The Milwaukee Leader (Milwaukee, Wis.)
Historic newspapers carry the language, views and graphic reporting of their time, including racist content. They are shown to teen and adult profiles.
6,666 issues from 1911 to 1932, published in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, digitised for Chronicling America.
The Milwaukee Leader was a daily newspaper with a Socialist and labor focus that ran from 1911-1938. The paper was established by longtime newspaper editor Victor Berger, who published German-language socialist newspapers such as Vorwärts and had recently been elected the first Socialist member of Congress. An English-language Socialist newspaper had been his dream for decades and was created at the height of the Socialists’ power in Milwaukee, when they held the mayoralty and several city offices. The party’s publishing arm, The Social Democratic Publishing Company, had already funded several Socialist papers and in the wake of its victories the English Leader was a natural next step. Unlike its predecessors, the paper functioned less as a party organ and more of a general daily that presented an alternative to capitalist papers. It had a women’s page, sports and comics sections, advertisements, but its Socialist leanings were clear in its editorials.
During WWI, the paper advocated for US non-intervention and called for peace, which its many German American readers approved of, but also angered President Woodrow Wilson. His postmaster general revoked the Leader’s mailing privileges in October 1917, banning it from the US Mail. The paper’s offices were raided, its subscriber rolls seized, and in 1919 Berger was sentenced to prison under the Espionage Act. But the paper kept running; carriers delivered it throughout Milwaukee County without skipping a single issue until…
- Genres
- News
- Published in
- Milwaukee, Wisconsin, United States
- Language
- English
- Collection
- Chronicling America
- Licence or status
- None stated by the archive
- Rights
- The Library of Congress believes that the newspapers in Chronicling America are in the public domain or have no known copyright restrictions. Newspapers published in the United States more than 95 years ago are in the public domain in their entirety.
- Credit
- Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers, Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities
- Who can read it
- Teens profiles and older (placed by Invisible Network from what the archive says; archives give no ratings)
- Archive
- Library of Congress