“From Blueprint to Reality”: The Dubuque Leader's Transformation under Cooperative Ownership

Abstract

This article considers the economic reorganization and journalism of the Dubuque Leader, a weekly labor newspaper published in Dubuque, Iowa, since 1906. In 1935, in an effort to implement a project of working class journalism unencumbered by extraneous political or economic forces, several figures involved in the eastern Iowa labor movement founded the Iowa Cooperative Publishing Company to take over the Dubuque Leader. In the ensuingyears the newspaper figured centrally in the labor movement's political and organizing campaigns while steering a delicate course vis-à-vis local business and industrial interests and AFL and CIO rivalry.