The People (American newspaper)
The large broadsheet was produced on the press owned by the association which published the Volkszeitung and Sunday was initially chosen as the weekly publication day.
[3] Sanial was soon shunted aside however, resigning as editor in 1892 to make way for the rising star of the SLP's firmament, a university lecturer recently converted to Marxism named Daniel DeLeon.
[6] DeLeon's consistent and confrontational leftism in the pages of the party weekly soon propelled him to a position of high authority among the SLP's rank-and-file membership, even exceeding that of the nominal political chiefs of the organization.
[7] The organization's division over the matter converged around the party press, with The People and the SLP's official German paper, Vorwärts, filled with attacks upon so-called "pure and simple labor unions" and their allegedly corrupt officers.
[8] An Anti-DeLeon "opposition faction" headed by Morris Hillquit and Henry Slobodin emerged, grouping themselves around the widely circulated New Yorker Volkszeitung.
In conjunction with the SLP's publishing house, the New York Labor News Company, an array of Marxist articles and pamphlets saw print, including the first American publication of Marx's Critique of the Gotha Program in the pages of The People on January 7, 1900.
In 1911 a series of 30 articles were published in the paper's pages analyzing the day-to-day activities of Victor L. Berger, elected as the first Socialist to the U.S. Congress in the fall of the previous year.
[14] Similarly, a series of 19 articles by DeLeon in The People written against the ideas of a popular anti-socialist priest, Thomas Gasson, were later gathered into pamphlet form as Father Gassoniana.
[15] A membership referendum vote was held in 1938 to elect a new permanent editor for the paper, pitting Teichert against Eric Hass, one of the party's National Organizers who had recently completed journalism course work at the University of Kansas.
[15] In the subsequent three decades, the publication maintained a relatively stable weekly circulation, hitting a low of 9,000 in 1925 to a high of 11,450 in 1945, including individual subscriptions and bundle orders for free distribution.
[18] The People remains readily available to activists and scholars of labor history and radical politics on microfilm, the master negative of which is held by the Wisconsin Historical Society in Madison.
