The Press: Federated’s End

At the height of the great 1919 steel strike, the U.S. press carried so little news of the dispute that 32 labor editors decided to start a cooperative, nonprofit news service solely to cover union activities. The agency: Federated Press. Since 1922 the F.P. has been run by Carl Haessler, a Detroit newsman, publicist, e.g., with the Institute for Mortuary Research, and a self-styled “anticapitalist” who was court-martialed for refusing to put on an Army uniform in World War I, later went to Alcatraz for leading a prison strike. Not long after its founding, F.P. began to toe the Socialist and later the Communist Party line, employed many Communist editors and correspondents.

F.P. barely survived the early Depression, but revived rapidly under the New Deal, when the C.I.O. started dozens of union papers. Despite its Red sympathies, F.P. boasted some 200 subscribers (including many anti-Communist publications) at its peak shortly after World War II. But the agency’s biggest support came from labor journals. In 1949, when the C.I.O. started cleaning out Red unions, a non-Communist labor news service called the Labor Press Association siphoned away many union papers. Though L.P.A. folded in 1954, Haessler survived by servicing the two principal U.S. Communist dailies—Manhattan’s Daily Worker and San Francisco’s People’s World—and a hard core of leftwing unions.

Last month, with fewer than 50 subscribers, Haessler, 68, decided to suspend operations “temporarily.” Last week he announced in Detroit that Federated Press would not resume service.