TheNew York Call was asocialist dailynewspaper published inNew York City from 1908 through 1923. TheCall was the second of three English-language dailies affiliated with theSocialist Party of America, following theChicago Daily Socialist (1906–1912) and preceding theMilwaukee Leader (1911–1938).
In 1899 a bitter factional fight swept theSocialist Labor Party of America (SLP), pitting loyalists to the party's English-language newspaper,The People, and its intense and autocratic editor,Daniel DeLeon, against a dissident faction organized around the party's German-language paper, theNew Yorker Volkszeitung. In addition to personal antipathy, the two sides differed on the fundamental question oftrade union policy, with the DeLeon faction favoring a continuation of the party's policy of establishing an explicitly socialist union organization and the dissidents seeking to abandon the course ofdual unionism so that closer relations to the established unions of theAmerican Federation of Labor could be forged.
A bitter split had ensued, with the dissident wing — pejoratively called "Kangaroos" by theDeLeonist SLP Regulars — attempting to appropriate the name of the organization and its English-language newspaper for themselves. The matter ended up in the courts, with SLP Executive Secretary Henry Kuhn, Daniel DeLeon, and the Regulars victorious in the legal battle. The losers were forced by the court to change their name and the name of their publication so that no electoral or commercial confusion would result from the factional dualism.[1]
On April 28, 1901, the losing side in the litigation, the so-called "Socialist Labor Party" headquartered inRochester, New York, headed byHenry Slobodin, relaunched their weekly New York City newspaper with a new name —The Worker.[2] Old numbering used previously for their version ofThe People was carried forward, with the first issued under the new banner designated "Volume 11, Number 4."[2] The paper was edited byAlgernon Lee, assisted byHorace Traubel, Joshua Wanhope, and others.[1]
Even before the split there had been an effort by New York members of the SLP to establish an English-language daily newspaper. In November 1900 a meeting was held in Clarendon Hall on East 13th Street and it determined to revive an essentially defunct organization founded in 1886 for the purpose of starting a newspaper, the Workingmen's Co-operative Publishing Association (WCPA), with a goal of publishing an English daily as soon as a fund of $50,000 was accumulated for the task.[3] After a search,Julius Gerber managed to locate six surviving members of the old WCPA who remained interested in starting a new socialist newspaper were located and the organization was thus relaunched on its new task.[4]
Fundraising proved neither quick nor easy. In November 1901 a fair was held for the benefit of theVolkszeitung, raising several thousand dollars over a four-day period so in the fall of 1902 the WCPA decided to repeat this idea to raise funds for the English daily the next spring.[5] The fair was held in March 1903; during its 16-day duration alinotype machine was put into action as a practical demonstration and a sample newspaper called theDaily Globe was produced.[6] Raffles were conducted, amusements held, food and drink sold, and several thousand dollars were raised for the future English daily, which was planned to be revisit the nameNew York Daily Globe on a permanent basis.[6] This idea came to naught, however, when another New York paper changed its name to theGlobe early in the spring of 1904.[6] Suggestions were made for a new name for the forthcoming publication and theDaily Call was decided upon, with a launch date of September 1, 1904, targeted.[6]
The WCPA and its project lost its fundraising mojo, however, owing to the excitement and expense of the 1904 Presidential campaign ofEugene V. Debs and New York Socialist Party stalwartBen Hanford.[7] By the end of June it had become clear that the drive to raise even the more modest sum of $35,000 would be met in failure and the birth of theDaily Call was necessarily postponed.[7]
While another successful fundraising fair was held in 1905, a growing range of new projects among New York Socialists, including theRand School of Social Science, theIntercollegiate Socialist Society, theChristian Socialist Fellowship, and New York City elections in 1907 robbed the project to establish a daily Socialist newspaper of active supporters.[7] By the fall of 1907, the number of people actively working on the project of establishing a daily paper was down to just six people, including future chief of the New York organizationJulius Gerber and past National Executive Secretary of the Springfield wing of the Social Democratic Party William Butscher.[8] A decision was made to hold one more fundraising fair and then to launch the paper onMay Day, 1908, regardless of whether or not the desired nest egg of $50,000 had been accumulated.[8] The fair proved a financial success, the proposed May Day launch of theCall was moved back toMemorial Day, and the daily newspaper was born.[8]
On May 30, 1908, the new socialist daily newspaper was launched — theNew York Call.[9] While the Yiddish-language and German-language socialists of New York City had long had daily newspapers of their own,The Call was remarkable as the first such effort for English-speaking radicals.[10]
Editorial offices were established at 6 Park Place in New York City, in a building subsequently removed and replaced by the massiveWoolworth Building.[11] Veteran journalist George Gordon was named the first editor of the publication and former Socialist Party Executive SecretaryWilliam Mailly the paper's managing editor.[11] Other key members of the early editorial and writing staff includedW. J. Ghent, Louis Kopelin, andAlgernon Lee.[11] At the end of October 1908, nationally famousmuckraking journalistCharles Edward Russell was brought aboard as associate editor, having recently joined the Socialist Party.[12]
The Call became the second English-language socialist daily in America, following theChicago Daily Socialist, established in 1906,[13] but preceding the long-runningMilwaukee Leader, which launched in 1911.[14]
The daily papers of the Socialist Party were dominated ideologically by the organization's dominant"constructive socialist" alliance, with theChicago Daily Socialist in the hands of editorA. M. Simons, theMilwaukee Leader under the general editor control of party founder and U.S. CongressmanVictor L. Berger, and theCall firmly in the hands of loyalists toMorris Hillquit.[15] The party'srevolutionary socialist Left Wing was left to find other vehicles for its ideas, such as the monthly magazine published byCharles H. Kerr, theInternational Socialist Review as well as a small handful of weekly papers.[15]
Despite theCall's importance to the American socialist movement and to later historians of American radicalism as a "newspaper of record," the publication was never a circulation powerhouse in the vein ofJ.A. Wayland'sAppeal to Reason. In 1916, with Socialist Party membership waning from its peak four years earlier, circulation of theNew York Call stood at an unimpressive 15,000 copies per issue — less than half of the average circulation of theMilwaukee Leader.[16]
Fundraising to support the cost of a daily newspaper proved an ongoing battle for New York City Socialists, with future member of the SPA's National Executive CommitteeAnna A. Maley given a full-time job as fundraiser for the publication.[11] Throughout its history proved essential for theCall to raise additional operating revenue supplementary to the funds generated by newsstand sales and advertising.
TheCall was very much a New York City newspaper, featuring news of the city and the world at the front of the paper, editorial comment and news of party affairs towards the back. The paper featured a "Women's Department" overseen by the high-profile activist wife of a "millionaire Socialist,"Rose Pastor Stokes.[17]Editorial cartoons were given a prominent place, with material contributed by Ryan Walker and others.[17]
One of the contributions to the paper of lasting impact was a short story written by New York Socialist Ben Hanford in 1909, at a time when he was dying of cancer. The story, "Jimmie Higgins," was a salute to the rank-and-file Socialist everyman, a committed volunteer who loyally performed the myriad of unpublicized and unglamorous laborious tasks that were essential to the successful functioning of any political organization.[18] The Higgins character proved enduring, being further immortalized in a 1919 novel byUpton Sinclair,Jimmie Higgins: A Story.[19]Whittaker Chambers refers to himself using that term in his 1952 memoir:
One day, shortly after we had met,Sam Krieger proposed that I should do "Jimmie Higgins work." He explained to me patiently that Jimmie Higgins is a character in one of Upton Sinclair's novels or stories with a passion for lowly jobs. I shared no such passion, but I readily agreed, for I wanted to know theparty from the ground up. I began with theDaily Worker, but not on its editorial staff... He set me to doing the task that nobody else would do— newsstand collections for theDaily Worker.[20]
TheCall also provided substantial original coverage of various labor disputes, such as theNew York shirtwaist strike of 1909 and disasters such as theTriangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911.[21]
In April 1917, PresidentWoodrow Wilson, who had recently won re-election to a second four-year term of office behind theslogan "He Kept Us Out of War", askedCongress for adeclaration of war againstimperial Germany. That same month, with emotions running high, elected delegates of the Socialist Party of America gathered at their 1917 Emergency National Convention to determine party policy on the war. The organization reaffirmed its staunchlyanti-militarist stance, declaring its opposition to the European war and American participation in it.
In June 1917, as part of the move of the United States government tomilitary conscription, so-called "Espionage Act" legislation was passed making the obstruction ofmilitary recruitment a crime.[22] Mere opposition to the American war effort via public speech or the printed word was interpreted by the Wilson Administration, and affirmed by the courts, as a violation of the law and a wave of prosecutions and administrative actions followed, including action byPostmaster GeneralAlbert S. Burleson to ban offending newspapers from the mail.[22] Mailing privileges of theNew York Call were quickly revoked as part of a general offensive against the Socialist Party's press.[23]
Charles Ervin, managing editor of theCall during this period, decided that, beginning on Monday, December 3, 1917, the paper would be printed in the evenings and would handle its own distribution. The paper continued to be distributed outside of New York by first class mail at this time.[24] At a meeting announcing the decision, Ervin was asked about the paper's attitude towards the U. S. Government and the war. He said that his criticism of the war was not to be understood as criticism of the government. In particular, Ervin told aNew York Times reporter that:
I have always attacked Kaiserism. I attacked the German Kaiser and his militarism in 1913 whenThe New York Times was praising him. I am not a pacifist. I am a fighter, and my ancestors fought in the civil war. Just now, however, I believe it most important for me personally to fight capitalism and Kaiserism in this country.[24]
TheCall was forced to make do for the duration of the war primarily with door-to-door sales bycarriers and atnewsstands. The paper did not have itssecond-class mailing privileges restored until June 1921.
With the advent of theBolshevik Revolution in the fall of 1917, theCall was taken by surprise. On December 26, 1917, the paper editorialized that events inRussia had "got clean away from us" and that the editors could "make nothing of it at present, nor predicate anything for its future from present reports."[25] The paper made its columns available both to supporters and critics of theBolsheviks in Soviet Russia, but were generally supportive of the Russian Revolution in its earliest phase.[26] As withThe Jewish Daily Forward, later a bastion ofanti-communism in the Socialist Party,The Call was not severely critical ofV.I. Lenin,Leon Trotsky and their regime until after the end of theRussian Civil War and the destruction of the internal left wing political opposition in 1921.[26]
As historianTheodore Draper noted:
"Many months after it happened, the Bolshevik revolution was still a very hazy and contradictory phenomenon. It was not simple and clear even to the participants. In its first stage, the Bolshevik regime consisted of a coalition between the Bolsheviks, theLeft Socialist Revolutionaries, and minor groups. Long-timeMarxists andanarchists pulled together against the common enemy...
"Thus it was possible for the American Left Wing to see the Bolshevik revolution in its own image. It could make itself believe that theSoviets were merely Russian equivalents of 'industrial socialism' or 'industrial unionism'..."[27]
Only in its last years, well after the 1919 departure of theLeft Wing Section of the Socialist Party to establish the nascent American Communist movement, would theCall become consistently critical of the excesses of the Russian Communist Party.
By the early 1920s the Socialist Party was in severe membership decline and funding of theNew York Call became correspondingly tenuous. In a last-ditch effort to save the paper, it was reorganized in the fall of 1923 to include non-Socialists in its management.[28] On October 1, 1923, the name of the paper was formally changed to theNew York Leader as a reflection of this new orientation and pacifist ministerNorman Thomas, formerly ofThe World Tomorrow, was named as editor of the publication.[28]Heber Blankenhorn became managing editor,Evans Clark business manager, and Ed Sullivan sportswriter.[29] This effort to stabilize the daily newspaper's funding was unsuccessful, however, and theNew York Leader was terminated just six weeks later.[28]
New York socialists, facing the prospect of no English-language paper in the city for the first time in more than three decades immediately met and made plans for a new weekly, to be calledThe New Leader in memory of the recently terminated daily.[28]James Oneal, a former member of theNew York Call staff, was made editor of this new publication.[28]
A complete run of theNew York Call is available via master negativemicrofilm from theNew York Public Library in New York City.[30]
The papers of the Workingmen's Co-operative Publishing Association are held by theTamiment Library ofNew York University in two archival boxes.[31] The material is open for the use of researchers without restriction.