian Jon Bekken. “They not only did not compete directly with the capitalist press, they could draw upon their communities’ institutional networks and resources for news, readers, and support.”3 Cash-strapped socialist dailies in English struggled to devise alternative economic models to sustain them in the capitalist economy. This chapter will focus on the Call in its analysis of the role daily newspapers played in socialist culture and political discourse. The newspaper’s management by a publishing committee, its advocacy journalism, and its role as voice of the New York Socialist Party offer useful examples of how dailies 57 social-movement media functioned differently than the mainstream dailies they reviled but whose news template they often followed. The Call and the Milwaukee Leader made the biggest marks of the dailies ; the former mainly by providing a voice for eastern workers, the latter by electing...