Daily Worker

DAILY WORKER. The most important literary-political expression of the Communist movement, the New York-based Daily Worker and its successor publications have generally echoed the orthodoxy at the center of the Party political apparatus. But they have also sought, in different ways at different times, to become popular newspapers of the Left and (mostly in hope rather than expectation) of a broader “progressive” audience. These two aims, often if not always in conflict, have supplied the dynamic tension in the newspapers’ life.

The Daily Worker reflected a historical weakness of the Left English-language press. Only during the heroic era of the Socialist Party (and again, in the political sector of the 1960s “underground” press) could an English-language paper gain a sufficient popular following and advertising base to pay for its production. Heavy subsidies, from readers and Communist sympathizers, made up the difference, but even so the specter of financial crisis never disappeared. The staff received meager wages, just sufficient (with the occasional contribution of a week’s pay) to qualify for Newspaper Guild membership. Although rarely trained within the commercial presses, the staff remained largely stable over a considerable period and gradually acquired increased skills. Political demands, however, repeatedly frustrated the tailoring of styles to a sustained perspective.

The Daily Worker was launched in 1924 with $100,000 raised from the Communist-led language-federation groups, which were already supporting their own dailies. During these early years, the publication seemed most intent upon its official status as Party organ, publishing documents and official theoretical interpretations. Among the competing factions of the 1920s it was a fiercely desired object (at one point, William Z. Foster’s supporters occupied the newspaper’s office at gunpoint) whose proprietorship depended upon the factional control of Party leaders, which in turn depended ultimately upon Comintern favor. These tensions stifled the paper’s effort to reach out to a wide audience.

A shift of the paper from Chicago, where it was founded, to New York in 1927 brought early hints of a different journalism. Harvey O’Connor, professional newspaperman and Federated Press wordsmith, joined the staff for a time, as did wry humor columnist Sendar Garlin and a number of talented young writers. With Communist leadership that looked more to the long haul than immediate revolutionary prospects, the Daily Worker sought to become more of a radical labor paper, with a somewhat popular appeal. Continued factional fighting and the opening of the Third Period in 1928 returned the paper to a wild stridency. Yet it had improved, or at any rate had become popularized, as its internal, theoretical character passed to more specialized publications (especially the monthly Communist) and open factionalism ended with the departure of the Trotskyists. Subjects such as developing battles in the Third World against imperialism gained coverage unimaginable in the commercial U.S. daily press.

Like the Communist Party generally, although in more elusive ways, the paper started to shift toward yet a different kind of newspaper style closer to that of the commercial daily press in the early 1930s. Earl Browder, a competent functionary who established his claims over rival candidates for Party leadership, brought with him Clarence Hathaway (1884–1963), a former leader of the Minnesota Farmer-Labor movement, as editor of the Daily Worker. A skilled editor, he provided a continuity and modest support for “Americanization” that took root and developed within the Party. Indeed, the early 1930s Daily Worker had a tabloidlike flavor no more hysterical in tone, certainly, than the New York Daily News or Mirror in their anti-union anticommunism.

By 1935–1936, the Daily Worker had palpably improved. Writing and design had become more professional, and the tone had begun to lighten somewhat with the addition of a sports column and comic strips. If these two features can be considered emblematic, sportswriter Lester Rodney may himself have been the clearest sign of a changing attitude toward Left journalism. Avid sports fan (especially of the Brooklyn Dodgers) and mostly self-taught journalist, Rodney carried on a protracted internal struggle with newspaper staffers and die-hard old-fashioned readers who disdained sports as pure escapism, or as activity best confined to the intramural events of the ethnic Left’s soccer leagues. By 1937–1938, Rodney’s column was widely noted, among sports fans considerably outside Communist circles, for his feeling for the players, his sensitivity to race and ethnic issues, and his close observation of details. His ten-year struggle for the integration of major league baseball has been widely noted by sports historians, and considered by many to have been crucial. In the same years, Little Lefty, drawn in the 1930s by Maurice del Bourgo and then by Louie Furstadt (by the 1940s assisted by, among others, Harvey Kurtzman, later Mad magazine’s editor) emerged as the most interesting—if somewhat predictable—Left comic creation since the Industrial Workers of the World’s Mr. Block. By contrast, Daily Worker film reviewing tended almost unfailingly toward the heavy-handed didactic. Daily circulation, generally in the twenty-thousand range, reached above thirty-thousand, with a weekend-edition circulation about twice that figure—the maximum ever attained.

The Daily Worker’s labor coverage had always been intense, especially in regard to strikes and the activities of Communist-led unions. In the 1920s and early 1930s, it was nevertheless often marred by extreme exaggeration and by a lack of on-the-spot, investigative reportage. A larger staff, both paid (if scarcely) and volunteer, provided more detailed and more accurate coverage—no less accurate in its own way, even at its worst, than the commercial dailies. Sometimes, as Communists covered and simultaneously promoted the new industrial unions and their struggles, the paper became an important tool in providing information and adding a sense of experience to local militants. Communists or near-Communists rising within the Congress of Industrial Organizations in turn became the paper’s entrée into the heart of industrial unionism.

By contrast, although this became rather more clear in retrospect, the paper (in articles by Anna Louise Strong and others) maintained a ferociously optimistic perspective of Soviet public cheer and economic growth. The Moscow Trials, demanding vast credulity, brought out the worst in Russian-based American workers and exposed the Daily Worker to charges of smearing honored revolutionaries while glorifying Joseph Stalin to superhuman heights. The cooperation of Left-leaning public intellectuals that had been so marked in the earlier 1930s dissipated.

Such features existed side by side, with little sense of apparent contradiction. At the apex of the Popular Front, Woody Guthrie’s regular appearance signified a kind of translation of Communist doctrine into something approaching a radical democracy. Mike Gold’s “Change the World” column, in earlier years dour and full of charges against liberals, grew positively rosy in its hopes for American democracy leavened (if not revolutionized in any foreseeable short run) by the active presence of Communism. Even coverage of the Democratic Party’s liberal wing developed a sophistication, as Communist journalists pinpointed the contradictions within the electoral system, and made themselves the forceful supporters of Vito Marcantonio’s righteous voice in Congress and of many other noncommunist but progressive public officials (especially in New York State) and candidates.

Most of all, however, the Daily Worker made itself authentically “American,” in the sense of native radical traditions, in support of black causes, especially close at hand in Harlem. During earlier years, the absence of any but the rarest black journalists (and not many black readers) had handicapped the paper; political insistence upon “self-determination” of “black belt” southern counties had an air of unreality about it. The Popular Front’s insistent promotion of blacks into the center of American life had a magnetic appeal to the black middle class, and to many white liberals and radicals. The Scottsboro, Angelo Herndon, and other legal cases, the exposure of human tragedies caused by discrimination and segregation, and the promotion of black candidates for office, all gave the paper an impact far beyond its circulation. No other paper cared so much; none, not even the commercial New York papers with their extensive music coverage, had such feelings for the importance of blues and jazz in American culture. No paper in the country could boast a reporter with the brilliance of Richard Wright (Daily Worker Harlem editor) on the Joe Louis-Max Schmeling boxing match.

These tendencies generally magnified during the Second World War, after the brief, confusing, and politically costly Hitler-Stalin Pact ended with Germany’s invasion of Russia. The paper was stymied, however, when Hathaway was replaced as editor by the journalistically incompetent Louis Budenz, who sought for a time to ride herd politically upon a staff grown more self-consciously professional. Pressed to glorify the Red Army and, soon, U.S. military triumphs, the Daily Worker retreated to a kind of shrillness even when—relative to other American papers—its interpretation of unfolding world events gave a more correct balance of Russia’s importance in defeating Nazism.

At the same time, coverage of women’s issues grew dramatically—most notably in the advocacy of women’s improved status by Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and others—as women became a major component of the wartime Party and of its middle-level leaders. And in spite of a fanatically single-minded devotion to military victory over Germany (miners’ leader John L. Lewis was roundly condemned for leading a major strike, the imprisonment of Minneapolis Trotskyists lauded, and the internment of Japanese Americans not opposed), the paper found space to maintain a vital sports section. It did not, although urged by distributors, seize the United Front moment to install a racetrack tip sheet, which would surely have proved yet more popular among the working-class readership.

Once again after the war, for the second time since the later 1930s, the Daily Worker gathered the momentum to nearly become a solid, professional daily. When Budenz suddenly returned to Catholicism in 1945, the editorship passed to Morris Childs, later famous as a reported informant of the Federal Bureau of the Investigation, then in 1947 to a young John Gates, shaped politically in the Browder era. In terms of sheer journalistic competence, the Daily Worker grew by leaps and bounds. But it found itself pressed hard on two sides. The Party entered the Cold War era disoriented and internally divided, increasingly unable after 1948 to meet the pressures of public anticommunism and the increasingly undeniable revelations about Russian misdeeds. Alarmed at the rightward shift of America, convinced fascism might be only months away, Party leadership isolated the organization and the paper unnecessarily. On the other side, the Daily Worker endured heavy competition, during the 1940s, from PM, a liberal New York daily, and its short-lived successor, the Daily Compass. By 1950, many middle-class “progressive” readers in particular were frightened of receiving a Communist paper and switched to the weekly National Guardian because of McCarthyism. Party membership fell drastically, and circulation of the Daily Worker dipped below ten-thousand.

The Twentieth Soviet Congress brought Gates and his political following into direct conflict with the more hard-line supporters of the Russian successors to Stalin. For a moment between 1956 and 1958, the Daily Worker became a semi-independent player in the Left, condemning the Russian invasion of Hungary and defending dissent within the Party press, even encouraging readers to write in with their opinions about American Communism’s true status and its past mistakes. Gates’s staff, notably the veteran journalist Max Gordon, used the opportunity to explore the contradictions of Communists less democratic in their internal life than the capitalism they deplored.

As the Party lost members and supporters, the Daily Worker lost readers, and despite a reduced page-size and staff, soon could no longer maintain production without rocketing subsidies. For political and editorial reasons, the daily closed in 1957, and with it, the independent status of the Communist press.

No Communist daily appeared in a decade marked by fresh and unpredicted developments. In 1967 the Daily World took the field, enabled by a union agreement that permitted maximum automation of the office (in advance, one might say, of other dailies). While no other Left daily existed, the Daily World lacked the influence of its predecessors upon the political scene. Young people, who in any case had little attraction to Communist politics, soon formed their own local press, with a vastly greater influence. The Daily World, mostly sold or given away by staunch Communist veterans of many years’ standing, seemed pallid by comparison. In the wake of the New Left collapse, it gained new talent (such as Terry Cannon, formerly a New Left journalist of note) and a somewhat greater weight in the Left circles that remained active. It experienced rare moments of triumph, albeit vicarious, in the election of local black officials who (or whose long-standing allies) were close to the Communist Party of an earlier age, and loyal to the sense of multiracial devotion in Communist circles. On international affairs, after the Vietnam War, it found no issue of equal appeal, despite heavy promotion of the African National Congress. Frequent attacks on Israeli policies, and praise for Israel’s avowed enemies as well as internal critics, continued to cost the Communist press dearly among once-faithful Jewish readers. Perhaps its most touching pages were devoted to late-life public celebrations of sturdy militants, often by local public or union officials. Then again, by way of comparison, Maoist groups, even before the Chinese turn away from world revolutionism, had no luck at founding a U.S. daily; as a communist organ, the Daily World remained singular if hard to find among the nation’s shrinking supply of independent-minded news vendors.

In 1986, against the wishes of many West Coast Communists and their longtime liberal allies, the People’s World merged with the Daily World to become the People’s Daily World, with color outside pages and center spread. Although some cultural writers came over from the People’s World, the New York-based paper was actually a somewhat expanded version of the Daily World, with a daily readership of perhaps fifteen-thousand, including many gift subscriptions, and a weekly paid readership of perhaps twice that. In an exceptionally difficult era for the Left, the People’s Daily World lionized Jesse Jackson and the Rainbow Coalition (while maintaining fervent loyalty to Communist political candidates), and castigated anticommunism as a fatal concession to Reaganism.

Perestroika and glasnost, Mikhail Gorbachev’s appeals to the West, and likewise the Western fascination with unfolding Russian events, seemed to catch the People’s Daily World somewhat ill prepared. Subsequent disappointments confirmed what many had feared, and American Communist journalism now had to train its lens on the out-of-power Russian Communist Party. Although reduced to weekly publication in 1988 and deprived of the subsidy provided by East European library subscriptions, the renamed People’s Weekly World survived. It showed a painfully familiar solidarity with the North Korean government (and a remarkable new admiration for the long-despised Chinese government), but it seized on American and world events with sometimes exceptional clarity. Labor reportage, European and Israeli coverage by William Pomeroy and Hans Lebrecht, and even a new environmental interest distinguished the Daily Worker’s successor.

Levenstein, Harvey A. “The Worker/Daily Worker.” In The American Radical Press, 1880–1960, vol. I, edited by Joseph Conlin. Westport, Connecticut.: Greenwood Press, 1974.

Rodney, Lester. Interview by Paul Buhle and Michael Furmanowsky. 1981. Oral History Project, University of California, Los Angeles.

Garlin, Sender. Interview. Oral History of the American Left. Tamiment Library, New York University.