Robert Reich, among other critics, has warned that today\u2019s media ecosystem is far more susceptible to authoritarianism than in the past. He blames this situation on structural changes to the political economy such as media and wealth concentration and shareholder capitalism. This is a valid observation, although it overlooks the disastrous role that neoliberalism played in the process. Criticisms of media concentration, authoritarianism, and threats to free speech, however, are not new. For over a century, a major problem with American mass media has been the tendency toward consolidation and monopoly and restrictions on free speech. Numerous groups in the past understood this and tried to do something about it\u2014especially organized labor. In this regard, it is important to acknowledge the birth, one hundred years ago this month, of an oppositional and alternative form of radio: Chicago\u2019s WCFL.<\/p>\n
WCFL emerged in the mid-1920s when radio broadcasting first became a popular mass medium. Contemporary pundits believed that radio could enhance democracy, obliterate class differences, and spread education and culture. Trade unionists and political radicals, however, recognized that an emerging monopoly of corporate radio stations and networks threatened working-class interests. Chicago labor officials attacked network radio programming for manipulating the myths of consensus and individualism while promoting consumerism, the sacred marketplace, and business infallibility. Socialist Party head Norman Thomas feared that commercial radio would anesthetize the American people and make them more vulnerable to conformity and mediocrity. Such criticisms, of course, had a long history.<\/p>\n
Dispossessed and oppressed communities\u2014whether defined by class, race, or gender\u2014and individual dissidents had long recognized the tendency of capitalist media to distort, stereotype, and malign their values and lives. Workers, African Americans, ethnic enclaves, and women\u2019s groups understood the need to develop their own oppositional voice, to control their own sources of information and education for their respective and often overlapping communities. In the early part of the nineteenth century, U.S. laborers and socialists perceived that mainstream newspapers echoed the class interests of local merchants or nascent industrial capitalists. A classic study of the industrial revolution in Lynn, Massachusetts noted the emergence of a labor press that denounced concentrated wealth, \u201cdefended the ballot as a weapon of reform,\u201d entertained \u201cwith moralistic fiction,\u201d and informed readers about industrial and union developments.[1]<\/sup><\/a> Later in the century, immigrant working-class communities produced a labor press that regularly addressed \u201cthe issues of class and ethnicity, of organization and work-place discrimination, of gender roles\u2026, of class fragmentation and international solidarity.\u201d[2]<\/sup><\/a> By the early twentieth century, a vibrant labor and union press had emerged, serving the working-class at large and the interests of trade unions in particular. In the 1920s, labor activists and radicals created the Federated Press (FP), modeled after the Associated Press, to cover national and international political and economic events from a working-class perspective. The FP offered an ideal home for radical journalists such as Jessie Lloyd O\u2019Connor and Harvey O\u2019Connor who \u201ccovered the news that the commercial press ignored and\/or feared.\u201d\u00a0 In the same era, the reporting and commentary of labor journalists such as Eva Valesh and Mary Heaton Vorse contended with a society rife with gender discrimination and class conflict.[3]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n Leaders of the Chicago Federation of Labor (CFL) also waged war against capitalist concentration. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, John Fitzpatrick and Edward Nockels, the CFL president and secretary, respectively, developed reputations as \u201cthe most active, the most untiring, the most militant sponsors of organized labor.\u201d[4]<\/sup><\/a> Moreover, these two organic intellectuals were in the vanguard of using cutting edge media to win the hearts and minds of Chicago\u2019s masses. During World War I, Fitzpatrick and Nockels led the CFL to establish both a newspaper (the New Majority<\/em>, later the Federation News<\/em>) and press service (FP) dedicated to providing alternative and oppositional perspectives to that of the capitalist media. In July 1926, the CFL launched its own radio station, WCFL. Created in the midst of a national debate about the structure and nature of U.S. broadcasting, WCFL would, in its first decades, be a thorn in the side of network broadcasters (e.g., the National Broadcasting Company), concentrated media conglomerates (e.g., the press\/radio empires of William Randolph Hearst and Robert R. McCormick), and federal regulatory agencies (e.g., the Federal Radio Commission and its successor, the Federal Communications Commission).<\/p>\n WCFL was the nation\u2019s first and longest-surviving labor radio station. It began as a listener-supported channel rooted in local working-class and ethnic communities. It emphasized popular entertainment and labor and public affairs programming. Ed Nockels became the voice of labor\u2019s driving force during its first and most militant decade (1926\u20131937). Under his direction, unions and working-class communities in the city used labor radio to help organize workers, increase public support for the union movement, and enhance working-class consciousness and culture. Equally important, Nockels became a prominent voice criticizing a growing radio monopoly of network broadcasters, large radio station owners, and electronic equipment producers. Dependent on voluntary contributions and the resources of its parent body, WCFL suffered financial crises\u2014exacerbated by the Great Depression\u2014and continual harassment by federal authorities and corporate competitors. Nevertheless, WCFL served a broadly defined labor and progressive community. \u201cService,\u201d for Nockels, meant providing \u201cnot only entertainment but information; not only music but science, history, economics, and all the other things that make for human welfare.\u201d A variety of labor, civic, consumer, and political activists and organizations utilized WCFL\u2019s microphones well into the 1940s.[5]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n Labor and radical groups joined WCFL to denounce corporate radio\u2019s institutional structure and contest its adverse cultural and ideological influence on the masses. And, to some extent, Chicago\u2019s voice of labor served as a model for other labor\/community-based outlets. Labor councils in San Francisco and St. Louis, the American Fund for Public Service, and other groups considered creating their own radio stations during the 1920s. The Socialist Party established a radio station in New York City in 1927. Named after Eugene V. Debs, WEVD dedicated itself to becoming \u201ca fighting, militant champion of the rights of the oppressed.\u201d Initially supported by financial contributions from party organs as well as the garment trades unions, WEVD became linked with the Jewish Daily Forward<\/em> and the conservative wing of the socialist movement. Well into the 1930s, area trade unions used the station\u2019s facilities to educate and organize workers. The International Ladies\u2019 Garment Workers\u2019 Union (ILGWU), for example, produced programs that combined live entertainment with speeches by prominent labor and political leaders. WEVD also broadcasted a variety of progressive and radical political analyses and shortened versions of workers\u2019 theater productions. By the 1940s and 1950s, WEVD\u2019s labor orientation had yielded to \u201cethnic\u201d programming, especially Yiddish entertainment and commentary on American Jewish life and the state of Israel. Although the station never entirely abandoned its social democratic tradition, it became increasingly right-wing by the 1960s. It left the air in 2001.[6]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n A revived labor movement in the 1930s saw many labor and political activists hoping to use the mass media to challenge corporate capitalism\u2019s ideological and cultural institutions and products. Unions affiliated with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in the 1930s\u20131940s formulated their own programming on commercial stations and networks. These labor programs aimed at both counterbalancing pro-capitalist corporate propaganda and advancing labor\u2019s own visions of industrial democracy, social justice, and equal rights.\u00a0 The work of radical labor radio commentators such as Arthur Gaeth and Sidney Roger, for example, offered oppositional perspective on domestic and foreign affairs in the mid- and late 1940s.\u00a0 At the same time\u2014with the advent of an alternative broadcasting format, frequency modulation (FM)\u2014several CIO unions created their own broadcasting stations. The ILGWU and the United Automobile Workers, in particular, established FM stations at this time. But these outlets proved short-lived because of the prohibitive cost of financing station operations and programming and the competitive disadvantages of FM broadcasting.[7]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n Depression-era problems, commercial radio competition, grandiose plans for a radio network of labor stations, and pressure from the conservative American Federation of Labor, changed WCFL by the late 1930s and early 1940s. Under pressure from the AFL, for example, the CFL opposed creation of the CIO and refused to allow CIO locals to use WCFL\u2019s facilities. Compounding the station\u2019s difficulties was the death of Ed Nockels in 1937. WCFL increasingly became like other commercial operations: dependent on advertising and mass entertainment programming for its survival. In the 1950s and 1960s WCFL redefined its \u201cservice\u201d to labor and maximized profits to fund its own operations and general CFL activities. WCFL developed a rock n\u2019 roll format to attract a rapacious consumer audience and, consequently, big-spending advertisers. Successful for a short time, rock radio ultimately failed. The CFL sold the station\u2019s license in 1978.<\/p>\n The presence of labor radio stations such as WCFL, especially during the early decades of broadcasting, represented an alternative to the concentrated business-owned mass media and<\/em> acted as an oppositional force in U.S. politics and culture. Nockels\u2019 twelve years of guiding WCFL were not perfect; they were full of inconsistencies and mistakes. WCFL\u2019s increased commercialization, even under Nockels\u2019 eye, weakened the participatory democracy that he and Fitzpatrick had championed in the 1920s.\u00a0 But Nockels was an articulate advocate for a decentralized and democratic media system. He denounced property rights on the air, maintaining that the airwaves were a public resource and as such should benefit all people and not become a source of profit for private or political interests. A century later we might ask how Nockels would have responded to the neoliberal policies, such as the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which had the effect of accelerating media concentration and weakening free speech rights. Nockels probably would have asked Congress, as he actually did in 1927: \u201cwhat right has an individual or corporation to use and exploit public property for profit?\u201d[8]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n Nockels\u2019 critique of a concentrated media system fit into his overall assessment of corporate capitalism. As twentieth-century \u201cradical Jeffersonians,\u201d Nockels and Fitzpatrick interpreted U.S. society as \u201cone vast, virtuous majority that suffered injustice\u201d at the hands of a narrow minority of corporate monopolists.[9]<\/sup><\/a> The danger was not only that a handful of corporations would establish a monopoly over communications technology, but that they would dominate the nation\u2019s cultural and ideological production. Nockels would be aghast at the level of media concentration taking place in the United States today. Even in the 1920s, Nockels and Fitzpatrick urged the federal government to investigate a radio monopoly that poured millions of dollars into \u201cwonderful music and entertainment\u201d which corporate broadcasters used \u201cto lull the people to sleep while, with their\u2026perfumed silk gloves, they will be able to pick the pockets of the people for all time to come.\u201d[10]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n This leads us to a crucial and still relevant point raised by Ed Nockels and WCFL in the 1920s and 1930s: the right of free speech on the air. In his battle to establish and sustain WCFL, Nockels exposed the way in which corporate capitalism tried to define the terms of debate. A frequent nemesis of Nockels was Louis G. Caldwell, the first general counsel of the Federal Radio Commission (FRC) and prominent corporate attorney. While serving in government and\/or defending the media empire of Robert R. McCormick, Caldwell structured the debate about radio free speech in such a way as to dismiss, out-of-hand, those who questioned the sanctity of the capitalist marketplace and its role as the sole guarantor of free speech. Challengers to such a proposition, such as Nockels and WCFL, became comparable to the feebleminded who attacked the law of gravity. Caldwell, network executives, FRC and FCC commissioners, etc. found Nockels insufferable because he disputed the meaning of words and actions that they held as self-evident truths. But Nockels revealed the fallacy of such an argument and exposed the efforts of corporate capitalists and their state henchmen to create ideological hegemony. He turned their arguments on their heads to demonstrate their class origin and intent. For this reason, if for no other, we should acknowledge and learn from Nockels\u2019 role in creating WCFL a hundred years ago.<\/p>\n [1]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0<\/sup>Alan Dawley, Class and Community: The Industrial Revolution in Lynn<\/em> (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976), 191-92.<\/p>\n [2]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0<\/sup>Dirk Hoerder, editor, The Immigrant Labor Press in North America, 1840s-1970s: An Annotated Bibliography<\/em> (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1987), 31.<\/p>\n [3]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0<\/sup>Jessie Lloyd O\u2019Connor, Harvey O\u2019Connor, and Susan M. Bowler, Harvey and Jessie: A Couple of Radicals<\/em> (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), 122.<\/p>\n [4]<\/sup><\/a> Letter, William B. Rubin to L. P. Straube, March 1, 1937, Correspondence 1937, Folder Jan.-Mar., Box 11, William B. Rubin Papers, Wisconsin Historical Society, Area Research Center, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.<\/p>\n [5]<\/sup><\/a> Nathan Godfried, WCFL: Chicago\u2019s Voice of Labor, 1926\u20131978<\/em> (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997).\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n [6]<\/sup><\/a> Nathan Godfried, \u201cStruggling over Politics and Culture: Organized Labor and Radio Station WEVD during the 1930s,\u201d Labor History <\/em>42: 4 (June 2001): 347\u201369.<\/p>\n [7]<\/sup><\/a> Elizabeth Fones-Wolf, Waves of Opposition: Labor and the Struggle for Democratic Radio<\/em>. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006); Nathan Godfried, \u201c\u2018Voice of the People\u2019: Sidney Roger, the Labor\/Left, and Broadcasting in San Francisco, 1945-1950,\u201d American Communist History<\/em> 18:1-2 (March-June 2019): 56-78.<\/p>\n [8]<\/sup><\/a> Federation News<\/em>, April 9, 1927, 1.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.lawcha.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/Pages-from-The_New_Majority-scaled.jpg\")
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