Then the League decided to have a daily paper. The “Courier-News” of Fargo had been for sale, but the owners would not sell to the League. The League went ahead to start a new paper, actually buying machinery and taking subscriptions; then the “Courier-News” decided to sell, and its circulation under League ownership now exceeds the total population of Fargo.
The League at present has weekly papers in seven states, with a total circulation of two hundred thousand, and another weekly, the “Nonpartisan Leader,” published in St. Paul, with a circulation of two hundred and fifty thousand. It is starting co-operative country weekly papers, supervising their editorial policy and furnishing them news and editorial service; over one hundred of these weekly papers are already going. There is another League daily in Grand Forks, North Dakota, and one at Nampa, Idaho. Finally, the League is going ahead on its biggest venture, the establishment of a daily in Minneapolis. This paper is to be capitalized at a million dollars, and the stock is being sold to farmer and labor organizations throughout the state. Says Mr. Morris: “Many wealthy professional and business men, disgusted with the controlled press, have purchased stock, and are warm boosters for the League publications.” Also he says:
One of the chief results of the establishment of a League press is a different attitude on the part of many existing papers. With competition in the field, many publishers who have hitherto been biased and unfair have been forced to change their tactics. Few of these papers have gone over to the League side of political and economic questions, but they have been forced at least to print fair news reports on both sides of the question in their news columns, reserving their opposition to the movement for their editorial columns. That, of course, is fair enough. The menace of the controlled press in America is due to the fact that as a rule this press does not confine its arguments and opposition to the editorial columns, but uses the news columns for propaganda, and, failing to print the news, printing only a part of it, distorting it or actually lying, sways opinion through the news columns.
Such is the procedure in places where Americans are free. But what about our crowded cities, with their slum populations, speaking forty different languages, illiterate, unorganized, and dumb? Even in these cities there have been efforts made to start newspapers in the interest of the people. I know few more heroic stories than the twenty-year struggle to establish and maintain the “New York Call.” It began as a weekly, “The Worker.” Even that took endless campaigns of begging, and night labor of devoted men and women who earned their livings by day-time labor under the cruel capitalist grind. At last they managed to raise funds to start a daily, and then for ten years it was an endless struggle with debt and starvation. It was a lucky week when the “New York Call” had money enough to pay its printing force; the reporters and editors would sometimes have to wait for months. A good part of the space in the paper had to be devoted to ingenious begging.
The same attempt was made in Chicago, and there bad management and factional quarrels brought a disastrous failure. At the time of writing, there are Socialist dailies in Butte, in Seattle, and in Milwaukee, also a few foreign-language Socialist dailies. There are numerous weeklies and monthlies; but these, of course, do not take the place of newspapers, they are merely a way of pamphleteering. The people read falsehoods all week or all month, and then at last they get what portion of the truth the “Appeal to Reason” or the “Nation” or the “Liberator” or “Pearson’s” can find room for. In the meantime the average newspaper reader has had his whole psychology made of lies, so that he cannot believe the truth when he sees it.
There are a few millionaires in America who have liberal tendencies. They have been willing to finance reform campaigns, and in great emergencies to give the facts to the people; they have been willing now and then to back radical magazines, and even to publish them. But—I state the fact, without trying to explain it—there has not yet appeared in America a millionaire willing to found and maintain a fighting daily paper for the abolition of exploitation. I have myself put the proposition before several rich men. I have even known of cases where promises were made, and plans drawn up. My friend Gaylord Wilshire intended to do it with the proceeds of his gold-mine, but the gold-mine has taken long to develop. I had hopes that Henry Ford would do it, when I read of his purchase of the “Dearborn Independent.” I urged the matter upon him with all the eloquence I could muster; he said he meant to do it, but I have my fears. The trouble is his ignorance; he really does not know about the world in which he finds himself, and so far the intellectual value of the “Dearborn Independent” has been close to zero.
So our slum proletariat is left to feed upon the garbage of yellow journalism. Year by year the cost of living increases, and wages, if they move at all, move laggingly, and after desperate and embittered strife. In the midst of this strife the proletariat learns its lessons; it learns to know the clubs of policemen and the bayonets and machine-guns of soldiers; it learns to know capitalist politicians and capitalist judges; also it learns to know Capitalist Journalism! Wherever in America the workers organize and strike for a small portion of their rights, they come out of the experience with a bitter and abiding hatred of the press. I have shown you what happened in Colorado; in West Virginia; in Paterson, New Jersey; in Calumet, Michigan; in Bisbee, Arizona; in Seattle, Washington. I could show you the same thing happening in every industrial center in America.
The workers have come to realize the part which the newspapers play; they have come to know the newspapers as the crux of the argument, the key to the treasure-chamber. A modern newspaper, seen from the point of view of the workers, is a gigantic munition-factory, in which the propertied class manufactures mental bombs and gas-shells for the annihilation of its enemies. And just as in war sometimes the strategy is determined by the location of great munition-factories and depots, so the class-struggle comes to center about newspaper offices. In every great city of Europe where the revolution took place, the first move of the rebels was to seize these offices, and the first move of the reactionaries was to get them back. We saw machine-guns mounted in the windows of newspaper-offices, sharp-shooters firing from the roofs, soldiers in the streets replying with shrapnel. It is worth noting that wherever the revolutionists were able to take and hold the newspapers, they maintained their revolution; where the newspapers were retaken by the reactionaries, the revolution failed.
In Petrograd the “Little Gazette,” organ of the “Black Hundreds,” became the “Red Gazette,” and has remained the “Red Gazette.” The official military organ, the “Army and Fleet,” became the “Red Army and Fleet.” The “Will of Russia,” organ of Protopopov, last premier of the Tsar, became the “Pravda,” which means “Truth.” In Berlin, on the other hand, the “Kreuz-Zeitung,” organ of black magic and reaction, became for a few days “Die Rothe Fahne,” the “Red Flag”; but, alas, it went back to the “Kreuz-Zeitung” again!
Will it come this way in America? Shall we see mobs storming the offices of the “New York Times” and “World,” the “Chicago Tribune,” the “Los Angeles Times”? It depends entirely upon the extent to which these capitalist newspapers continue to infuriate the workers, and to suppress working-class propaganda with the help of subservient government officials. I personally am not calling for violent revolution; I still hope for the survival of the American system of government. But I point out to the owners and managers of our great capitalist news-organs the peril in which they place themselves, by their system of organized lying about the radical movement. It is not only the fury of resentment they awaken in the hearts of class-conscious workingmen and women; it is the condition of unstable equilibrium which they set up in society, by the mass of truth they suppress. Today every class-conscious workingman carries about with him as his leading thought, that if only he and his fellows could get possession of the means of news-distribution, could take the printing-offices and hold them for ten days, they could end forever the power of Capitalism, they could make safe the Co-operative Commonwealth in America.