A Historical Case Study of Alternative News Media and Labor Activism: The Dubuque Leader 1935–1939

Abstract

Identifying Alternative Media in Media History This study contributes the historical dimension of the literature addressing alternative media in the United States through a close consideration of the Dubuque Leader's reorganization in the mid 1930s as a collectively owned and independently operated newspaper, the challenges the newspaper faced as an alternative medium, and its role in cultivating progressive social change in the city and region. A weekly newspaper controlled by a cooperative of several hundred working-class shareholders involved in or supportive of the labor union movement, the Leader became an important forum for Dubuque, Iowa's working-class community, while its editorial abandon made it a frequently controversial outlet. As the Leader established itself as a social conscience of the community, so did its journalistic voice foster action toward the increased civic and economic enfranchisement of Dubuque's craft and industrial workers. In comparison the circulation of other labor and progressive journals of the period published in larger metropolitan locales, the Leader's peak weekly circulation of 3,350 during the late 1930s1 was modest, yet close historical exploration of the paper's formative years reveals not only an unusual discursive element within the social microcosm of Dubuque proper, but also many of the facets which constituted Midwestern working-class culture and community in the 1930s. At the same time the Leader is illustrative of the constraints facing journalists that are still encountered by independent news media this day. In fact, the Dubuque Leader's formation as non-profit organ correspondingly informs a central problem encountered by news media and addressed by journalists and scholars throughout the twentieth century: a commercial modus operandi versus genuine editorial freedom.2 This fundamental problem driven much of the media criticism in the United States3 and is of marked concern at the present historical moment where a networked world spawned a multiplicity of alternative news outlets and what become a genuine movement toward media reform.4 As John Downing noted many years ago, the problem of media access not been endemic the United States, and his studies have thus been driven by one crucial question which informs the present work: What are the possibilities people have for constructing their own media, independently of capital, the state, the church, and other agencies of oppressive power?5 One means of significantly responding this question is through historical examples of alternative media that illustrate under what specific social and historical conditions such possibilities were realized in a pre-information based era.6 While historical instances of alternative, independent, or community-based news media are essential a greater understanding of media and the potential for democratic social movements, media scholars have largely overlooked the histories of working-class newspapers with small circulations and similar alternative media. Detailed documentation of the difficulties encountered by them, however, is rich in its implications for a greater comprehension of not just alternative media forms, but also of the media terrain in general.7 As Nick Couldry and James Curran observe, The process we call 'media' is the historic result of countless local battles over who the power represent the reality of others. Once such battles are won, they generally cease being remembered as battles.8 Chris Atton also notes how recent scholarship has had little say about the historical conditions under which [alternative] media enact their journalism.9 Media historians' neglect of these struggles over representation, according Jon Bekken, signifies a missed opportunity to grapple with such vital questions as press freedom (both political and economic) and the nature of the relationship between the media and the publics they serve. …