Background From the decade of the 1930s, the
Communist Party USA (CPUSA) cast a long shadow as the largest
Marxist political organization in the United States of America. In addition to a vast array of monthly, weekly, and daily
publications in languages other than English, the Communist Party published an English-language daily newspaper in New York City, the
Daily Worker. As an official organ of the CPUSA, this publication was constrained by tight central direction and rather mechanical adherence to the party's political line — factors which somewhat limited the paper's appeal to radical American intellectuals. In 1945 an American plane carried a number of newspaper men to Germany, whose
Nazi regime had recently been defeated in
World War II. These were part of a "Psychological Warfare Division" consisting of American, British, and Canadian newspaper editors and writers given the task of purging those deemed as Nazi collaborators from the German newspaper industry and replacing them with a new crop of publishers, editors, and journalists with verifiable anti-fascist bona fides. Among these journalists tapped to help "denazify" the country through establishment of a democratic press were
James Aronson, a resident of New York City, and Englishman
Cedric Belfrage, a former theatre critic for the London
Daily Express who had since the 1930s lived in
Hollywood, California where he worked as a
screenwriter. United by radical political beliefs, the two journalists vaguely discussed establishing a new radical newspaper in the United States following their demobilization. This took the form of a new political organization, the
Progressive Party, which launched a national campaign with a ticket headed by former Vice President
Henry A. Wallace. A broad political movement, backed by the CPUSA, emerged in support of Wallace's insurgent candidacy.
Establishment The first issue of the
National Guardian saw print on October 18, 1948 — just three weeks before the November presidential election. This subject-sectional approach favored by the glossy news weeklies was rapidly abandoned, with only a "Better Living" section surviving into the 1950s. The paper initially maintained no editorial page but editorialized freely with the published content, selecting and rewriting news stories from
wire services and mainstream daily newspapers with a new radical focus. With over 1 million voters casting ballots for Henry Wallace in November 1948, such a goal seemed within realization, and the editors tied their hopes to the continued growth and success of the Progressive Party movement. Circulation peaked at 75,000 by 1950. The paper skipped issues and slashed pay of its office staff, barely surviving the financial crisis. The paper's cover price was hiked to 10 cents in an effort to balance costs and revenues. In addition to falling returns, the
National Guardian found its growth hampered by its connection to what was seen by many to be a faltering political movement. Seemingly damaged by its close linkage to the personality of defeated Presidential aspirant Henry Wallace and subjected to severe criticism for its suspected connections to the Communist Party, the Progressive Party dissolved in the 1950s. The paper was so closely tied to the Rosenberg defense that after the pair were executed on the
electric chair for
espionage,
National Guardian editor James Aronson was named a trustee of the fund established on behalf of the couple's orphaned children. Continuity with the earlier incarnation of the paper was limited, with radical foreign correspondents Anna Louise Strong in China and Wilfred Burchett in
Southeast Asia continuing in their previous roles. "We are movement people acting as journalists," the
Guardian′s staff now proudly declared. A factional split developed among the editorial staff in 1970, leading to the creation of a short-lived rival publication, the
Liberated Guardian. These party-building efforts ultimately failed, owing in some measure to the exhaustion of the
Cultural Revolution in China as well as the lack of popular support for extreme political solutions and revolutionary phrasemaking in the United States. By the decade of the 1980s the paper had begun to moderate its tone, lending critical support to revolutionary movements of whatever stripe, without regard to the Sino-Soviet split, and opening its pages to a range of diverse views by a broad spectrum of political activists. Circulation recovered somewhat, floating in the 20,000 to 30,000 range throughout this interval. ==Organization==