The Young Socialists� Magazine

The Young Socialists' Magazine

(1908-1920)

Historical Introduction

The Young Socialists’ Magazine was the first radical working-class children’s magazine in the United States. Launched in 1908 in allegiance with the Socialist Party and issued by the publishing association responsible for producing the Socialist daily newspapers the New Yorker Volkszeitung and the New York Call, it was originally titled The Little Socialist Magazine for Boys and Girls and described itself as the “organ of American Socialist Sunday Schools and the Young People’s Federation.” The magazine appears to have grown out of the Our Boys and Girls page edited by Bertha H. Mailly and published on Saturdays in the New York Call; the page was discontinued not long after the launch of The Little Socialist Magazine.

The Socialist Sunday School movement arose out of a perceived need for supplemental education to challenge the pro-establishment worldview taught in the public schools and to inspire children with a feeling of solidarity for the working-class cause (naturally, the schools enrolled almost exclusively the children of Socialist Party members and sympathizers). In the words of a defense of the Socialist Sunday Schools published in the December 1917 issue of the magazine:

How can the children of Socialist parents acquire a feeling of solidarity or comprehend the meaning of the word “comrade” if they are surrounded by people in school and on the streets who scoff at them and their parents? Will they in their childish minds not perhaps get the idea that their parents alone are queer? These handicaps to the spread and growth of Socialism can be overcome only when the children whose parents are Socialists become acquainted with each other so that the name comrade will be founded upon a true friendship. This can be done only in the Sunday School.

The Socialist Sunday School cirriculum, aimed at children aged roughly from 5-14, centered on socialist-themed singing, games, and stage plays, alongside more focused education which generally aimed to challenge pro-capitalist preconceptions through Socratic questioning. For example, in a sadly unsourced 1910 issue of the New York Call Sunday magazine, a teacher recounted asking the question “Who is better, a boy or a girl?”

Eleven out of eighteen girls admitted that boys are more useful; four spoke of the superiority of boys with an enthusiasm and of their own mediocrity with a bitterness which appalled me; three declared that boys were just as good as girls, and one of them even pretended in a real speech that “women were superior to men.” [...] The majority of the boys did not even care to discuss the subject. It was too self-evident! Some got up to ridicule the female sex in general. Five (all last year’s pupils) maintained that girls were as good as boys, and one of them wrote an essay, which is a little masterpiece.

Returning to The Little Socialist Magazine for Boys and Girls, at first its content was oriented toward the children aged 5-14 attending the Socialist Sunday Schools, although it also included a column for older students entitled “For Our High School Reader.” Much of the original content was written by Socialist Sunday School teachers, and readers familiar with the Women’s Movement of the Socialist Party will recognize several names between them: Bertha H. Mailly, Antoinette Konikow, etc.

In June 1911, as the targeted readership of the magazine changed, the material slowly became oriented toward an older audience. As a result, it was renamed The Young Socialists’ Magazine. It ultimately became the official organ of the Socialist Party’s youth group, the Young People’s Socialist League (YPSL), which at first in 1907 served socialists aged 15 to 21; as the group expanded its activist activities in the latter half of the 1910s, this was expanded into a Junior section aged 12-16 and a Senior section aged 15-30 (note that the voting age in the US at the time was 21 (for men), and that the Socialist Party proper allowed membership with voting rights from age 18). The magazine began to regularly cover YPSL activities, and by 1914 it claimed to have a circulation of 10,000. Because of this change in audience, I recommend using the Boys and Girls title in citations for older issues.

In 1917, an initial surge of YPSL activity opposing US entry into World War I quickly turned stagnant, as the draft forced male members either to go to the front, go to jail or go into hiding, and draconian laws like the Espionage Act imposed 10-year prison sentences on prominent anti-war Socialist activists including Eugene V. Debs and Rose Pastor Stokes. At the same time however, the influence of the October revolution in Russia sparked the emergence of a powerful Left Wing Section of the Socialist Party, which won the sympathy of a majority of YPSL chapters. After a coup by the party’s National Executive Committee which nullified the election of a majority Left Wing NEC and expelled a large number of pro-Left Wing party locals, the Communist and Communist Labor Parties of America were formed, with sympathetic YPSL delegates present at their founding congresses. At this point funding for the Young Socialists’ Magazine became tenuous. Publication became sporadic throughout the year 1919, and the magazine sent out its final issue at some point in 1920.

In light of this history, the spiritual successor to The Young Socialists’ Magazine would be The Young Worker, published by the Young Workers League associated with the Communist Party of the USA and gaining the membership of most of the former YPSL’s visible leaders. The successor to The Little Socialist Magazine for Boys and Girls would be The Young Comrade, for the YWL’s Junior section aged 5-14. The latter publication is noteworthy in that the majority of its content was written by the children themselves, with the remainder being written by members of the YWL Senior section.

The history of the the Socialist Sunday School movement has been documented in the 1993 book Schooling for “Good Rebels” by Kenneth Teitelbaum; an outline history of the YPSL has been written by Tim Davenport here.

Magazine Introduction

The Young Socialists’ Magazine published a wide range of short fiction, poems, songs, fables, essays and cartoons. Nationally famous figures in the Socialist Party like Eugene V. Debs often wrote articles addressing the Socialist youth movement directly, and a recurring feature eulogized famous revolutionaries on their birth dates, such as John Brown and August Bebel. Because of the large number of German speakers in the Socialist Party at that time, the magazine was bi-lingual, publishing articles in both English and German. As the magazine developed and started to write for an older audience, more and more space was dedicated to covering YPSL activities across the United States and other socialist youth movements abroad.

Here we offer an incomplete run of issues from 1911 to 1917.

Intro by Paul Saba and Bill Wright, Feb-March 2025
PDFs prepared by Paul Saba