In January 1926, the ILD began publishing Labor Defender, as a monthly, profusely illustrated magazine with a low cover price of 10 cents. Magazine circulation boomed. It rose from some 1,500 paid subscriptions and 8,500 copies in bulk bundle sales in 1927, to some 5,500 paid subscriptions with a bundle sale of 16,500 by mid-1928. This mid-1928 circulation figure was said by Assistant Secretary Marty Abern to be "greater than the combined circulation of The Daily Worker,Labor Unity, and The Communist combined."[2]
Labor Defender depicted a black-and-white world of heroic trade unionists and dastardly factory owners, of oppressed African Americans struggling for freedom against the Ku Klux Klan and the use of state terror to stifle and divide and destroy all opposition.[3] Writers included prominent Communists such as trade union leader William Z. Foster, cartoonist Robert Minor, and Benjamin Gitlow, a former political prisoner in New York.,[3] as well as non-party voices like novelist Upton Sinclair, former Wobbly Ralph Chaplin, Socialist Party leader Eugene V. Debs, and Gavin Arthur, grandson of U.S. President Chester A. Arthur. Between April 1936 and December 1937, Sasha Small, Gavin Arthur, and communist poet Langston Hughes served as editors.
The magazine made a constant plea for additional funds for jailed labor activists across the country. A regular column called "Voices from Prison" highlighted the plight of those behind bars and reinforced the message that good work was being done on the behalf of the so-called "class war prisoners" of America.[4]
^Abern, Martin (1992). "International Labor Defense Activities (1 January - 1 July 1928)". James P. Cannon and the Early Years of American Communism. New York: Prometheus Research Library. p. 537.
^ abMilton Cantor, "Labor Defender: Chicago and New York, 1926-1937; Equal Justice: New York, 1937-1942," in Joseph R. Conlin (ed.), The American Radical Press, 1880-1960: Volume 1. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1974; pg. 250.
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