National Guardian/Guardian

NATIONAL GUARDIAN/GUARDIAN. The longest-lived and most prestigious of the postwar radical newspapers, the National Guardian (renamed the Guardian in 1967) was founded in 1948 by a triumvirate of James Aronson (executive editor), Cedric Belfrage (editor), and John McManus (managing editor). The immediate objective was to provide a dissenting voice from the Cold War policies then being fixed in place by the government of the United States. A broader goal was to revive the most militant aspects of the New Deal.

The natural political locus for such an undertaking was the orbit of the Progressive Party, and the editors tried to obtain party funding for their paper. Although this did not come about, most of the original Guardian readers were supporters of the party, and the paper was able to build its circulation by participating in the mass movement associated with it. The debut issue of October 18, 1948, headlined an article written exclusively for the paper by Henry Wallace and a contribution from Norman Mailer, already famous as author of The Naked and the Dead, and a Progressive Party supporter.

At the state level, the Guardian was aligned with the American Labor Party. Congressman Vito Marcantonio was an enthusiastic Guardian supporter, and John McManus ran for governor on the American Labor Party ticket in 1950 and 1954. In 1958, the Guardian backed the Independent-Socialist ticket, which had McManus as its candidate for governor, Annette Rubinstein for lieutenant-governor, and Corliss Lamont for senator. The McManus vote fell from its 1950 high of 208,000 to 35,000. With the demise of the third parties, Belfrage lamented that the Guardian was a journalistic tail without any political dog to wag.

The survival of the newspaper was mainly due to its professional quality. The Guardian staff was an amalgam of seasoned journalists and political activists. Aronson, for example, had worked for the New York Post, Herald-Tribune, and Times; and McManus had worked for Time, PM, and the Times. McManus had been past president of the Newspaper Guild of New York and Aronson had edited Frontpage, the Guild organ. Belfrage had an equally impressive background that included a stint in Hollywood writing for a wire service. Over the years he would also write or edit a dozen books. Other Guardian staff members had worked for Esquire, the Brooklyn Eagle, PM, the New York Post, the New Republic, Time, and other well-known publications. The impressive corps of foreign correspondents included Agnes Smedley, Anna Louise Strong, and Wilfred Burchett.

The issues the paper addressed in its first years would continually reappear in new forms. Opposition to the Cold War rendered the Guardian virtually the sole public voice opposing the Korean War. A decade later the Guardian was among the first publications to go into active opposition to the war in Vietnam, and as American involvement grew, the on-the-scene dispatches of Wilfred Burchett, sometimes written behind communist lines, became must reading for anyone interested in the conflict. The Guardian supported national liberation movements whenever they appeared, focusing mostly on Africa in the 1950s, Southeast Asia in the 1960s to mid-1970s, and Latin America thereafter.

Civil rights was another area given considerable space. In the 1950s this involved aggressive reporting on the “Trenton Six,” the murder of Emmett Till, and the execution of William Green. Combined with the paper’s support of African liberation movements, this work forged a strong working relationship with individuals such as Paul Robeson and W. E. B. Du Bois. In the 1960s the paper supported the views of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the later positions of Malcolm X, and the Black Panther Patty. It also fought against the frame-up of activists such as Angela Davis. During the 1980s the Guardian worked to build the multiracial Rainbow Coalition.

A third area of intense concern was defense of political prisoners. The Guardian actively defended the Communist Party leadership charged under the Smith Act, Alger Hiss, the “Hollywood Ten,” Harry Bridges, Anne and Carl Braden, Corliss Lamont, and Willard Uphaus. In time it would also have to defend close supporters such as Robeson, Du Bois, Marcantonio, and the Reverend Claude Williams, a minister defrocked by the Presbyterian Church for his radical views. Each of the Guardian editors would also be called before a number of committees. One unhappy result was that rather than languish in prison awaiting a hearing before the Supreme Court, the British-born Belfrage accepted a deportation order in 1955. He was named editor-in-exile and filed stories with datelines from around the world, including nations forbidden to American citizens.

The most historic defense was of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. At a time when the Communist Party and the Daily Worker would not cover the case, the Guardian published a William A. Reuben story that sparked what would become an international defense effort. Reuben, who continued to be an important writer on the Hiss case as well, first took the Rosenberg story to I. F. Stone, then an editor of the Compass, who turned it down. The Guardian role was so vital that after the Rosenbergs were executed, Aronson was named a trustee of the fund established for their children.

The Guardian maintained friendly but problematic relations with the Communist Party. A major area of difference was the Guardian’s rejection of the Party’s view that independent political parties were futile and that radicals should work within the Democratic Party. The Guardian held exactly the opposite view. In spite of the failures of third parties in the 1950s, the Guardian took part in a party-building movement in the 1970s and in the 1980s used its influence within the Rainbow Coalition to keep that movement as independent of the Democratic party as possible.

In the area of foreign affairs, the Guardian refused to be a clone of Soviet policies. It was supportive of Yugoslavia’s break from the Soviet orbit and carried on principled coverage of the purges in Eastern Europe and the Hungarian Revolt of 1956. Most important, the editors allowed debate on such subjects to rage in the letters columns. In the winter of 1948–1949 when Anna Louise Strong was denounced by the Soviet Union as a spy, the Guardian defended her, continued to publish her, and helped initiate the six-year campaign that ultimately led to the accusation’s being dropped.

Within a few years of its launching, the Guardian hit its peak circulation of seventy-five thousand. Support of the Rosenbergs, opposition to the Korean conflict, and the repressive atmosphere of the times caused a rapid falloff in readers. In the year the paper took up the Rosenberg defense, circulation fell from fifty-five thousand to just over twenty thousand. Nonetheless, the paper survived as radical movements began to stir in the late 1950s and better times seemed in the offing.

Despite the death of McManus in 1961, the Guardian supported the emerging civil rights, anti-war, and the New Left movements with as much energy as ever. The paper also published Mark Lane’s landmark ten thousand-word “A Brief for Lee Harvey Oswald,” the first in-depth reporting to challenge the “lone gunman” theory of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Such efforts, however did not catch the rising tide of radicalism, and circulation remained at just under thirty thousand. Many newcomers to the Guardian staff felt the paper was out of touch with the temper and needs of the new era. Individuals later grouped around Irwin Silber, the Guardian’s cultural editor and a former editor of Sing Out!, proposed that the paper provide the New Left movement with direct ideological leadership. Aronson resisted, feeling a newspaper could not substitute for a political party. Internal tensions grew and in April 1967 Aronson and Belfrage decided to resign.

The ensuing reorganization gave the staff working control of the production process and ownership shares. The paper’s name was shortened and Jack A. Smith was elected editor, a post he held until 1981. Under Smith’s tenure the paper experienced many swings in format and orientation. As the New Left collapsed, one tendency on the staff wished to transform the paper into a Marxist-Leninist publication while other tendencies wanted to strengthen the reportage tradition or move to the more anarchistic and nonhierarchical forms of the underground press. A schism in 1970 led one group to create the Liberated Guardian, a newspaper whose life span was soon cut short by a subsequent schism-within-the-schism. The parent Guardian almost folded as well, its circulation dipping to fourteen thousand.

For a large part of the decade that followed, the Guardian was a core element in an effort to create a new left-wing party based on Marxist-Leninist principles and the experiences of the Chinese Revolution. The paper began to carry as much editorial and essay material as straight reporting. When the party-building effort failed, partly as a result of changes in China, the Guardian struggled to return to its traditional functions. In the 1980s it examined all existing socialist revolutions in a respectful but questioning manner, and it allowed significant editorial space for non-staff movement activists to express their views, even when those views did not fit the Guardian editorial perspective. The Aronson-Belfrage-McManus tradition was underscored in a big thirty-fifth-anniversary supplement. Circulation fluctuated between twenty thousand and thirty thousand, waxing and waning with the mass movements the paper reported on and for. While still highly respected in radical circles, the Guardian did not regain the prestige of the National Guardian years, which had been greatly diminished in the 1970s.

On the fortieth anniversary of its founding, the Guardian could boast of a remarkable consistency. Unlike In These Times, the only other independent radical weekly with a national readership, the Guardian remained committed to radical alternatives to the two-party electoral system. Strong advocacy of the rights of women and sexual minorities had been melded with its traditional support of civil rights, working-class, anti-war, and national liberation movements. The joy of a fortieth-anniversary banquet planned to underscore the continuity of the paper’s politics was sapped when a seventy-three-year-old James Aronson died from a long struggle with cancer just a few days before the celebration.

The memorial services for Aronson illuminated his continuing involvement with quality journalism. After leaving the Guardian he had been a teacher of journalism at universities in New York and Beijing, had taken part in symposiums on journalism, had written for professional journals, and had been a consultant for journalism departments in Chinese universities. He had also written three important books on American mass media: The Press and the Cold War, Deadline for the Media, and Something to Guard, a history of the Guardian coauthored with Belfrage. After his death, an Aronson award for investigative journalism was established by Hunter College of the City University of New York.

Despite a temporary lift from the fortieth anniversary events, the Guardian continued to face crucial circulation and financial problems. Many in its first generation of readers, the most reliable financial supporters of the newspaper, were literally dying off, and replacement generations had not stepped forth to take their place. The paper also continued to favor a rhetorical and editorial style that did not fit comfortably with what remained of the Left movement and its closest allies. In 1992, after a failed appeal for funds and falling circulation, the Guardian closed its doors without so much as a farewell issue.

Aronson, James, The Press and the Cold War. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970.

Aronson, James. Deadline for the Media: Today’s Challenges to Press, TV, and Radio. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1972.

Belfrage, Cedric, and James Aronson. Something to Guard: The Stormy Life of the National Guardian, 1948–1967. New York: Columbia University Press, 1978.

Bennett, Jonathan A., “James Aronson, Guardian Founder, Is Dead at 73,” and Cedric Belfrage, “A Personal Farewell to a Rare Friend and Journalist.” Guardian, 2 November, 1988.

The Guardian. Thirty-fifth anniversary supplement. December 14, 1983.

Smith, Jack A. “My Life and Times with the Guardian.” The Rag Blog. August 2, 2012. http://theragblog.blogspot.com/2012/08/jack-smith-my-life-and-times-with.html