A “Friendly Negotiation”: Jewish Labor, the Newspaper Guild, and the Limits of the New Deal

Abstract

The rise of commercial media and a broader consumer culture positioned consumers as the guardians of a moral economy during the depths of the Depression, but it also handed journalists the burden of protecting democracy. This chapter describes how the American Newspaper Guild (ANG) sought to organize media workers within the Jewish labor movement’s own institutions. By the late 1930s, a new generation of activists had come of age during the era of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). Jewish labor promoted an outdated anti-Communism that fueled a proto-McCarthyism, but the CIO-inspired organizers did not comprehend the importance of the labor and ethnic press to maintaining a broader, democratic public sphere. ANG organizers and Jewish labor institutions came into enormous conflict as a result, as the Forward and the garment unions all opposed the ANG’s efforts to wage a strike at the Yiddish-language Der tog () The Day ).