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

426 Pages·2014·6.12 MB·English

by  Linda J. Lumsden

BLACK,
WHITE,
AND RED
ALL OVER
BLACK,
A Cultural History of
WHITE,
the Radical Press in
AND RED
Its Heyday, 1900–1917
ALL OVER
LINDA J. LUMSDEN
The Kent State University Press Kent, Ohio
© 2014 by The Kent State University Press, Kent, Ohio 44242
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 2013042998
ISBN 978-1-60635-206-9
Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lumsden, Linda J., 1953– Black, white, and red all over : a cultural history of the radical press in its
heyday, 1900–1917 / Linda J. Lumsden.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-60635-206-9 (hardcover) ∞
1. Underground press publications History—United States—20th century.
2. Press, Socialist—United States—History—20th century.
3. Press, Labor—United States—History—20th century.
4. Press and politics History—United States—20th century.
I. Title.
PN4888.U5L86 2014
071'.309041—dc23
2013042998
18 17 16 15 14 5 4 3 2 1
To every journalist
who ever took a risk to tell a truth
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Rise of a Nineteenth-Century Radical Press
1 Socialists: National Periodicals in the Heartland
2 Dailies: Socialists Take on the Mainstream Press
3 Bombs and Bombast: Trials of Socialist Newspapers
4 Cacophony: From a “One-Hoss Boss” to a Party Boss in the Socialist Press
5 Wobblies: Journalism as Direct Action by the Industrial Workers of the World
6 Anarchy! Imagining a World without Hierarchy
7 The Intellectuals: Wilshire’s, the Masses, and the Lyrical Left
8 “The Black Man’s Burden”: Race and the Radical Press
9 “What Every Woman Should Know”: Women and the Radical Press
10 Suppression: Silencing the Radical Press during World War I
Conclusion: Radical Media in the Twenty-First Century
Notes
Select Bibliography
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Writing may be a solitary pursuit, but research and publishing are not. Many
people and institutions contributed money, expertise, and moral support during
the eight years it took to make this book.
First, let me thank the folks at the receiving end of my e-mails in the
University of Arizona Library Interlibrary Loan Office. They obtained hundreds
of periodicals, books, and dissertations for me. I am also grateful to other
university units that awarded me grants for archival research. Thanks to UA’s
Social and Behavioral Sciences Research Institute for grants that funded trips to
Bancroft Library at the University of California at Berkeley, Tamiment Labor
Archives at New York University, Pittsburg (Kansas) State University, the
University of Massachusetts Amherst, and the University of Connecticut.
Thanks also to the University of Arizona Foundation for funding research at the
University of Washington. I am also grateful to an excellent academic
organization, the American Journalism Historians Association, for a 2007 faculty
research grant that funded additional research at Tamiment.
I never would have received that funding without generous letters of support
and sabbatical leaves from Dave Cuillier, director of the UA School of
Journalism, and his predecessor, professor emerita Jacqueline Sharkey. Thanks
for hiring me, Jacqueline. Two other women have played key roles in my post-
journalism scholastic career: JoAnne Albers, retired director of the School of
Journalism & Broadcasting at Western Kentucky University, and the late
renowned First Amendment scholar Margaret A. Blanchard. You inspired me as
educators and independent women.
The manuscript benefited enormously from careful readings by authors John
Downing and Elliott Shore, who both have made important contributions to the
literature on the radical press. Other radical press scholars whose work provided
a foundation for my own include historians Jon Bekken, Joseph R. Conlin, Philip
Foner, James Green, Melvin Dubofsky, and Allen Ruff. The Kent State
University Press staff further improved the book every step of the way, from
acquisitions editor Joyce Harrison’s initial interest to managing editor Mary D.
Young and her staff’s shaping of the final product. Freelance copy editor Erin
Holman deserves a medal for the myriad embarrassments she spared me. Any
errors, omissions, or misinterpretations are, of course, my own.
My gratitude extends to the largely unsung librarians at the various archives I
visited. A few who stand out are Randy Roberts and Janette Mauk in Special
Collections at Pittsburg State University’s Leonard H. Axe Library, and Lucinda
Ealy at the University of Massachusetts’s W. E. B. Du Bois Library. A tip of the
hat goes to Georgann Roche for research assistance at the University of
Connecticut, to Jessalee Lumsden Landfried for the same at Duke University,
and to Samuel Lumsden Landfried for technical support regarding the
illustrations. Jess and Sam remain my toughest critics but favorite son and
daughter. You make me proud.
Socialists called each other “comrade,” and I’ve had a number whom I
appreciate for their interest in this book or the diversions they provided from it.
Atop that list perches my sister, Laurie Kamuda, who is as cheerful helping me
get used to a new knee as she is kayaking in search of loons on Adirondack
Mountain lakes. Thanks for the Vermont hospitality from the entire Kamuda clan
—Jeff, Brian, and Joe. At the risk of forgetting someone, thanks also to far-flung
friends: Kentucky comrades Kathryn Abbott and Jane Olmsted; ADK soul mate
Karen Delaney; Manchester (Conn.) Journal Inquirer veteran Louise Beecher;
North Carolina bibliophile Claire Jentsch; photojournalism historian Dolores
Flamiano; my buddies from Enfield High School’s Class of 1971; ex-in-laws
extraordinaire Mark and Marjorie Landfried; Scrabble nemesis Charlotte Keller;
and Arizona cowgirl Maggy Zanger, just one among many UA School of
Journalism colleagues who inspire me on the job and make me laugh off it.
Finally, everyone should be lucky enough to have parents cheering for her
for as long as mine did. My mother, Margaret Lumsden, is not quite sure what
this book is about, but that never dampened her enthusiasm. My father, Lennox
Lumsden, died not long before the book appeared. Although talk of revolution
revolted him, I miss the pride with which he would have greeted Black, White,
and Red All Over, just because his rebellious daughter wrote it.
INTRODUCTION
THE RISE OF A NINETEENTH-CENTURY RADICAL PRESS
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
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 Radicals
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