New York Call
A bitter split had ensued, with the dissident wing — pejoratively called "Kangaroos" by the DeLeonist 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.
[5] The fair was held in March 1903; during its 16-day duration a linotype machine was put into action as a practical demonstration and a sample newspaper called the Daily Globe was produced.
[6] The WCPA and its project lost its fundraising mojo, however, owing to the excitement and expense of the 1904 Presidential campaign of Eugene V. Debs and New York Socialist Party stalwart Ben 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 the Daily Call was necessarily postponed.
[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.
[11] At the end of October 1908, nationally famous muckraking journalist Charles Edward Russell was brought aboard as associate editor, having recently joined the Socialist Party.
[11] Throughout its history proved essential for the Call to raise additional operating revenue supplementary to the funds generated by newsstand sales and advertising.
The paper featured a "Women's Department" overseen by the high-profile activist wife of a "millionaire Socialist," Rose Pastor Stokes.
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.
[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."
[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 by Postmaster General Albert S. Burleson to ban offending newspapers from the mail.
[22] Mailing privileges of the New York Call were quickly revoked as part of a general offensive against the Socialist Party's press.
[23] Charles Ervin, managing editor of the Call 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.
Lenin, Leon Trotsky and their regime until after the end of the Russian Civil War and the destruction of the internal left wing political opposition in 1921.
[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 called The New Leader in memory of the recently terminated daily.
[30] The papers of the Workingmen's Co-operative Publishing Association are held by the Tamiment Library of New York University in two archival boxes.
