Cleveland Citizen

CLEVELAND CITIZEN. “America’s Oldest Labor Newspaper,” as its subtitle still proclaims, the Cleveland Citizen played an especially important role in socialist and trade union movements of 1891–1920 through the political influence and personal forcefulness of its leading editor, Max Hayes (1866–1945). Founded as an organ of the new Central Labor Union, which had broken from the Knights of Labor in 1887 and adhered to the American Federation of Labor (AFL), the Citizen was simultaneously pro-socialist and pro-AFL. Despite Hayes’s national reputation of leading socialist opposition to Samuel Gompers for three decades, Hayes consistently argued against any break with the AFL. He adamantly opposed the Socialist Trades and Labor Alliance in the 1890s, the Industrial Workers of the World in the 1900s and 1910s, and the Congress of Industrial Organizations in the 1930s.

During the 1890s the strongest and most durable of many local socialistic labor papers, the Citizen functioned as an organizing tool for the Central Labor Union and for national AFL unions in the Cleveland area, and as a free, open forum for discussion of all the hotly debated issues in the working class and the Left. In addition to a wide range of national and international labor news, the weekly characteristically covered the economic, political, social, and cultural activities of Cleveland’s multiethnic labor and community groups—with special emphasis upon those involved in the skilled trades. Reputedly, Gompers began publishing the American Federationist in 1894 to counter the Citizen. On the other side of the political lines, in 1895–1896, Hayes was among the first important union leaders to break with Daniel DeLeon’s Socialist Labor Party and to call for an alternative socialist movement more accepting of labor’s institutional autonomy. The Citizen fended off several further threats from Right and Left in subsequent decades, losing the subsidy of the Central Federation of Labor but not its endorsement.

In 1920 the Citizen again took the national spotlight when it became the official organ of the Cleveland and Ohio Labor Party with Hayes the candidate for the national Farmer-Labor Party ticket. Hayes remained at the helm of the paper, advocate of the AFL and of independent political action, until incapacitated by a stroke in 1940. The paper subsequently lost its socialistic character, and was purchased in 1977 by the Cleveland Building Trades Council.

Dick, William M. Labor and Socialism in America: The Gompers Era. Port Jefferson, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1972.

Sidlo, T. L. “Socialism and Trade Unionism: A Study of Their Relation in Cleveland.” Western Reserve University Bulletin 12 (November 1908).

Tussey, Jean. “Max S. Hayes.” Encyclopedia of Cleveland History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.

"Max S. Hayes, Papers, 1891-1949: Biographical Note," Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation and Archives, Martin P. Catherwood Library, Cornell University.