A great early ‘Labor Herald’ with Foster on rail workers, UMWA District 5 miners, Earl Browder on the amalgamation movement in Ohio, Jack Carney on ‘Them Turrible Reds,’ Jay Fox with ‘Labor and the Law,’ Elwood Brewster on labor cartoons, union divisions in the textile industry, and more. William Z. Foster’s article ‘Ravages of Dual Unionism’ is also contained and linked to online text here.

The Labor Herald (Trade Union Educational League). Vol. 1 No. 9. November, 1922.

Contents: Railroad Workers Amalgamate! by William Z. Foster, Betrayal of the Fayette County Miners by William Guiler, Thomas Meyerschof, and Frank Indof, Amalgamation Victorious in Ohio by Earl R. Browder, Maintenance Men Route Reactionaries, Amalgamation Sweeps Onward, Those Turrible Reds by Jack Carney, Labor and the Law by Jay Fox, Degenerate Labor Cartoons by Elwood Brewster, Michigan Convention Moves Forward by a Delegate, Chaos in the Textile Industry by H.J.C., A Big Squawk, Ravages of Dual Unionism by William Z. Foster, Editorials, The International.

The Labor Herald was the monthly publication of the Trade Union Educational League (TUEL), in immensely important link between the IWW of the 1910s and the CIO of the 1930s. It was begun by veteran labor organizer and Communist leader William Z. Foster in 1920 as an attempt to unite militants within various unions while continuing the industrial unionism tradition of the IWW, though it was opposed to “dual unionism” and favored the formation of a Labor Party. Although it would become financially supported by the Communist International and Communist Party of America, it remained autonomous, was a network and not a membership organization, and included many radicals outside the Communist Party. In 1924 Labor Herald was folded into Workers Monthly, an explicitly Party organ and in 1927 ‘Labor Unity’ became the organ of a now CP dominated TUEL. In 1929 and the turn towards Red Unions in the Third Period, TUEL was wound up and replaced by the Trade Union Unity League, a section of the Red International of Labor Unions (Profitern) and continued to publish Labor Unity until 1935. Labor Herald remains an important labor-orientated journal by revolutionaries in US left history and would be referenced by activists, along with TUEL, along after it’s heyday.

Link to PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/laborherald/v1n09-nov-1922.pdf