The People's Voice (Helena, Mont.)
Historic newspapers carry the language, views and graphic reporting of their time, including racist content. They are shown to teen and adult profiles.
1,257 issues from 1939 to 1963, published in Helena, Montana, digitised for Chronicling America.
The People’s Voice was a weekly newspaper founded in 1939 by veteran journalist H.S. “Cap” Bruce, with financial backing from Montana labor leaders and farm co-ops. Finding the press coverage of the 1937 state legislature’s defeat of liberal measures lacking, Bruce decided to start his own paper. In May 1938, the People’s Voice Publishing Company entered an agreement with the Belgrade Journal to rent the Journal‘s printing plant for six months at a rate of twenty dollars per month. By October, however, the Voice signed a contract with Bruce’s Educational Co-operative Publishing Company, which had its own printing plant and offices located across the street from the state capitol building in Helena.
The first issue of the Voice was published on December 6, 1939. After editing this issue, Bruce became managing editor and passed editorship to Bennett Hansen. Associate editor Harry L. Billings became managing editor in 1948. Hansen would become managing editor in 1968 and leave the publication in 1969 for a better position elsewhere.
The People’s Voice covered a wide range of issues to interest Montana’s farmers, union leaders, and workers of all kinds. Harry L. Billings described the paper in a 1946 letter to a Camas, Montana, labor leader as “Montana’s only state-wide progressive farmer-labor paper.” He was sure workers would “find much of news value [sic] which has not been printed in other publications of the state. Being a paper owned by farmers and by workers the Voice…
- Genres
- News
- Published in
- Helena, Montana, 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