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Hundreds of newspapers and magazines published by socialists, anarchists, and the Industrial Workers of the World in the years before World War I offered sharp critiques of the emerging corporate state that remain relevant in light of gaping twenty-first-century social inequity. Black, White, and Red All Over offers the first comprehensive narrative to explore the central role that a broad swathe of social movement media played in radical movements, stirring millions of Americans a century ago.Author Linda J. Lumsden mines more than a dozen diverse radical periodicals-including Progressive Woman, Industrial Worker, Wilshire's, the Messenger, Mother Earth, Appeal to Reason, New York Call, and International Socialist Review-to demonstrate how they served anarchists, socialists, and industrial unionists in their quest to topple capitalism and create their varied visions of a cooperative commonwealth. The book argues that these subversive periodicals were quintessentially American: individualist, independent, socialminded, egalitarian, defiant, and celebratory of freedom. Even their call for revolution resounded from the roots of the American experience.Black, White, and Red All Over explores socialist periodicals in the agrarian heartland; views socialists' attempts to provide alternatives to urban dailies; explores the radical press crusade to champion workers; analyzes the role anarchist periodicals played in their pioneering battles for a free press, free speech, and free love; surveys socialism in the black press; and details the federal government's wartime campaign to suppress the radical press. It draws parallels with Occupy Wall Street's social media movement. Despite the distance from the typewriter to Twitter, Lumsden concludes that twenty-first-century social movement media perform nearly the same function as did their nearly forgotten predecessors.

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USA

United States of America

Media studies

History of the Americas

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Publié par	The Kent State University Press
Date de parution	15 août 2014
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781612778624
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

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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 bayonet