The Labor Herald. Vol. 2 No. 3. May, 1923.

Contents: On Trial In Michigan by Wm. Z. Foster, May Day 1886-1923, The Best Bosses in Russia by Anise, Organizing New York Food Workers by Joseph Manley, Progressive Miners’ Conference by Thomas Myerscough, The Capitalists Amalgamate by Clarissa Ware, Miners’ Struggle in South Africa by Thomas Mann, Progressives Prevent Anthracite Split by Thomas Myerscough, The R.I.L U. and the U.M.W.A. by John Dorsey, Steel Workers for Amalgamation and Labor Party by Wallace T. Metcalfe, The Needle Workers’ International by Rose Wortis, Mencken on Gompers, A Pair of Jacks by Earl Browder, A Vote for a Labor Part by J. Louis Engdahl, 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/v2n03-may-1923.pdf