The press has always been key to Communist political activity. Karl Marx began his revolutionary career as a journalist, while V.I. Lenin published several articles exhorting his
fellow Bolsheviks to greater efforts to build the Communist
press, which he saw as not merely a means of propaganda,
but a “collective organizer.” But Communists were hardly
alone in prioritizing their communication apparatus—dissident movements (and governments as well) of every stripe
have sought to harness the power of the press almost from
its origins.
The best-known Communist newspaper in the United
States was the Daily Worker, although in the 1930s the party
also published the short-lived Midwest Daily Record and the
People’s World (daily from 1938 until 1949, weekly until
1986) as popular front organs, a host of foreign-language
dailies and weeklies (many formally independent of the
party), literary and theoretical journals, and a host of other
specialized periodicals. Magazines such as the New Masses
(1926–1956; as Masses and Mainstream in its final years)
published material by some of the leading artistic and literary figures of the left, including Ernestine Caldwell, Jack
Conroy, Theodore Dreiser, Mike Gold, Ernest Hemingway,
Langston Hughes, Meridel Le Sueur, and Richard Wright
during the Popular Front years.
The Daily Worker was launched in Chicago in January
1924 with money from the party’s foreign-language sections and built on a foundation of weekly newspapers dating
to the ferment unleashed within the Socialist Party by the
Russian Revolution and the subsequent expulsion of the leftwing tendencies that (for the most part) coalesced to form
the Communist (Workers) Party. As factions broke away
from the Communist Party over the following decades, each
launched its own newspapers, the most notable of which
was the Trotskyist weekly The Militant.
The Daily Worker was published through 1957, when it
was cut back to a weekly. The Worker expanded to semiweekly publication in 1961, and resumed daily publication
in 1968 as The Daily World. In 1986, the paper was consolidated with the west coast People’s World to form the
People’s Daily World, which was retrenched as the People’s Weekly World in 1991. At its peak the paper had some
thirty-five thousand subscribers, but enjoyed a much greater
reach through allied publications and the efforts of readers
who were expected to draw on the newspaper’s analysis and
information in their local organizing.
There are, of course, other Communist parties in the
United States, each of which supports its own press. Issued
on a weekly basis into the early thenty-first century were
the Revolutionary Communist Party’s Revolution (founded
in 1975; also issued in a separate Spanish-language edition),
the Socialist Workers Party’s The Militant (1928–), and the
Workers World Party’s Workers World (1954–). Several
now-defunct publications also played significant roles, such
as the National Guardian, launched in 1948 to support the
Progressive Party and continuing as an independent radical
weekly that played a significant role in the emergence of
the new left, and in catalyzing the new Communist movement of the 1970s, before ceasing publication in 1992. As
new Communist groups emerged, each established its own
press—often publishing with a frequency far beyond what
their numbers could reasonably support—perhaps most
spectacularly the semiweekly (from 1973 through 1989)
Bulletin issued by a Workers’ League that never counted
more than a couple hundred supporters (the paper has since
retrenched to a virtual existence as the world socialist web
site).
While the Daily Worker, People’s World, and New
Masses were certainly the best known of the Communist
Party’s publications, and the most studied, they may well
have been less influential than the myriad shop floor newsletters and foreign-language publications issued by party
supporters. Indeed, the party considered its shop floor and
neighborhood publications so important that it issued the
monthly Party Organizer from 1927 until 1938 in large part
to offer guidance to the three hundred or so such papers.
The party’s foreign-language newspapers always
enjoyed a larger circulation than their English-language
counterparts, reflecting the party’s origins in the Socialists’ foreign language federations and the predominantly
immigrant character of the American working class. In an
immigrant community where it was particularly strong,
the party supported three Finnish-language dailies, Työ-
mies (1903–1950), Eteenpäin (1921–1950), and Toveri
(1907–1931), as well as the weekly Toveritar/Naisten Viiri
(1909–1978) aimed at Finnish women, and the combined
Työmies-Eteenpäin from 1950 until 1998, gradually reducing publication from five times a week to weekly before
suspending altogether. But the Communists also published
daily newspapers in Croatian, Hungarian, Lithuanian, Russian, Slovakian, Ukrainian, Yiddish, and other languages,
many issued by ethnic and mutual aid societies which often
enjoyed substantial autonomy. Where daily publication
could not be sustained, party supporters issued weekly and
monthly papers in nearly every language spoken by workers
in the United States. While this commitment to foreign-language publishing is now restricted to a Spanish-language
section in the back pages of the party’s weekly, the foreignlanguage federations raised the bulk of the funds to launch
the Daily Worker, which continues to live off their legacy.
In 2006, the People’s Weekly World was edited from the
offices of the Workers Education Society, successor to the
Lithuanian association that published the Communist daily
Vilnis from 1920 to 1989 (as a weekly in its final years).
It claimed a total circulation of some twenty-five thousand
copies weekly (about two thousand of which are individual
subscriptions).
The Communist press was at the height of its influence
in the 1930s and 1940s, when the party had established
a substantial, if short-lived, base in the labor movement;
drawn many artists and intellectuals into its orbit through
popular front organizations focused on issues such as racial
justice, opposition to the global rise of fascism, and expansion of social welfare programs; and still included many
vibrant foreign-language newspapers that in later decades
succumbed to government persecution (including the forced
dissolution of the party-dominated International Workers
Order), the influx of anti-Communist immigrants in the
aftermath of World War II, and the assimilation of younger
generations.
These newspapers were not mere outlets for official
proclamations and news of party activities. Many boasted
substantial national and international news (aided by the
resources of the independent labor news service Federated
Press, by Tass, and by reports sent in by hundreds of grassroots supporters around the country), along with substantial
cultural and educational offerings. Most Communist papers
included a diversity of voices, even if the party did impose
its orthodoxy on major political questions. In 1935, the
Daily Worker launched a sports section that continued for
decades, combining reports of sporting events with critiques
of the institutionalized racism that dominated the industry. The paper’s eleven-year campaign—through its sports
pages, often working in cooperation with African American newspapers—to desegregate major league baseball has
drawn substantial scholarly attention in recent years, was
but part of a larger effort to integrate the party’s commitment to economic and social equality into all aspects of its
coverage and of its members’ lives. The Worker also published comic strips, cultural coverage that focused attention
on popular art forms such as jazz and blues, and populist
commentary by figures such as Woody Guthrie. By the
mid-1930s, its in-depth labor and civil rights coverage drew
readers from outside the Communist orbit.
However, in the 1950s McCarthyism and the larger campaign of persecution it has come to represent (coupled with
growing awareness of Stalinism’s methods) forced the party
to the margins of political life, and it became increasingly
difficult to sustain its press. Several papers were discontinued or merged, and others cut back their publication
schedule. Even its retrenched public presence could only
be sustained with external funding. Archival documents
establish that the party received substantial financial assistance from the Soviet Union from 1959 to 1989. The end of
that funding forced a new round of retrenchment. In 2006,
the Communist Party published its weekly newspaper, the
monthly Political Affairs magazine, and the Young Communist League’s quarterly Dynamic magazine.
Further Reading
Bekken, Jon. “‘No Weapon So Powerful’: Working-Class Newspapers in the United States,” Journal of Communication
Inquiry 12(2), 1988.
Howe, Irving, and Lewis Coser. The American Communist Party:
A Critical History. Boston: Beacon Press, 1957.
Isserman, Maurice. Which Side Were You On?: The American
Communist Party During the Second World War. Wesleyan
University Press, 1987.
Klehr, Harvey. The Heyday of American Communism: The
Depression Decade. New York: Basic Books, 1984.
Kostiainen, Auvo. The Forging of Finnish-American Communism, 1917–1924: A Study in Ethnic Radicalism. Annales
Universitatis Turkuensis, University of Turku, Finland,
1978.
Silber, Irwin. Press Box Red: The Story of Lester Rodney, The
Communist Who Helped Break the Color Line in American
Sports. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003.
Jon Bekken