Federated Press Bulletin, front page, issue of Jan. 12, 1924.
This won’t come as a surprise to union activists, but the mainstream press doesn’t always fairly represent the labor movement. That was true in 1919, the year the Federated Press (FP) was founded, and it remains true today.
The FP was created to counteract the anti-labor bias in the mainstream press during the post-World War I strike wave. At the first convention of the Farmer-Labor Party, a coalition of labor activists, editors, and socialists hatched the idea for a cooperative, labor-oriented press service that would provide national and international news to subscribing labor newspapers. Imagine the Associated Press, but written by and for labor.
For more than three decades, from 1919 to 1956, the FP sent daily news sheets to hundreds of labor newspapers. At its peak in the early 1940s, FP journalists reached millions of American workers with feature stories, regular columns, cartoons, and briefs covering strikes and union news, national and international politics, employer tactics, and suggestions for how workers could act to shape the conditions that affected their lives.
But the FP was more than just news. It represented the vibrancy of American labor and working-class culture in the mid-20th century. One hundred years ago, there were 629 labor newspapers in print. Today, there are about 100.
From the Women's Pages to the Front Page
In my new book Labor Journalism, Labor Feminism: Women at the Federated Press, I argue that labor journalists and newspapers played a critical role in bringing working women’s demands to the fore. To explain the growth of labor feminism, most historians have focused on individual women, such as Caroline Davis of the United Auto Workers (UAW), or organizations like the Women’s Bureau in the U.S. Department of Labor. But the importance of labor newspapers should not be overlooked in understanding how the demands of labor feminism went mainstream.
World War II marked a turning point for both women workers and women journalists. The FP’s women journalists had been publicizing union women’s demands for equal pay since the 1920s. Women’s employment swelled during World War II, but not just in defense plants. Women journalists moved from the women’s pages to the front pages, bringing working women’s problems with them.
National Photo Company, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
What Can We Learn From the Federated Press?
While the book focuses on the FP’s women journalists to tell this story, it is also a history of the FP itself, one that may have some lessons for labor today. Two things stand out to a 21st century reader of the FP’s news sheets.
First, many of the political and economic battles that were waged a century ago are still being fought today. In the 1920s, FP economic columnist Laurence Todd pointed out how tariffs would negatively impact working people. A year before the 1929 crash, Esther Lowell reported on rising unemployment, strikes, and soup lines in New England textile towns. In the early 1940s, Washington D.C. bureau chief Virginia Gardner warned that conservatives were discarding party identification, and uniting in a new coalition of “poll taxers plus Hoover Republicans and reactionary Northerners” to dismantle the New Deal. In the 1930s and 1940s, Julia Ruuttila closely followed the federal government’s efforts to deport political leftists and labor activists. From the 1920s through the 1950s, big business and political conservatives used the specter of communism to discredit labor’s demands, civil rights, and liberal political programs. The FP’s news sheets provide a road map of how we came to our current political moment and a historical record of how ordinary people organized to resist political and economic repression through the labor movement.
There are many reasons why American labor succeeded in the mid-20th century, but foremost among them was unity. One of the defining characteristics of the FP was its editorial policy of nonpartisanship within the labor movement. Carl Haessler, the FP’s managing editor for almost its entire existence, insisted that all organized labor - the American Federation of Labor’s (AFL) craft unions, the Congress of Industrial Organizations’s (CIO) industrial unions, and independent unions - be accorded fair and equal treatment. The FP had no favorites within the labor movement, and it was criticized from both the left and the right for it. Conservatives within the AFL argued that by giving any voice to the political left, the FP weakened the labor movement. At the same time, leftists in the CIO argued that giving anticommunist conservatives equal voice weakened the labor movement. But Haessler stuck by its nonpartisanship policy until 1955. The ability to maintain unity and diversity of opinion was crucial to the success and longevity of the FP.
How can organized labor work toward a program that unifies America’s workers under a shared program of action while allowing for diverse political perspectives? Given the current political and economic crisis, organizing the unorganized millions of Americans seems to be the only realistic path forward. The men and women who organized in the 1920s, faced with a hostile federal government, powerful business interests, and no legal power, but unified in their shared goal of building power for working people, offer one model.
Harris & Ewing, official White House photographers, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
The second lesson is about persistence in the face of political repression. FP journalists Julia Ruuttila, Virginia Gardner, Mim Kelber, Harvey O’Connor, Carl Haessler, and others were called before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and accused of being communists. Harvey and Jessie O’Connor had their passports revoked. But each of them remained focused on their work and committed to their political ideals through very dark times. They would never, at the height of McCarthyism in the 1940s and 1950s, have predicted the liberal resurgence of the sixties. The last chapter of Labor Journalism, Labor Feminism follows the four women journalists featured in the book after the FP closed in 1956. Julia Ruuttila remained a fixture of labor activism in Portland, Oregon into the 1980s, and became a mentor to younger women activists. Mim Kelber linked the labor feminism of the Old Left to the mainstream feminism of the New Left in the 1960s, and remained active in environmental causes until her death in 2004. All of them continued to mentor younger activists, including Ray Mungo and Marshall Bloom, who in 1967 launched the Liberation News Service, a press agency for underground, alternative, and radical newspapers. For labor activists facing similar challenges today, their stories offer a glimmer of hope: political winds shift in ways we cannot predict, but the work of organizing endures.
Lessons for a Movement in Crisis
As workers today face a decades-long decline in union density, rising inequality, and a hostile media landscape, the FP's century-old experiment in independent labor journalism feels urgent again. Labor News, Labor Feminism, a history of a long-forgotten press agency, speaks to our current moment and the pressing need to re-energize America’s labor movement.
Labor Journalism, Labor Feminism: Women at the Federated Press will be available in 2026 through the University of Illinois Press.
