[lbo-talk] no dissent, we're Americans!

[J Cullen]

>Michael Perelman wrote:
>>
>>  Weren't there a sizable number of small town progressive papers in the
>>  past?  Not the majority, of course.
>>
>>
>
>I can remember "small town" newspapers from Benton Harbor, St. Joseph,
>Kalamazoo, Ann Arbor, & Marcellus Michigan & from South Bend Indiana.
>All reactionary. A century or so ago there was a small town progressive
>newspaper someplace in Kansas, I don't remember the town. Again I cite
>Upton Sinclair, _The Brass Check_, for a pretty good account of "the
>media" as they existed circa 1900.
>
>The Bloomington Pantagraph was progressive during the Civil War,
>advocating that one Confederate pow be shot for every black union
>soldier the confederates shot. (Lincoln's campaign manager, David Davis,
>came from Bloomington, his descendants, along with the Stevensons, later
>owned the paper -- and Davis was probably one of the movers-and-shakers
>in making the Republican party a conservative party within a decade or
>two. The last local owner, David Merwin, was related to both the Davis's
>and the Stevensons. His last act as owner was to defeat a union by
>speaking of the great advantages of personal relations between owner &
>staff. It later turned out that he had already planned to sell it to the
>owner of the SF Chronicle, who wanted it as a wedding present for his
>nephew or something like that.)
>
>Carrol

That small-town Kansas progressive paper you were thinking of 
probably was William Allen White's Emporia Gazette.

In many small towns there was a Democratic paper and a Republican 
paper dating back to before the Civil War. I know that was the case 
in towns of any size in Iowa in the late 1800s. A lot of them 
probably merged in the 1950s and '60s, but they would have maintained 
their partisan identities at least through the New Deal and the early 
'50s. The Populist Party promoted local and regional populist papers 
in the 1880s and 1890s, some of which survived into the early 20th 
century. The Progressive movement started at least two publications 
-- The Progressive magazine and the Madison, Wis., Capital Times, 
which still exist. Wallaces Farmer was a progressive magazine with a 
high rural readership in the early 20th century.

Also, remember that Hearst started out as a pro-labor publisher -- 
until they started to unionize his papers.