Federated Press

FEDERATED PRESS. The most enduring and comprehensive Left-oriented press service created in the United States, the Federated Press (FP; 1919–1956) offered detailed alternative news reporting and critical interpretation. Socialist papers had established cooperative publication arrangements, with outside pages added to local editions, several times from 1890 to the 1910s. None of these proved lasting, and the usual practice of reprinting news from other socialist papers meant delays or dispatches from only a few correspondents. During the 1919 nominating convention of the Farmer-Labor Party in Chicago, newspaper editors from the Committee of Forty-Eight, the Non-Partisan League, Socialist Party, and militant union movements—representing a total of thirty-two newspapers—founded the Federated Press. Robert M. Buck, editor of the New Majority, was named editor. FP’s activist and educational mission, to raise labor consciousness and assail capitalist propaganda, would not have been possible without editorial insistence that FP’s news be as solid, professional, and as cleanly written as that of any wire service in the world.

In 1920 FP began its subscription mail service. It operated three main bureaus, in Chicago, New York, and Washington, D.C. Other bureaus were variously opened in Detroit, Los Angeles, and elsewhere as labor struggles developed. FP supplemented a limited full-time staff with dozens of part-time writers, including Robert Dunn and Len De Caux. Most of these correspondents worked for little or no compensation. Cartoons and photo mats were also provided to subscribers who could afford them in addition to news stories. Regular columns on foreign affairs, economic trends, labor news summaries, and humor became mainstays of the service. So too did feature stories.

Carl Haessler (1883–1969), former Rhodes scholar and university professor, imprisoned war resister and Milwaukee Leader staffer, moved into the central leadership position during the organization’s early financial collapse in 1921–1922. Haessler shunned formal party allegiance yet recognized the broad need for working-class unity and cooperation.

Through the 1920s, representatives of American Federal of Labor (AFL) union papers joined representatives from independent, socialist, communist, and syndicalist organs on FP’s executive board. William Z. Foster sat on the board, as did Vern Smith of the Industrial Workers of the World. Earl Browder remained on the board until 1929. Fred Hewitt, editor of the International Association of Machinists’ Machinist’s Monthly Journal, served until his retirement in 1941. Labor editors on the board saw the FP as a means of expanding the scope and strength of their own newspapers. They also saw FP as a means of drawing attention and support for struggles their own organizations were undergoing.
Yet the presence of well-known radicals on FP’s board drew the attention of more conservative labor leaders and, with the continued rise of red-baiting, open attacks from the right wing of American society. At the behest of Matthew Woll, the AFL conducted an investigation of FP’s politics, funding, and labor reporting in 1922–1923. Haessler fully cooperated with the investigation, but the AFL created its own Weekly Service to compete with FP. FP nevertheless continued to draw support from trade union editors who saw the need for a regular labor news service.

FP thrived as the union movement thrived. From its initial subscription list of thirty-two labor papers in 1919, it grew to 120 in 1921. The economic crises of that year spelled hard times for organized labor, and the corresponding drop in union membership throughout the 1920s was matched by declining subscriptions. From a low of fifty-nine subscriptions in 1927 FP rebounded to just over one hundred in the first year of the New Deal’s protection of collective-bargaining rights for workers. Subscriptions continued to grow and reached an all-time high of 250 in 1946.

FP correspondents served as articulate firsthand reporters, following the rise of union struggles well before they were reported by the mainstream press. Many went on to serve as editors of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) union papers. Thus, Haessler was also able to encourage continuity and help coordinate the news received and used by the CIO News, Guild Reporter, the United Mine Workers Journal, and the United Automobile Worker. These papers, as much as anything else, were vital keys to information and organizing in the movement.

Two noted writers for FP, Harvey and Jessie O’Connor, illustrate the remarkable quality of the collective effort. Jessie, the granddaughter of reformer-journalist Henry Demarest Lloyd, began working for Haessler in 1928 and continued off and on for more than a decade, covering strikes and labor conditions, most notably the famous Gastonia, North Carolina, conflict. Harvey O’Connor, youthful participant in the Seattle General Strike and for a time a staffer for the Seattle Union Record, became FP’s Eastern Bureau Chief and remained a correspondent until its demise. In later years especially, the O’Connors helped make the financial continuation of FP possible. Thanks in part to the experience he gained there, Harvey became one of the outstanding muckrakers of the 1930s–1950s, with a series of popular books about family fortunes.

Yet oligopolization of the commercial press in the 1940s and 1950s concentrated the force of opposition against FP. Section 304 of the Taft-Hartley Act (1947) forbade unions from making direct contributions for political purposes, drawing the wrath of those opposed to FP’s explicit political reporting. So too did the stabilization and bureaucratization of the labor movement, whose leaders increasingly sought better ways of controlling their unions and the information about them. Organized labor’s in-house papers developed internal resources (and politics) capable of excluding the need for FP’s news service. Similarly, the advent of radio and television supplanted community reliance on newspapers for local news; workers, like other Americans, became less dependent on and less willing to read local papers, even though popular press, radio, and television reporting was increasingly hostile to labor.

The Cold War’s red scare tactics above all spelled the end of FP. The CIO’s expulsion of Communists, and Communist-influenced unions, made FP’s role as labor’s Left voice insecure. Willingly, CIO leaders sought a secure and respectable place in American society. This contradicted FP’s philosophy of labor as a movement. Between 1940 and 1950 the number of independent labor papers decreased by half as labor leaders came to grapple with dissent. Under attack by labor leaders, Congress, and McCarthyism, FP officially disbanded on 29 October 1956.

Dilling, Elizabeth. The Red Network. New York: self-published, 1935.

Haessler, Stephen J. “Carl Haessler and the Federated Press: Essays on the History of American Labor Journalism.” Master’s thesis, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1977.

O’Connor, Jesse Lloyd, Harvey O’Connor, and Susan Bowler. Harvey and Jesse: A Couple of Radicals. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988.

Carl Haessler Collection. Papers, 1908-1972. Walter R. Reuther Library. Wayne State University. Wayback Machibne Internet Library. https://web.archive.org/web/20120227044842/https://www.reuther.wayne.edu/files/LP000031.pdf

Federated Press records: [microform], 1918-1955. Archival Collections, Columbia University Libraries. http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/archival/collections/ldpd_4079772/