How Rossville, GA Became Home to the South’s First Communist Paper
How Rossville, GA Became Home to the South’s First Communist Paper
A bit of hidden history.
Midway through 1930, Rossville, Georgia became an unlikely home to a very controversial publication: The Southern Worker - a newspaper that would send shockwaves through the region and eventually catch the attention of the highest levels of government.
The Southern Worker was, in fact, a Communist Party publication, boldly disseminating radical ideas in the heart of the Deep South. The first such publication in the south.
And get this: the Rossville print shop which printed the radical weekly was co-owned by none other than a local Ku Klux Klan leader.
The story began that spring when the Communist Party USA headquarters in New York City dispatched two young comrades on a covert mission. One of the young commies was Jim Allen (real name Saul Auerbach), the first editor of The Southern Worker.
The text below is an excerpt from his memoir
I was ordered to remain strictly “underground,” to avoid too open association with Party people or participation in any conspicuous way in public activities. These prohibitions proved burdensome and at times impossible to observe, but they were necessary to assure the regular appearance of the paper.
It was agreed that Birmingham was too tightly controlled to launch the paper there, and Atlanta was just as tough. Chattanooga would provide greater freedom of action, it was thought. So I went off to that city, close by the northern border of Georgia and not far from Alabama. Unlike Birmingham, which was held in the iron grip of a U.S. Steel Company subsidiary, no single large industrial corporation dominated Chattanooga. To be sure, Southern-style segregation prevailed, but the history of the city had given it a somewhat freer atmosphere. Distant from the plantation areas and less subject to planter influence, it had played a border role in the Civil War. In more recent times a tradition of trade unionism had grown among both white and Black, although the craft unions remained segregated. In comparison with Deep South cities, Chattanooga appeared almost “Northern.”
A printer now had to be found who could be counted on to publish an avowedly Communist paper with regularity and at a reasonable price. A canvass of the small shops in the city was unsuccessful—either proper equipment was lacking, the price was too high, or they seemed untrustworthy. Turning to the environs of the city, I found a small print shop in the town of Rossville, just across the border in Georgia. It occupied a small detached building on the outskirts of town, and printed the official county weekly newspaper. A quick glance around revealed that the shop was suitably equipped to handle our tabloid newspaper.
Facing me at the counter was a tall lanky, taciturn Southerner. I approached the main question cautiously. The bottom had been knocked out of the printing trades by the Depression. The man before me would be eager for business, especially if it were assured weekly. He showed no visible emotion when I told him it was to be a “labor” paper. It was to be not an official labor paper, I then informed him, but an independent, left-wing paper. His face remained impassive. At my request, he took pencil in hand and figured the basic cost for a four-page tabloid at three thousand copies, and for each additional page and for every thousand copies. He came up with a basic cost of sixty dollars, cash on the barrelhead. I agreed immediately. It was much below any previous estimate. I told him I would stop in the next day with copy for a subscription blank.
That was the first test. The next day, trembling inside, I placed the copy for the blank before him: “SOUTHERN WORKER—Issued Weekly by Communist Party of U.S.A.—White and Colored Workers Unite!” This time he perceptibly blanched. He took it and told me when the blanks would be ready. When I returned, not at the appointed time, but somewhat later, he placed a neatly wrapped package on the counter. The single white linotype operator barely glanced at me. I paid the agreed price and arranged the schedule for the first edition. At the designated time, I arrived with all but the last-minute copy, including headlines and type specifications, which was to be composed immediately. We agreed when I would come to make up the edition.
This was the crucial test, for the material I had left covered the entire range of issues, including a two-column credo putting forth the policies of the paper. When I arrived, he was at the stone, placing the type and headlines helter-skelter into the frames. He was nervous and wanted to get the type out of the way as fast as he could. But I had my own layout for each page, with a designated spot for every story and illustration. I put my layout on the stone, asked him to remove the type he had placed in the frames, and to begin all over again. He did so without a word. We worked together until the four frames were locked and ready for the press. He printed that night. The entire edition, well wrapped, was ready for me to pick up in the morning. I paid him $60 in cash. From then on, no matter what other pressing needs we had, the cash arrangements were strictly adhered to.
I soon discovered another reason, entirely unexpected, that assured the security of the printing arrangement. The shop was owned by two partners and had only one paid worker. The second partner did not put in an appearance until a few weeks after our first issue. He was a short, pudgy man whose face turned red when I entered the shop. He did not even greet me, but turned sharply and walked to the rear. On making inquiries in the town, we learned he was the local kleagle of the Ku Klux Klan. At first, we were deeply disturbed. On second thought we realized that he was as concerned as we were to conceal the fact his shop printed the Southern Worker. Not a single issue was missed during the time I was editor.
Under the law, our paper was legal, but according to Southern practice and mores, it definitely was not. If they became known, the printer and the editors would be subject to serious harassment to force the closing of the paper.
For the first six months we were a three-state operation. The Southern Worker was datelined Birmingham, Alabama, its mailing address a box in the Birmingham post office. Its editorial office was in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and its printer in Georgia. Isabelle and I moved often, usually from one furnished room to another, our home serving as the office. Our comrades picked up the mail at the Birmingham box and forwarded it to us. In February 1931, when it became too difficult to avoid surveillance at the original post office, we changed the address to another post office box in Chattanooga.
--- from Organizing in the Depression South: A Communist’s Memoir
Now, if that sounds a bit fantastical, Dick Reavis, the NC State associate professor who compiled, restored, and archived 300 copies of the southern worker said this:
the affair reads like romantic fiction, and is therefore worthy of skepticism. But because the printers required him to pay with cash, in advance of delivery, and because no receipts or other records have survived—if ever any existed—nothing can be proved. Rossville indeed was the home of a local weekly, the Open Gate, which also printed other newspapers and was owned by two partners. Compositors in those days tended to develop a style, or matrix of habits, which provide at least speculative clues about their identities. Both the Open Gate and the Southern Worker, typographers tell me, display a common “stair-stepped primary headline layout: first line flush left, second line column-centered, third line flush right.”
They also share a “column centered” layout for secondary headlines, and “horizontal separator” lines of “similar size and spacing” as well as a commonality in “primary headline” typesizing and leading. In other words, they may have been composed by the same hands. Both also used the Cheltenham typeface in most headlines. Though microfilms of the two newspapers are of poor quality, they also appear to share a text typeface, Ionic No. 5. But more than 3,000 newspapers were using Ionic at the time.
A glance at the two newspapers shows different designs. The Open Gate was a “bedsheet,” 7 columns and about 16 inches wide. The Southern Worker was a tabloid, 5 columns and about 12 inches wide. But the size difference tells us nothing—bedsheet presses could produce tabloids, too. Design clues, however, indicate that another newspaper probably links both the Southern Worker and the Open Gate.
The Gate, like most dailies of the era, had a “showy” feel; the Southern Worker was drab and newsletter-like in comparison.
Auerbach apparently copied his austere design, not from the Rossville newspaper, but from the Labor World, a weekly of dull organizational news published by the AFL council in Chattanooga. The “ears of the labor newspaper,” the upper-left and right corners of the front page, carried messages, “Say to the Advertisers:/ I saw it in the Labor World,” and “United We Stand;/ Divided We Fall.” The ears of the Southern Worker during Auerbach’s tenure as editor also carried slogans “Don’t Starve-/Fight for Social/Insurance!” on the left and “White and/Colored Workers,/Unite!” on the right. The Labor World used a similar typeface, headline style and use of spacing markers, but also included a union label. The Open Gate’s two partners had but one employee, Auerbach reported. Maybe he was a union member.
Though it seems probable, and even likely, that the Party’s newspaper was printed by the Open Gate, the Klan membership Auerbach claimed for of one of its partners is beyond investigation. From time to time, a klavern existed in Rossville, but like the Party, the Klan kept its membership lists secret.
While there's no definitive evidence that the Rossville print shop did print the southern worker, there is also no evidence that the people or powers in Rossville or Chattanooga ever uncovered the print shop's role in producing The Southern Worker. However, it wouldn’t be the last time Rossville found itself tangled with leftwing ideas. Just a few years later, the national textile worker strike sent shockwaves through the South, sparking labor unrest in this very textile powerhouse straddling the Tennessee-Georgia border. It seems that, for a time, this quiet corner of northwest Georgia became a reluctant battleground for workers’ rights and radical change—a reminder that even the most unassuming towns can find themselves at the heart of history's more dramatic moments.
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