Jump to USA History Section
Newspapers, Magazines and Journals
This section of the MIA would not be possible without the contribution of the Riazanov Library Project
which digitized the overwhelming majority of the publications listed below.
Publications listed that are not linked are digitization projects we have not yet started. Many of the original copies of these papers and journals were provided by the The majority of digitized files found in this section were scanned by the Riazanov Library Project. Additionally, many if not most of these files were provided by the Holt Labor Library in San Francisco, CA.
| The Agitator (and The Syndicalist) (1910 – 1913) | America For All (1932) |
| The Agitator, later renamed The Syndicalist was the expression of pre-WWI revolutionary syndicalism in the U.S. Organized by Earl Ford, J.W. Johnstone, William Z. Foster, they formed various syndicalist organizations inspired by the revolutionary syndicalism of the French CGT. Failing to win over the IWW to this brand of unionism, his followers set up the Syndicalist Militant Minority League in Chicago. Soon afterwards renaming the paper The Syndicalist as the organ of the Syndicalist League of North America. Unlike the IWW which attempted to compete with the AFL head on, the SLNA attempted to “Bore from within” the AFL. | America for All was a short-lived weekly campaign newspaper published by the Socialist Party of America from August through November 1932 in support of the second presidential run of Norman Thomas. A total of 14 issues were produced, all of which have survived, albeit in somewhat damaged condition. The paper included written contributions by candidate Thomas and his running mate, Jim Maurer, as well as an array of prominent Socialist Party intellectuals, such as League for Industrial Democracy’s Harry Laidler, Heywood Broun, veteran author John M. Work, McAlister Coleman, Powers Hapgood, Harriot Stanton Blanch, and W.E. Woodward. Worthy of note is an appearance in print in support of the Thomas-Maurer ticket by Oswald Garrison Villard, editor of The Nation, although he was not himself a party member. Villard characterizes Democratic Party nominee Franklin D. Roosevelt as “a kindly, good-natured gentleman who means well” but who is oblivious to the fact that only “fundamental and radical reforms are going to restore the control of this country to the people to whom it belongs.” The four page publication was richly illustrated with photographs and original art done by Art Young in support of the Thomas electoral effort. Subscriptions were sold although it is likely that circulation was extremely limited outside of Thomas campaign events. Content was focused upon the 1932 election — a race ultimately won, of course, by Roosevelt for the first of his four terms of office. |
| American Labor Union Journal (1902 – 1904) | American Appeal (1926 – 1927) |
| Published weekly by the American Labor Union out of Butte, Montana. As much an organ for the Socialist Party of America as it was a the union itself. | This newsaper was the official organ of the Socialist Party of America in the pre-WWI years. Edited by J. L. Enghdal, it reflected the reformist and electoralist tendencies of the leadership of Party nationally at that time. It was also very much a campaign paper covering the increasing number of electoral victories of the SP during the early years of the World War. Of special note was the coverage it afforded the left-wing anti-war candidacy of Eugene V. Debs. It gave way in 1920 the the party journal The Socialist World |
| American Socialist (1914 – 1917) | American Socialist (1954 – 1959) |
| Journal of the Socialist Party of America in the 1920s. This paper was the continuation of the The Socialist World also published in Chicago. Formally edited by Eugene V. Debs, the paper reflected the centrist leadership of the SPA after the split of the communists in the 1919-1920 period. The archive includes the 100 weekly issues spanning 1926 and 1927. | New York. When the Cochran-Braverman group split from the Socialist Workers Party in 1953, it did not attempt to set up another ‘vanguard’ formation. Instead the organization they formed, called The Socialist Union, was a conscious attempt to pursue a different model. In combination with their monthly magazine, The American Socialist, they attempted to start a new Marxist current that would dispense with the sectarian habits of the past. Although the magazine was published for only six years, from 1954 through 1959, it is still very relevant for today’s activists who are trying to construct new revolutionary organizations that are free of dogmatism and sectarianism. |
| Appeal to Reason 1895 – 1922 | Arbeiter-Zeitung (1877 – 1931) |
| Privately owned Predates formation of the Social Democratic Party. Not formally factional but definitely closer in spirit to the Populist-rooted Chicago SDP than the Marxist-rooted Springfield SDP. In 1904 the paper followed most socialists into the newly formed Socialist Party of America. Filmed multiple times, including by State Historical Society of Wisconsin and Kansas State Historical Society. Digitized as part of Newspapers.com. Later iterations as The New Appeal, Haldeman-Julius Weekly, and The American Freeman, terminating in the 1940s. This paper is best known as one of the Eugene V. Debs primary literary outlets. | The Arbeiter-Zeitung, also known as the Chicagoer Arbeiter-Zeitung, a German language radical newspaper, was started in Chicago, Illinois, in 1877 by veterans of the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. It continued publishing through 1931. It was the first working-class newspaper in Chicago to last for a significant period, and sustained itself primarily through reader funding; the reader-owners removed several editors over its run due to disagreements over editorial policies. The Arbeiter-Zeitung was initially edited by German-American émigrés Paul Grottkau and August Spies. Grottkau departed for Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1883 to establish the Milwaukee Arbeiter-Zeitung, leaving the Chicago paper in the hands of Spies, who was officially named editor in 1884. |
| Art Front (1935 – 1936) | The Black Panther | Art Front was a short-lived American art magazine published by the Artists Union in New York. About twenty-five issues appeared between November 1934 and December 1937. In early 1934 a group called the Artists Committee of Action formed to protest Nelson Rockefeller's destruction of Diego Rivera's mural Man at the Crossroads; Hugo Gellert, Stuart Davis, Zoltan Hecht and Lionel S. Reiss were among the leaders. In the autumn of 1934 Herman Baron, director of the American Contemporary Art gallery, was asked to join them; he offered to publish a bulletin for the group, like those he had previously issued through his gallery. Gellert suggested to the Artists Union that they should collaborate on the project. The name Art Front was suggested by Herbert Kruckman. The first issue appeared in November 1934. Baron was managing editor, with an editorial committee of sixteen, eight from each of the partner groups. Apart from Gellert, Davis and Hecht, those from the Artists Committee of Action were Hilda Abel, Harold Baumbach, Abraham Harriton, Rosa Pringle and Jennings Tofel, while those from the Artists Union were Boris Gorelick, Katherine Gridley, Ethel Olenikov, Robert Jonas, Kruckman, Michael Loew, C. Mactarian and Max Spivak. The magazine and many of the artists associated with it, were politically aligned with the Communist Party, USA | The Black Panther was the official newspaper of the Black Panther Party. It began as a four-page newsletter in Oakland, California, in 1967, and was founded by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale. It was the main publication of the party and was soon sold in several large cities across the United States, as well as having an international readership. The newspaper distributed information about the party's activities, and expressed through articles the ideology of the Black Panther Party, focusing on both international revolutions as inspiration and contemporary racial struggles of African Americans across the United States. |
| The Buffalo Socialist (1912 – 1914) | The Bugle (1922 – 1924) | The Buffalo Socialist was a short lived socialist periodical published in Buffalo, NY by the local Socialist Party of America branch. Thanks to the University of Buffalo web site for the digitization of this publication. | The Bugle was the written record of an attempt to reorganize and rebuild a Socialist Party of Oklahoma from the ashes of it's destruction in 1916 during what was called the “The Oklahoma Insurrection” where the party was blamed The effort was cheered on by retired wallpaper hanger Otto Branstetter, National Executive Secretary of the SPA, who was himself a former Socialist Party organizer in Oklahoma. |
| The Camden Voice of Labor/N.J. Leader [1911-1917] | Chicago Daily Socialist [1906-?] | Camden, New Jersey, located across the Delaware River from Philadelphia, was an industrial city of about 100,000 people in the first decades of the 20th Century. While the history of the socialist and labor movement in such major urban centers as New York City and Philadelphia is frequently studied and more or less well-known, the few surviving issues of The Voice of Labor and its successor, the New Jersey Leader, both published in Camden, provide evidence of the existence of a vital socialist movement in this and other small cities of the industrial Northeast during the Debsian era of the Socialist Party. | Chicago, Illinois. The Chicago Daily Socialist was begun late in October 1906, initially envisioned as a temporary side-project of the weekly Chicago Socialist. Published by Local Cook County, Socialist Party, the paper was created for a special run as a daily for a two week duration, culminating with the November 1906 general election. The paper seems to have been very warmly received from the outset, however, selling well enough that the Executive Committee of Local Cook County made a quick decision to keep the paper as a permanent publication, with the costly 12-page Sunday editions abandoned after the initial two week run. The paper was the second English-language socialist daily in America, following into the field The Daily People of New York City, published from 1902 by the rival Socialist Labor Party. |
| Chicago Socialist/The Workers’ Call [1899 – 1912] | The Class Struggle/Advance (1896 –1902? Undetermined dates) | Chicago — Est. March 11, 1899. Edited by A.M. Simons, this newspaper started as a local Socialist Labor Party publication, becoming a voice of the Springfield SDP after the split of the anti-DeLeon faction in July. Continued through the end of 1901, when it was replaced by the Chicago Socialist in March 1902, going daily as the Chicago Daily Socialist c. 1907 and running until termination in 1912. The short-lived terminal name of the publication was the Chicago Evening World. | San Francisco — Establishment date uncertain, definitely earlier than 1899. Privately owned and edited by G.B. Benham. Publication became The Advance after formation of the Socialist Party and seems to have died in 1902. Master negative for 1900-1902 in three reels is held by Harvard University. |
| The Class Struggle (1917 – 1919) | The Coming Nation (1893 – 1913) | The Class Struggle was a bi-monthly Marxist theoretical magazine published in New York City by the Socialist Publication Society. Among the initial editors of the publication were Ludwig Lore, Marxist theoreticians Louis B. Boudin and Louis C. Fraina, the former of whom left the publication in 1918. In the third and final year of the periodical, The Class Struggle emerged as one of the primary English-language voices of the left wing factions within the American Socialist Party and its final issue was published by the nascent Communist Labor Party of America. | The Coming Nation was a weekly publication owned jointly by Appeal to Reason publisher Julius Wayland and editor Fred D. Warren and initially produced in Girard, Kansas in the Appeal’s state-of-the-art publishing facility. Edited by Algie Simons and Charles Edward Russell, the publication was heavily illustrated and had a decidedly artistic and literary bent, and included regular sections dedicated to women and to children. The paper featured the drawings of Appeal to Reason staff artist Ryan Walker and free lance Art Young. |
| The Communist (1919-1923) | The Communist (1926 – 1945) | The Communist was the name for a series American Communist journals of the same name. All the various factions of the Left-Wing of the Socialist Party of America that went on in 1919 to form the two, original, Communist Parties: the Communist Party of America and the Communist Labor Party, published a journal with the same name: “The Communist”. By 1923 they had all merged into one journal with this name, representing a unified Workers (Communist) Party of America | The Communist was published by the Workers (Communist) Party as a continuation of The Workers Monthly starting in 1926. The magazine transitioned away from the literary and pictorial format from The Workers Monthly to a more theoretical type journal. Monthly publication continued through its name change to Political Affairs in 1945 in accord with the world Communist movement that was seeking a continuation of the WWII alliance with the West. |
| The Comrade (1901-1905) | The Comrade launched in 1901, during the first year of the Socialist Party, The Comrade [1901 - 1905] is viewed by many as the most significant forerunner (some describe it as a "pale" forerunner) of The Masses [1911-1917]. Both are distinguished by the a commitment to present socialist art and literature along with socialist politics. The Comrade was published in New York City. The Comrade printed utopian fantasies as well as revolutionary propaganda (notes Rebels in Bohemia / The Radicals of The Masses by Leslie Fishbein), and included works by Walt Whitman, Heinrich Heine, Thomas Nast, Ella Wheeler Wilcox, Edward Markham, Jack London, Maxim Gorky, Clarence Darrow, Upton Sinclair, Eugene Debs, and Mother Jones. |
| The Crusader (1918-1922) | The Daily Worker (1923 – 1958) | The Crusader was the publication of the African Blood Brotherhood, an early radical Black nationalist organization. The Crusader was founded by Cyril V. Briggs, a former writer for the Harlem based The Amsterdam News. Eventually the ABB joined the nascent Communist Party. | The Daily Worker was the daily newspaper the Communist Party, U.S.A. As the direct descendant of the The Ohio Socialist, The Toiler and other communist journals, the The Daily Worker became the central organ of the U.S. Section of the Communist International, the Communist Party, USA. The launching of The Daily Worker represented the organizational and political consolidation of the various strands of pro-Bolshevik communism in the United States. One of the longest running leftwing periodicals with the same name, in U.S. history. Published in broadsheet format until the 1950s when it became a tabloid size journal. |
| The Democratic Left (1973-present) [no issues are uploaded as of now] | Die Wahrheit [The Truth] (1889-1910) | New York City. Journal associated with Michael Harrington from the split from the Socialist Party USA called the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC). This journal became the organ of the descendent of DSOC now called the Democratic Socialists of America. | Milwaukee. Beginning in 1889 as the weekly summary edition of a German-language Milwaukee socialist daily, this became a separate entity in August 1898. Edited by Victor Berger, this was apparently his main German party publication, as opposed to the trade unionist Vorwärts. Broken run on film from the State Historical Society of Wisconsin. |
| Fight – Against War and Fascism (1933-1939) | Forverts [Jewish Daily Foward] (1897 – 2003) | Fight Against War and Fascism newspaper was the American League Against War and Fascism, an organization formed in 1933 by the Communist Party USA and pacifists united by their concern as Nazism and Fascism rose in Europe. In 1937 the name of the group was changed to the American League for Peace and Democracy. The newspaper folded along with the organization when the Hitler-Stalin Pact was signed in 1939 | Published monthly in New York City for a Jewish-American audience. Founded in 1897 as a Yiddish-language daily, today The Forward is a digital-first publication with online reporting alongside monthly magazines in both English and Yiddish. The Forward's perspective on world and national news and its reporting on the Jewish perspective on modern America have made it one of the most influential American Jewish publications. The Forward is published by an independent not-for-profit association. It has a politically progressive editorial focus. The first issue of Forverts appeared on April 22, 1897, in New York City. The paper was founded by a group of about 50 Yiddish-speaking socialists who organized themselves approximately three months earlier as the Forward Publishing Association. The paper's name, as well as its political orientation, was borrowed from the German Social Democratic Party and its organ Vorwärts. Abraham Cahan, patriarch of The Forward until 1946. Forverts was a successor to New York's first Yiddish-language socialist newspaper, Di Arbeter Tsaytung (The Workman's Paper), a weekly established in 1890 by the fledgling Jewish trade union movement centered in the United Hebrew Trades as a vehicle for bringing socialist and trade unionist ideas to non-English speaking immigrants. This paper had been merged into a new Yiddish daily titled Dos Abend Blatt (The Evening Paper) as its weekend supplement when that publication was launched in 1894 under the auspices of the Socialist Labor Party (SLP). As this publication established itself, it came under increased political pressure from the de facto head of the SLP, Daniel De Leon, who attempted to maintain a rigid ideological line with respect to its content. It was this centralizing political pressure which had been the motivating factor for a new publication. |
| Good Morning (1919-1922) | The Haverhill Social Democrat (1899-1901) |
| Good Morning was an American left-wing humor magazine published from 1919 to 1922 by the cartoonist Art Young. Other contributors included Ellis Jones, Samuel Roth and Mabel Dwight. The first issue appeared on 8 May 1919, with Young collaborating with Ellis Jones. The magazine’s slogan was ‘A Weekly Burst of Humor, Satire and Fun With Now and Then A Fleeting Beam of Wisdom’. Though established as a weekly, Good Morning found survival hard. After a hiatus from July to October 1919 Young (now without Jones) re-established the magazine as a semi-monthly. With its slogan now ‘To Laugh That We May Not Weep’, the magazine kept its “independent, whimsical leftist slant”. | Haverhill, Massachusetts — Est. Oct. 7, 1899. Privately published by the Social Democratic Publishing Association. Local coverage of the booming SDP of Massachusetts and a reliable source for pronouncements of the Springfield National Office. Renamed as The Clarion after the formation of the Socialist Party of America in the summer of 1901. Complete run filmed by New York University’s Tamiment Library and was extremely rare film until recently digitized by Marty Goodman of the Riazanov Digital Library Project. |
| Health (1934) | Health & Hygiene (1935-1938) | Short lived health oriented newspaper whose editor, Paul Luttinger, was close to the Communist Party. Before the excellent informational quality health advice for the public monthly periodical Health and Hygiene (1935 - 1938) appeared, there were produced in 1934 three issues of Health. | Health & Hygiene Publication launched with support from the Communist Party, USA in 1935 to give a leftist perspective on issues surrounding health care in America. It was sub-headed as “The Magazine of the Daily Worker Medical Advisory Board. |
| Industrial Democrat (1910-1914) | Industrial Organizer (1941) |
| Newspaper of the Oklahoma Socialist Party from 1910. Published in Oklahoma City. | The Industrial Organizer, the continuation of the Northwest Organizer which ended in Auguast of 1941, was the voice of the most militant section of the U.S. working class in the late 1941. The Trotskyist lead Local 544-CIO was under attack by both Daniel Tobin, the boss of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and the FDR government who saw Local 544-CIO as a threat to labor peace they were trying to impose on the northern Central States. Much of the paper is is devoted to defending the Local from these attacks are well as reports on other militant actions by the working class during this period. |
| Industrial Pioneer (1921-1926) | Industrial Union Bulletin / Industrial Worker (1907 - 1913) |
| Chicago. The Industrial Pioneer was a monthly publication of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). It was published in Chicago by the general executive board of the IWW from 1921 to 1926, under various editors. The precursor of the Industrial Pioneer was the One Big Union Monthly. The editor of One Big Union Monthly, John Sandgren, used his position to wage war on the Communists in the IWW. When his editorials became too sectarian, the IWW replaced him as editor in 1931, and changed the name of the publication to the Industrial Pioneer. The new editor was a Communist, however, and this alienated the non-Communist majority of IWW members. He was removed as editor in 1922. By the end of 1923, the IWW publications Industrial Pioneer and Industrial Worker were both nearly bankrupt. An organizer with experience in the Oklahoma oil fields, Frank Gallagher, became business manager for both. The Industrial Pioneer lived on, but after the 1924 split in the IWW, the union's decline as an actual labor organization is visible in the Industrial Pioneer, which became more purely educational and historical in flavor. | The Industrial Union Bulletin, and the Industrial Worker were newspapers published by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Representing the socialist and revolutionary syndicalist views of early industrial organizing, these papers chronicalled the fierce, sometimes armed, class struggles of the pre-WWI period during the height of America’s industrial oligarchical period. The IWW was the most radical trade union in U.S. History. |
| Industrial Worker (1906-1907) | Iowa Socialist (1902-1903) |
| The Industrial Worker was the first official organ of the Industrial Workers of the World, launching in January 1906, several months after the founding of the organization in July of the previous year. The 16-page small format publication was issued monthly; some issues do not seem to have survived. Although claims were made of a membership approaching 100,000, in actuality the average monthly paid membership of the organization in the initial two years did not exceed 14,000, and funds were short due to ongoing legal expenses of the Western Federation of Miners and profligate spending on travel and related expenses by President Charles O. Sherman. Consequently the Industrial Worker never exceeded monthly frequency, nor did it attain large circulation. Original issues are a bibliographic rarity. The Sherman faction continued to produce the Industrial Worker until it terminated publication, apparently for financial reasons, midway through 1907. | Dubuque, Iowa. Short lived socialist paper published by E. Holts and A. A. Triller. |
| International Socialist Review (1900 - 1918) | Kapitalistate 1973 and 1983 |
| Monthly magazine published in Chicago, Illinois by Charles H. Kerr & Co. Loyal to the Socialist Party of America throughout the entire course of its existence, the International Socialist Review after 1908 was recognized as one of the primary voices of the party’s left wing. It was the first theoretical journal of the Socialist movement in the U.S. It defended the concept of revolutionary socialism against those who would reduce the Socialist Party to a party of simple reform, championd the Industrial Workers of the World, consistently fought against the expansion of militarism, and provided a vehicle for the leaders of the Zimmerwald Left to relay their ideas to an American audience. | The journal Kapitalistate was published between 1973 and 1983. It was edited by editorial collectives in a number of cities, which varied over time. The collective in the San Francisco Bay Area was the most consistent over time, lead by James O'Connor, but there were also collectives with varying degrees of activity and longevity in: Madison, Wisconsin; Boulder, Colorado; Germany; Italy; the UK; and Canada. |
| Labor Age (1929 - 1933) | Labor Defender (1926-1930) |
| Labor Age was a left-labor monthly magazine published by the Labor Publication Society from 1921-1933. It succeeded the Socialist Review, journal of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society. Labor Age aligned with the League for Industrial Democracy, and during 1929-33 the magazine was affiliated with the Conference for Progressive Labor Action with A. J. Muste playing a prominent role. Other important figures associated with Labor Age were James Maurer, Harry W. Laidler, and Louis Budenz. The magazine advocated industrial unionism, economic planning and the nationalization of industries. It was also a major promoter of the workers education movement. | The Labor Defender was a monthly magazine the International Labor Defense, founded by Communist Party leaders James P. Cannon but included a variety of supporters from other currents like Eugene V. Debs and Upton Sinclair. The ILD began with a discussion between James P. Cannon and "Big Bill" Haywood in Haywood’s room in Moscow in 1925. Cannon recalls that "the old fighter, who was exiled from America with a 20-year old sentence handing over him was deeply concerned about the persecution of workers in America. The ILD was set up with this mind and the Labor Defender it’s monthly pictorial. |
| Labor Herald (1922-1924) | Labor Unity (1927-1934) |
| The Labor Herald was the official organ of the Trade Union Educational League (TUEL). Established by William Z. Foster in 1920 as a means of uniting radicals within various trade unions for a common plan of action. The group was subsidized by the Communist International via the Communist Party of America from 1922. The organization did not collect membership dues but instead ostensibly sought to both fund itself and to spread its ideas through the sale of pamphlets and circulation of a monthly magazine. After several years of initial success, the group was marginalized by the unions of the American Federation of Labor, which objected to its strategy of “boring from within” existing unions in order to depose sitting union leaderships. | Labor Unity was the official organ of the Trade Union Unity League (TUEL). The TUUL was an industrial union umbrella organization of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) between 1929 and 1935. The group was the American affiliate to the Red International of Labor Unions. It was the result of the Communist International’s Third Period policy, which dictated that affiliated Communist Parties pursue a strategy of dual unionism and thus abandon attempts to “bore from within” existing trade unions. |
| The Liberator (1918-1924) | Lincoln Socialist-Labor (1895 - 1896) |
| The Liberator was a monthly magazine established by Max Eastman and his sister Crystal Eastman in 1918 to continue the work of The Masses, which was shut down by the wartime mailing regulations of the US Government. It was a journal which combined astute radical political coverage of events of the day, fine art, poetry, and some of the best left-wing political cartoons in the history of American journalism. | So-called Lincoln Socialist-Labor, actually published in St. Louis, was a side-project of the powerful St. Louis Socialist Labor Party, represented by its weekly newspaper, Labor. The publication provides additional evidence that there was an alternative Socialist Labor Party "in the provinces," potentially representing a decentralized alternative to the Bolshevik-like New York City monolithic centralism of Daniel DeLeon. |
| Lumberjack/Voice of the People (1913-1914) | Maoist, New Communist and Anti-Revisionist Papers (1946 – ) |
| Published in New Orleans during the height of Jim Crow segration, this IWW publication was published weekly by the National Industrial Union of Forest and Lumber Workers, Southern District which united Black and White workers in one big union of woodworkers. The Lumberjack was founded in January 1913 in the midst of a protracted labor strike by the Brotherhood of Timber Workers (B.T.W.) in Merryville, Louisiana. Published by the Southern District of the National Industrial Union of Forest and Lumber Workers, the weekly paper was edited by Covington Hall (1871-1952), a member of the radical wing of the Socialist Party in New Orleans. --Libcom.org | A full listing of the post-WWII “Anti-Revisionist” movement (Maoist, Hoxhaite, New Communist Movement, etc.) publications is maintained in an extensive page in the Encyclopedia of Anti-Revisionism On-Line (EROL). |
| The Masses (1911 - 1917) | The Messenger (1917 – 1928) |
| The Masses was a graphically innovative magazine of socialist politics published monthly in the United States from 1911 until 1917, when federal prosecutors brought charges against its editors for conspiring to obstruct conscription. It was succeeded by The Liberator and then later The New Masses. It published reportage, fiction, poetry and art by the leading radicals of the time such as Max Eastman, John Reed, Dorothy Day, and Floyd Dell. The stunning cover art set the standard for all magazines of the day | A. Phillip Randolph and Chandler Own founded The Messenger in 1917, after joining the Socialist Party of America. They wished to provide the African American community of the time with a radical left perspective and discussion forum. Their perspective differed from that of W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington, whom they saw as part of the older generation. The Messenger opposed World War I, and with it wartime conscription of African Americans. It supported armed self defense against lynching. It considered labor exploitation to be central to racism. It supported the Bolshevik Revolution, When in June of 1919 the left wing of the Socialist Party was expelled/left the SP to become eventually the Communist Party USA, "The Messenger" remained loyal to the Socialist Party. |
| The Missouri Socialist / St. Louis Labor / Labor (1901-1925) | The Montana News (1903-1910) |
| St. Louis, Mo. — Est. Jan. 5, 1901. Organ of the potent Social Democratic Party of St. Louis and that city’s labor movement, which had a strong socialist component from the German-dominated Brewers’ Union. Became St. Louis Labor then simply Labor, billedas the "organ of the St. Louis Socialist Party". Long running paper issued to 195. Two filmings, either individually complete but complete when taken together, by State Historical Society of Missouri and State Historical Society of Wisconsin. | Journal published by J. H. Walsh in support of the Socialist Party. It was, for it's first volume in 1903, published as the Judith Basin News but beginning with the first issue listed below in 1904, changed its' name to Montana News |
| Morgen Freiheit (1922-1988) | The National Guardian (1948-1992) |
| The New York city-based Morgen Freiheit (original title: מאָרגן־פרײהײט; English: Morning Freedom) was a daily Yiddish language newspaper affiliated with the Communist Party, USA, founded by Moissaye Olgin in 1922. After the end of World War II the paper's pro-Israel views brought it into disfavor with the Communist Party and its editor Paul Novick was expelled from the organization. The paper finally folded in 1988. The Freiheit was established in 1922 as a self-described "Communistic fighting newspaper" in the Yiddish language. The paper's chief goals included the promotion of the Jewish labor movement, the defense of the Soviet Union, the advancement of proletarian culture, and the defeat of racism in America | The National Guardian, later known as The Guardian, was a left-wing independent weekly newspaper established in 1948 in New York City. The paper was founded by James Aronson, Cedric Belfrage and John T. McManus in connection with the 1948 Presidential campaign of Henry A. Wallace under the Progressive Party banner. Although independent and often critical of all political parties, the National Guardian is thought to have been initially close to the ideological orbit of the pro-Moscow Communist Party USA, but this suspected association quickly broke down in the course of several years. In February 1968 the newspaper's editorial staff was reorganized. The paper shortened its name to The Guardian and gradually turned towards a pro-Chinese orientation and support of the Maoist New Communist Movement in the United States. During the early 1980s the publication's ideological line shifted once again, this time towards an independent non-communist radicalism. The Guardian was terminated in 1992 owing to declining circulation and financial difficulties. |
| The National Ripsaw 1903-1918 | New Yorker Volkszeitung (1878 – 1932) |
| The National Rip-Saw was a monthly tabloid newspaper published in St. Louis, Missouri. The paper seems to have launched early in 1903, although issues prior to 1908 do not seem to have survived. The publication was edited by Seth McCallen (pseudonym Col. Dick Maple). McCallen, who lived variously in Jacob, Illinois and Nashville, Tennessee, was one of the most reprehensible and vile racists in the history of the Socialist Party of America and a number of articles in the issues from 1908 sound as if they were written by an unreconstructed Ku Klux Klan member. After McCallen-Maple suffered a severe stroke in 1909, publisher Phil Wagner seems to have taken over the editor’s chair and attenuated the racist bilge considerably. The publication is filled with adds for patent medicine, bizarre electro-magnetic medical devices, and other pharmacological bunkum and resembles Wilshire’s Magazine in size and feel. In later years the publication was closely associated with Katherine and Frank O’Hare, joined on the staff by Eugene V. Debs for several years during the 1910s. The National Rip-Saw supported the Socialist Party’s anti-militarist program even after American entry into World War I in 1917. It lost its mailing privileges for political reasons in 1918 and terminated publication. | New Yorker Volkszeitung was the longest-running German language daily labor newspaper in the United States of America, established in 1878 and suspending publication in October 1932. At the time of its demise during the Great Depression the Volkszeitung was the only German language daily in the United States and one of the oldest radical left newspapers in the nation. The New Yorker Volkszeitung began as a daily in 1878. It was edited by Sergei Shevitch from 1879 to 1890. It was later reorganized by Dr. Siegfried Lipschitz, an American correspondent of the Sozialistischer Pressedienst of Berlin, Germany. He succeeded Ludwig Lore as the newspaper's editor. Afterwards the publication was endorsed by the Socialist Party of the United States and the Social Democratic Party of Germany. Its publisher was the Socialist Cooperative Publishing Association which had offices at 47 Walker Street in New York City. The financial crisis of the 1930s prevented members of the Socialist Cooperative Publishing Association from meeting regularly, which made it necessary to shut down printing. Its thirty employees were not released. Two months after the closure of New Yorker Volkszeitung, a new publication, Neue Volkszeitung, was launched as its successor. |
| The New Review (1913 – 1917) | New International (and New Internationalist) (1917-1918) |
| This journal’s purpose was make known “the intellectual achievements of Marx and his successors” to the “awakened, self-conscious proletariat on the toilsome road that leads to its emancipation.” In practice, it proved to be a theoretical magazine by intellectuals, for intellectuals. This was in 1913. Never intending to be ideologically homogeneous, the trend of The New Review over the three-and-a-half years of its existence was from Center to Left. The magazine was active in attempting to make sense of the hot button issues of syndicalism and mass action in 1913, maintaining a sympathetic posture. It provided a forum for the writing of two of the principals of left wing New York literary-artistic magazine “The Masses,” Max Eastman and Floyd Dell. It dealt extensively with the issues of feminism, American intervention in Mexico, the growth of militarism, and the role of the International Socialist movement in the war. | This was the first overly pro-communist journal inspired by the Bolshevik wing of the February Revolution in Russia in March of 1917. Representing the views of the, Socialist Propaganda League of America, a wing of the increasingly pro-Bolshevik Left-Wing of the Socialist Party, this journal was edited by Louis C. Fraina. It merged into other more overtly pro-Communist journals in 1918. |
| New Justice (1919-1920) | The New Majority (1923) |
| Short lived revolutionary communist journal published by the Friends of the Russian Revolution out of Los Angeles. Like many soon-to-be communist journals that sprung up on an ad-hoc basis by left wing members of the Socialist Party of America and IWW, this journal lasted less than and year and was folded into other communist periodicals of the Communist movement founded in 1919. | The New Majority was published by the Chicago Federation of Labor as the organ of the Federated Farmer-Labor Party in the United States. The Party was target of a takeover by the new Workers (Communist) Party it was basically destroyed by this internecine battle between the unionists of the CFL and the WP. |
| New Masses (1926-1948) | The New York Daily Call/New York Leader [1908–1938] |
| New Masses was the continuation of Workers Monthly representing the same political line of that of the Communist Party USA and the artists sensibilities of the art of Masses, The Liberator and Workers Monthly | The New York Call was the first daily Socialist newspaper launched in the U.S. in the English Language. While the Yiddish-language (Forward) and German-language (Arbeiter-Zeitung) socialists of New York City had long had daily newspapers of their own, The Call was remarkable as the first such effort for English-speaking radicals. |
| Novy [other: Novii] Mir [The Truth] (1920-21) | Northwest Organizer (1936-1941) |
| Novy Mir was a Russian language pro-communist publication associated with the new Communist Party of America. Published in New York City. | The Northwest Organizer was published by the Teamsters Joint Council in Minneapolis, Minn. from 1936 through the middle of August 1941. The Trotskyist lead Local 544-AFL was the main force behind the Northwest Organizer and the Teamsters union throughout the upper-midwest during this period. The Local had gone an organizing drive for the entire upper Mississippi/Missouri valley and the paper was launched in the main as the tribune of this organizing drive. |
| The Organizer (1934 – 1940) | The Ohio Socialist (1918 – 1920) |
| Newspaper of the fighting Teamsters Local 574 during the Minneapolis Teamsters Strikes in the summer of 1934. It was produced, varyingly, daily and weekly depending on the class struggle during the summer strike wave that year. It chronicles the 3 large strikes that year that turned Minneapolis around from being a non-union open shop town to a completely union town. The paper was edited by James P. Cannon. Teamsters Local 574 was organized by and politically lead by Trotskyists of the Communist League of America, the U.S. Section of the International Left Opposition. | Newspaper of the Ohio Socialist Party it represented the Left Wing of the Socialist Party of the America. The newspaper reflected the strong anti-war positions of the mostly immigrant Cleveland working class and the Ohio Socialist became the tribune for this sentiment throught Ohio and other parts of the eastern Mid-West. Strong supporters of Eugene V. Debs it’s editors and readers became supporters of the newly founded Communist Labor Party in 1919. It merged The Communist to become The Toiler as the main weekly of the new communist movement |
| The People (1899 – 1907) | The People |
| Published in New York City, this version of The People was published by a breakaway faction of the Socialist Labor Party lead by Morris Hillquit. The paper appeared under the same masthead of the original official SLP The People and even used the same mailing list. The paper was renamed The Worker. Both The People and The Worker listings are on the same page. | The People was an official organ of the Socialist Labor Party of America (SLP), a weekly newspaper established in New York City in 1891. The paper is best remembered as a vehicle for the ideas of Daniel DeLeon (1852–1914), the dominant ideological leader of the SLP from the 1890s until the time of his death. The paper became a daily in 1900, reverting to weekly publication in 1914 for budgetary reasons. Publication of the paper was moved to Palo Alto, California during its later years, finally terminating publication in 2008. Its 117 years of continuous publication make The People the longest running socialist newspaper in the history of American political radicalism. Daily (1900-1914), Weekly (1914-?), Monthly (2003-2008). |
| Political Affairs (1945 - 2016) | The Progressive Dentist |
| New York. The magazine was a publication of the Communist Party USA and was founded in 1944 upon the closure of its predecessor, The Communist, which was founded in 1927. Well-known editors of Political Affairs Magazine included V.J. Jerome, Gus Hall, Hyman Lumer, Herbert Aptheker, Gerald Horne, and Joe Sims. Other editors included Max Weiss (activist). In 2016, the magazine stopped publishing articles and merged with People's World. | The Progressive Dentist was published between 1912 and 1915 and was a project of the Dentists's Study Group of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society. The Dentists' Study Group of the ISS was headquartered in New York City and based among students and alumnae of the New York College of Dentistry. The Intercollegiate Socialist Society, founded in 1905, was non-aligned but in the orbit of the Socialist Party and had an office for several years at the Rand School. In 1911 the ISS had 41 chapters on as many campuses, including affiliates at Wesleyan University, University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, Harvard, Princeton, and Barnard College. In 1921 the ISS changed its name to the League for Industrial Democracy. |
| The Proletarian (1918 – 1931) | Proletarec (1906-1918) |
| Detroit/Chicago. The official organ of the Proletarian Party of America was a monthly magazine called The Proletarian, which originally served a newsheet for the left wing inside the Socialist Party of Michigan. The Proletarian launched in May 1918 and continued to be issued each month until July 1931, when it was superseded by Proletarian News, which was launched in 1932 and terminated in July 1960. Both publications were monthlies | Chicago. In 1905, Frank Petric and Joze Zavertnik began publishing in Chicago Glas Svobode ("Voice of Freedom"), a socialist newspaper intended for Slovene workers in the United States. A year later Petric and Zavertnik left the Svobode to publish Proletarec under the South Slavic Workers Publishing Co., becoming the first editors of a paper aimed at promoting socialism and the cultural values of the Slovenian population. Proletarec served the interests of the Slovenian members of the Yugoslav Socialist Federation (YSF), a political and cultural organization composed of Serbs, Croats, and other Slavic immigrants. Based in Chicago, Proletarec began circulation in January of 1906 as a monthly publication with only 100 subscribers. In 1908, Proletarec became a weekly publication under the direction of Ivan Molek, who acquired the position of editor-in-chief the previous year. In 1907, Proletarec increased its readership by publishing an additional section in Croatian, which effectively extended its ability to reach the Croat members of the YSF. Proletarec's conscious efforts to maintain and extend readership to immigrant Slovene socialists continued throughout its history. |
| Proletarian News USA (1931 – 1960) | Revolt San Francisco (1911-1914) |
| Detroit/Chicago. The official organ of the PPA was a monthly magazine called The Proletarian, which originally served a newsheet for the left wing inside the Socialist Party of Michigan. The Proletarian launched in May 1918 and continued to be issued each month until July 1931, when it was superseded by Proletarian News, which was launched in 1932 and terminated in July 1960. Both publications were monthlies. During its final years, Proletarian News was produced via mimeograph owing to the small size of the party membership. | San Francisco. Revolt 'The Voice Of The Militant Worker' was a short-lived revolutionary weekly newspaper published by Left Wingers in the Socialist Party Local San Francisco in 1911 and 1912. Associated closely with this newspaper was labor militant Tom Mooney. |
| The Revolutionary Age (1918 – 1919) | Revolutionary Age (1929 – 1932) |
| The Revolutionary Age was an American Marxist newspaper edited by Louis C. Fraina and published from November 1918 until August 1919. Originally the publication of Local Boston, Socialist Party, the paper evolved into the de facto national organ of the Left Wing Section of the Socialist Party which battled for control of the Socialist Party throughout the spring and summer of 1919. With the establishment of the Left Wing National Council in June 1919, the paper was moved from Boston to New York City and thus gained status as the official voice of the nascent American communist movement. The publication was terminated in August 1919, replaced by the official organ of the new Communist Party of America, a weekly newspaper known as The Communist. It should be pointed out that there were several, perhaps a dozen, various communist factional newspapers that arose during the rise of the Socialist Party’s pro-Bolshevik revolutionary wing. Each them were nuanced slightly in how they supported the Russian Revolution and what needed to be done to build a pro-Bolshevik wing inside the Socialist Party or, as the case was, split to form a new, Communist Party. | Revolutionary Age was the twice-monthly journal of the Communist Party (Majority Group) associated with the International Right Opposition and N. Bukharin in the U.S.S.R. The paper started publicaction within a few months of The Militant, the paper of the Left Opposition. Jay Lovestone was the best known leader of this Right Opposition organization. The journal ran for 2 years when it morphed into Workers Age in early 1932. |
| Science for the People (1970 – 1989) | Social Democratic Herald (1898 – 1913) |
| Science for the People was the left-wing bi-monthly periodical published by Scientists and Engineers for Social & Political Action (SESPA). SESPA, which soon took on the name Science for the People (SftP), emerged from the 1960's New Left in the United States. Shaped by the Antiwar and Civil Rights Movements, SESPA cohered a radical critique of contemporary science out of university-based activism and left-wing caucuses in various scientific professional associations. The organization was closely identified with its member-subscribers' confrontational tactics against proponents of violent and oppressive applications of science. SftP authors made vital contributions to many areas of science activism, including the anti-racist and feminist critiques of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, which had attempted to re-legitimize biological determinism in the 1970's. | Chicago — Est. July 9, 1898. Official organ. Complete, although issues from April to Nov. 1901 inadequately filmed and partially illegible. Paper moved to Milwaukee after the Joint Unity Convention and lost its status as official organ, becoming a privately-owned arm of Victor Berger’s publishing empire. Forerunner of Milwaukee Leader. |
| The Social Democrat and Railway Times (1897 – 1900) | The Socialist (1900 – 1910) | Publication of the American Railway Union first titled Railway Times it was the organ Eugene V. Debs industrially organized union for all railroad workers unions. In July of 1897 it was renamed The Social Democrat. | Seattle, Washington — Est. August 12, 1900. Editor was the radical Hermon Titus, who started the paper in connection with the Debs campaign of 1900 and kept it rolling until 1910, moving at one point to Toledo, Ohio and back home again. Filmed by University of Washington (complete for early issues) and State Historical Society of Wisconsin (complete for later issues) — complete run when the filmings are considered together. First several years have been digitized, later years have not. After formation of the SPA, became the more or less official organ of the left wing. |
| Socialist News (1914 – ?) | Socialist Party of America — Official Bulletins (1904 – 1913) |
| Socialist News was the official organ of the Communist Party of Cleveland and Vicinity. It was published weekly, in the US state of Ohio, starting in 1914, and appears to have had a small circulation and limited distribution. | Socialist Party of America — Official Bulletins were the internal official organ of Socialist Party and were published in Chicago as an official periodical of the Socialist Party of America National Committee. |
| Socialist Review (1934-1937) Known previously as American Socialist Quarterly | The Socialist Woman (1907 – 1914) |
| Socialist Review wast the official magazine of the Socialist Party of America in the 1930s and 1940s. Starting out as American Socialist Quarterly the name changed to Socialist Review in September 1937. Even with the name “Quarterly” in it’s title, the magazine was monthly starting from Volume 5, No. 1 in March of 1936. The journal reflected the dominent “Militant” tendency that was composed of of the ‘center’ leadership of the SPA whose main leader was Norman Thomas, though he was not formally part of this caucus in the Party. There was both a growing left wing lead by the American supporters of the movement for the Fourth International lead by former CPUSA member James P. Cannon and grouped around the weekly periodical Socialist Appeal. There was also the right-wing tendency associated with the magazine New Leader inside the SPA. We have only narrow listing of years for the magazine below, 1934 through most of 1937. | The Socialist Woman (1907-1914) was a monthly magazine edited by Josephine Conger-Kaneko. Its aim was to educate women about socialism by discussing women's issues from a socialist standpoint. It was renamed The Progressive Woman in 1909 and The Coming Nation in 1913. Its contributors included Socialist Party activist Kate Richards O'Hare, suffragist Alice Stone Blackwell, orator Eugene V. Debs, poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox, and other notable writers and activists. |
| The Socialist World (1920 – 1926) | Sojourner Truth (1969 – 1985) |
| The Socialist World was the descendent of The Socialist Appeal published in Chicago as an official periodical of the Socialist Party of America and edited by Eugene V. Debs. It ceased publishing in August of 1926 and was merged with The New Leader a SPA publication out of New York City. | The Sojourner Truth Organization, according to historian Michael Staudenmaier, was an American "revolutionary group based largely in Chicago during the 1970's and 1980's. STO, as it is commonly known, created a small but vibrant political tendency around the concepts of challenging dual consciousness, opposing white supremacy, supporting extra-union organizing in factory settings, defending anti-imperialist and national liberation struggles, and building an internal culture of intellectual rigor and sophistication." This section contains the mass paper Insurgent Worker , it's theoretical journal Urgent Tasks and variety of pamphlets and subject indexes |
| Solidarity | Spravedlnost [Justice] (1900 – 1914) |
| Solidarity was newspaper published by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) from 1909 through 1917. Solidarity was the largest circulation English language IWW publication. Founded in 1909 and edited for most of a decade by Ralph Chaplin, Solidarity demonstrated the best of the IWW's propaganda skills. Songs and art that have become emblematic of the IWW, many of them written and drawn by Chaplin, appeared first on its pages. | Chicago — Est. March 10, 1900. Czech-language weekly edited by F. Hlaváček, regarded as one of the key figures of Czech-American socialism. Only a few scattered issues of this paper, the circulation of which hit 6,000 in 1903, have survived. |
| Southern Worker (1930 – 1937) | Soviet Russia Pictorial (1923) |
| The Southern Worker was a newspaper the Communist Party set up in Birmigham, Alabama, in the “Deep South” of the U.S. Designed to spread organize workers inthe CP it directly confronted the racism of Jim Crow segration. Starting in the middle of the “Third Period” during this ultra-left period between 1928 and 1935. This paper became a major exponent of the “Black Belt Theory” that raised the demand of a Black Nation in the heart of the South. | Soviet Russia Pictorial was the monthly magazine of the friends of Soviet Russia (FSR). The FSR was formally established in the United States on august 9, 1921 as an offshoot of the American labor alliance for trade relations with Soviet Russia. It was launched as a "mass organization" dedicated to raising funds for the relief of the extreme famine that swept Soviet Russia in 1921, both in terms of food and clothing for immediate amelioration of the crisis and agricultural tools and equipment for the reconstruction of Soviet agriculture. In 1924 it was merged with Workers Monthly and the Labor Herald to become The Liberator. |
| Studies in Socialism (1907) | The Toiler 1899-1904 | Girard, KS paper | A privately owned tabloid newspaper published every Friday in Terre Haute, Indiana — home town of socialist leader Eugene V. Debs. The paper was one of two English-language weekly closely associated with the Social Democratic Party with headquarters in Chicago, the other being the official organ of the party, the Social Democratic Herald. It is believed to have been first launched early in the spring of 1899. |
| The Toiler (1919 – 1922) | Trotskyist Journals (USA) (1928 – ) |
| The Toiler was a weekly regional transitional publication of the American Communist movement. Although little-known, the paper occupied a significant place between its state-oriented Socialist Party predecessor, The Ohio Socialist, and its well-known national Communist successor, The Daily Worker. Some 113 issues were produced on the road from Point A to Point B, a trip which took more than three years. The transitional nature of this publication reflected the ongoing fationalism in the communist movement during the consoldiation of the movement into one national party instead of the previous two parties, the Communist Labor Party and the Communist Party of America. The paper was published out of Cleveland, Ohio, as was its predecessor, The Ohio Socialist but moved to New York City and became the main, central public "labor" organ of the United Communist Party and then the merged CP. On its masthead read “Official Organ of the Communist Labor Party of Ohio”. The Toiler was edited by Elmer T. Alison. The size of the paper varied all the way from large broadsheet down to journal size before it merged with Workers Council paper and became The Worker which then, going daily, became the Daily Worker. | All U.S. Trotskyist periodicals are located in the newspaper section of the Encyclopedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL). We have full runs of The Militant and The New Militant 1928 – 1936; Socialist Appeal 1937; Labor Action, 1936 – 1937; and many others. |
| Voice of Industry (1845-1848) | Voice of Labor (1923 – 1924) |
| Voice of Industry was a worker-run newspaper published between 1845-1848, at the height of the American Industrial Revolution. The Voice was centrally concerned with the dramatic social changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution, as workers came to depend on corporations for a wage. Published out of Massachusetts, varyingly by different "Working Men’s Associations" or individual publishers, it championed the conditions of working class women in the textile mills of Lynn Massachusetts. | |
| Voice of Labor was published by the Workers (Communist) Party is its Chicago organ, focusing on the building of the Farmer-Labor Party, a project initiated by the Chicago Federation of Labor in 1921. Primarily an organ of factional intervention by the Workers Party, which was intent on taking over the Farmer-Labor Party project from the CFL. As the intervention itself was cut short by the blowing up of the project by the CP, the Voice of Labor itself was shortly shutdown |
| Vorwärts [Forward] (1898 – 1935) | The Washington Socialist (1914 – 1915) |
| Milwaukee. Beginning as a special Sunday edition of a German-language socialist daily published in Milwaukee from 1887, this became a separate entity (the organ of the Milwaukee AF of L) in August 1898. Edited by Victor Berger, with a full run preserved on film, master negative held by the State Historical Society of Wisconsin. This paper continued to be published until 1932. | |
| The Washington Socialist was a newspaper of the Socialist Party of America based in Everett, Washginton. Closely aligned with the militant IWW it was the voice of socialism in the Pacific Northwest for it’s short 18 month run. |
| The Western Comrade | Western Worker (1932 - 1937) |
| The Western Comrade was a socialist magazine published in the 1910s in Los Angeles, California. It was associated with the Llano del Rio utopian community of 1914-1918. The Western Comrade began publishing in April 1913. It published 5 volumes, the last issue dated March-April 1918 (by which time the publication had moved from California to Louisiana along with much of the Llano colony). Two later issues of a sixth volume followed in 1918 under the title "The Internationalist", before the magazine folded. | |
| Newspaper of the Communist Party, USA, published in San Francisco and covering the western the states. Highlights include coverage of the 1932 and 1933 agricultural workers strikes in California and later, the 1934 Maritime Strike and SF General Strike. |
| Wilshires Magazine | Toronto, later New York City, 1901-1915. One of the largest circulation North American socialist publications ever published. |
| The Woman Today | The Worker [incorporating The People] (1901-1903) | New York City. A Communist Party sponsored and supported women's publication to compete with the many capitalist commercial women's magazines of the day. Included are two issues of The Working Woman | The Worker NYC. Was the organ of the Social Democratic Party, a recent split from the Socialist Labor Party. Previously, the paper was titled The People. All known issues of this important publication are presented here. It should be noted that many issues of The People from 1899 and 1901 are either lost to the world or remain to be discovered in libraries and archives around the United States. This deficiency is regrettable but unavoidable. The Worker continued its weekly publication schedule through December 1908, when it was discontinued in favor of the New York Call, a daily newspaper launched six months earlier. |
| The Worker (1919 – 1920) | The Worker (1923-1924) | Representing the Boston and vincity are branches of the newly formed Communist Party, The Worker was a short-lived organ of these early Massachussetts Communists. The Worker was shortly merged with other regional and natioanl communist publication efforts. | The Worker was the direct predecessor of The Daily Worker, the daily organ of the newly unified Communist Party. Run as a weekly for most of it's one year existence, the plans for a daily newspaper were already in the works when The Worker started publication in early 1923. As a reflection of the unifying spirit of the new Workers Party of America in January 1922, The Toiler was merged with the bi-weekly The Workers Council. The following month the combined publication was given a new name, The Worker, beginning with issue #208. Despite the modified moniker, the "new" publication looked and felt like The Toiler in every way, even making use of the same numbering run. |
| Workers Age (1931 – 1941) | The Workers’ Call/Chicago Socialist |
| Continuation of Revolutionary Age published by the Communist opposition block known as the “Communist Party, U.S.A. – Majority Group”. Notable writers for this publication included Ben Gitlow and Jay Lovestone. | Chicago — Est. March 11, 1899. Edited by A.M. Simons, this newspaper started as a local Socialist Labor Party publication, becoming a voice of the Springfield SDP after the split of the anti-DeLeon faction in July. Continued through the end of 1901, when it was replaced by the Chicago Socialist in March 1902, going daily as the Chicago Daily Socialist c. 1907 and running until termination in 1912. The short-lived terminal name of the publication was the Chicago Evening World. |
| Workers Challenge | Worker’s Council (1921) | The United Toilers of America, established in 1922, was the legal wing of an underground Marxist group which split off from the Communist Party of America in the fall of 1921. The organization published a weekly newspaper called Workers Challenge and was effectively dissolved at the insistence of the Communist International by the time of the Bridgman Convention of August 1922 with its members rejoining the mainline Workers Party of America. A tiny underground rump organization resisted merger and continued an independent existence throughout the decade of the 1920s. We have here listed the only known issues of Workers Challenge. We don't know if the paper continued beyond 1922 though we know the UTA did continue to at least 1929. | The Worker’ Council were primarily devoted to events within the world of American radical politics. The journal’s specific purpose was to win the Socialist party of America (S.P.A.) to affiliation with the recently founded Third or Communist International (Comintern). Its publishers included some Socialists who were apparently part of the party establishment. J. Louis Engdahl, for example, was editor of the S.P.A.’s official organ, The Eye Opener. Others were Benjamin Glassberg, a New York City schoolteacher; Moissaye J. Olgin, a popular Jewish writer; and J. B. Salutsky, editor of the radical Jewish weekly, Naye Welt. All were at least personally connected with the party’s Jewish Federation and, organized after mid-1920 as the Committee for the Third International, they comprised the S.P.A.’s left Wing. |
| The Workers Monthly (1924 – 1927) | Workers Theatre (1931 – 1933) | Workers Monthly is the continuation of The Liberator and also a merger with Soviet Russia Pictorial and the TUEL's Labor Herald. Arguably the greatest radical magazine ever produced in America which began in the spring of 1918 as a successor to the New York left wing political, artistic, and literary magazine The Masses, which had been effectively terminated by postal censorship and Justice Department prosecution during World War I. Workers Monthly continued the cover art-work often created with charcoal and simple paints one found on the covers of The Liberator. | Workers theatre was a theatre-oriented magazine put out by the Communist Party USA in 1931, 1932, and 1933. It started as crude mimeographed issues with rough sketches drawn on the covers and inside. In May of 1932, it appeared as a typeset, more professional – looking publication, with some half tone photos on the cover and inside. Its final issue was July-August 1933. After that, it was succeeded by New Theatre, whose first issue was September - October 1933, and which then came out roughly monthly in 1934, 1935, and 1936. New Theatre had lavish production values, with beautiful and varied color cover art. |
| The Workers World (Kansas City, 1919 – 1920) | Young Comrade (1923 – 1928) |
| The Workers World a weekly publication of the Socialist Party in Kansas City, Missoiuri. It was edited at varying times by both Earl Browder who later went on to become Sect’y of the Communist Party and James P. Cannon, also a leader of the Communist Party who went to found the Trotskyist movement in the U.S. While associated with the Socialist Party, the paper was firmly in that party’s left-wing. It was one of the many left wing SP periodicals inspired by and firmly supporting the Russian Revolution, and (like many other such left wing SP periodicals) ended as those involved in it left the SP to organize the new Communist Party of America and Communist Labor Party, and develop new periodicals for those organizations. Because of this, these issues of The Workers World are located in the Communist Party, USA archive on the MIA. | Representing the Junior Section of the Young Workers League this publication was oriented toward younger than older teenagers and young adults of the Young Worker’s audience: children 8 through 12, often the children of older Communist Party members. There are contributions in the journal by children as young as 8 years old. |
| The Young Socialist (1957 – 1964) | The Young Worker (1922 – 1927) |
| The Young Socialist is the magazine of the Young Socialist Alliance, associated with the Socialist Workers Party in the U.S. The early years of the YS however, reflected a regroupment of revolutionary socialist forces among young people and radicals in the 1950s that was beginning to take place around the various events of the era, most notably the Khrushchev revelations from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union’s 20th Party Congress in 1956 along with the Soviet invasion to crush the Hungarian workers revolution that year had a profound effect on Marxists across the board. The ending in that decade with the victory of the Cuban Revolution capped this new world situation that socialists were reacting too. Domestically the progressive and socialist back-lash to McCarthyist-era repression against the Left dovetailing with the rise of the new Civil Rights movement started drawing young people from the enforced cultural and political lethargy into active political action around these issues. | The Young Worker was the organ of the Young Workers League, the first youth group of the early American Communist Party. Running through at least 1927, this monthly was initially edited by later-Trotskyist Max Shachtman, the YWL’s first General Sectretary. Unlike it’s parent organization, the Communist Party, the YWL was a legal outlet for communist work among the youth. |
* * *
| Listing of Trotskyist Journals USA (1928 – ) | Listing of Maoist, New Communist and Anti-Revisionist Papers (1946 – ) |
| All U.S. Trotskyist periodicals are located in the newspaper section of the Encyclopedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL). We have full runs of The Militant and The New Militant 1928 – 1936; Socialist Appeal 1937; Labor Action, 1936 – 1937; and many others. | A full listing of the post-WWII “Anti-Revisionist” movement (Maoist, Hoxhaite, New Communist Movement, etc.) is maintained in an extensive page in the Encyclopedia of Anti-Revisionism On-Line (EROL). |
Books
1840: Democracy in America, by Alexander De Tocqueville
1921: History of the United States, by Mary Beard. Note: This book is a secondary source.
1926-1929: Red Cartoons, by Fred Ellis and Jacob Burk, cartoonists for the The Daily Worker. [All 4 volumes published]
1935: CPUSA: Manual on Organisation: This booklet was published in 1935 and became an indispensible tool for party members around the USA on how to conduct every aspect of their affairs: from organising Shop, Town, and Street Units to disciplinary measures.
1935: Hunger and Revolt Book of political cartoons by Jacob Burck
Pamphlets
Little Red Library 11 pamplets published by the Communist Party USA in the 1920s
Trade Union Educational League Pamphlets 20 pamphlets
U.S.A History Section
| Early American Marxism | Industrial Workers of the World (1905-present) |
| American Marxism didn’t spring from nothing during the Great Depression, there were over sixty years of conflict and struggle before the stock market fell with a thud. Early American Marxism compiles organizational histories and collects documents relating to American radicalism’s early years – from the First International in America to the Socialist Labor Party to the Socialist Party to the Communist Party (and including the Foreign Language Federations that played such a pivotal role in the early American movement). | The IWW was the most successful revolutionary syndicalist unions ever oganized in the United States. Founding members including Eugene V. Debs, Daniel Deleon, Vincent St. John and many others. The “Wobblies” as they were nick-named went on to lead some of the most important strikes in American history, such as the 1912 Lawrence Textile Strike documented on this page. |
| The Triangle Fire (1911) | Lawrence, Mass. Strike (1912) |
| A collection of articles from The New York Call, documenting the disastrous fire that stimulated the growth of unionism among the Italian and Jewish workers in the needle trades in New York, and the passing of fire, building and health regulations. | In Lawrence, Massachussettes, europeans immigrating to the US were able to find work. Lawrence was a “mill town” – around half of its 85,000 residents over the age of 14 were working in the mills. Health conditions were so deplorable in the mills that one-third of Lawrence residents died before the age of 25. When the government reduced the working week with mill owners immediately lowering wages, 20,000 unionised workers walked out of the mills. |
| Teamsters Strike, Minneapolis (1934) | Shell Strike (1973) PDF pamphlet |
| The Minneapolis Teamster strikes of 1934 were among the most important strikes in US labor history. Vicious battles between police, scabs and truckers broke out throughout the summer of 1934 resulting in the workers being in full control of the city of Minneapolis with the police and scabs chased off the streets. These same truckers went on to organize the entire Upper Mid-west trucking industry with more than 250,000 members enrolled. | OCAW (Oil, Chemical & Atomic Workers’ Union) Strike against Shell Oil, after continual health and safety concerns went unaddressed by the bosses. Shell, the fourth largest company in the world (at the time), refused to be held accountable for the lack of workers’ safety nor would they allow the workers to change existing health and safety ‘standards’. On January 23, 1973, 4,000 men and women – from the US West coast to the Gulf of Mexico – walked out of five refineries and three chemical plants. |
| Sacco and Vanzetti Case (1920-1927) | Black Liberation and Civil Rights in the U.S. (1800s-present) |
| Italian-American anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were arrested on May 5, 1920, during the height of the infamous "Red Scare" after World War I. They were convicted of robbery and first-degree murder in a sham trial. On April 9, 1927 they were scheduled to die in the electric chair and that sentence was carried out a few minutes after midnight on August 23, 1927. | This page has seperate sections relating to information on the Black Panther Party and their revolutionary struggle to overturn the U.S. system of racial and working class oppression, and the Civil Rights Movement; and the many analyses by Marxist organization on the “Black Question”. Links to various sections of the MIA are provided that go to a myriad of organizations and journals reflecting their involvement in Black Liberation. |
| The Black Panther Party (1966-1979) | GATT (1948-94) |
| The Black Panthers represented one of the first organized attempts in U.S. history to militantly struggle for racial and working class emancipation – a party which inherited the teachings from Malcolm X to Mao Tse-Tung, and set on their agenda the revolutionary establishment of real economic, social, and political equality across gender and color lines. | The U.S. began its fundamental control over the world economy after WWII had devestated Europe and left capitalism on the brink of world-wide collapse, through the Bretton Woods Agreements. This archive currently contains the text of The General Agreement On Tariffs And Trade, an organisation that became the WTO. |
| Foreign Relations with USSR (1918) | Cuban Missile Crisis (1961-63) |
| Contains documents by various US Ambassadors and Counsels with the US Secretary of State, explaining the current events in Soviet Russia, explaining their positions and thoughts. Organized into three sections, sorted by date, subject, and author. | A detailed timeline of the Cuban Missile Crisis based on declassified U.S. government documents. This account details event by event leading up to the crisis, including the invasion of the Bay of Pigs, the terrorism (assassination, sabotage, etc) and economic warfare waged by the U.S. just months after the revolution, U.S. nuclear proliferation around the world, and much, much more. |
| US Presidents (1892-2000) | U.S. Military History (1945-49) |
| Archiving key documents on various presidents including presidential diktats (executive orders), and charting the candidates for the presidency of the leftist parties throughout the past century, from the Communist to the Green Party, and the success of their presidential campaigns. | A timeline of U.S. military action since the end of World War II. This span of events currently covers 1945 to 1949, and details every military action of the U.S. military: from suppressing the revolutions of the Philippines, Greece & Italy to losing the civil wars in China, Korea, & Albania. |
To volunteer, ask questions, or send comments, mail David Walters at davidwalters -AT- Marxists dot org.
Last Update: 4 June 2023, by JF