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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) | Avanti! |
| 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 | L’Avanti!, the weekly newspaper of the Socialist Party, USA's Italian Federation (FSI), was launched in the fall of 1918. The paper, like most members of the FSI, remained loyal to the Socialist Party following the 1919 split with the Communists. L’Avanti! was edited by G. Valenti and Giuseppe Bertelli until 1922, when it was renamed La Parola del Popolo. |
| The Black Panther (1968-1984) | |
| Oakland, California. 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. |
| Champion of Youth (1936 – 1938) | |
| Champion of Youth, later simply Champion, and finally Champion: Labor Monthly, was a magazine published by the Young Communist League, USA during the popular front years. It was aimed at a mass audience, the sponsorship of the YCL was not emphasized and, in addition to communists, it published a broad array of liberal and progressive authors. |
| 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. |
| Debs Magazine (1921 – 1923) | A magazine started in 1921 as the Debs Freedom Monthly dedicated to securing freedom for Eugene V. Debs, who had been sentenced to ten years in prison for his opposition to World War I. After his release from prison in late 1921 the journal was renamed Debs Magazine and served as a mouthpiece for the Socialist leader to espouse his views on a wide range of subjects. |
| 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. |