The youngest editor of a socialist periodical in the early 1910s was just sixteen years old. His name was Marvin Sanford. He was the son of DeForest Sanford, who, himself, had a long career editing labour and socialist newspapers, including the Knights of Labor Advocate, People's Advocate and Whidby Islander, the last of which was the official newspaper of the Freeland Rochdale community in Puget Sound, Washington. In his typewritten, eight-page monthly, the younger Sanford saw his purpose as publishing for the ‘rising generation’. He called his monthly the Searchlight, and, like other socialist editors he truly believed that ‘education’ was ‘the way to liberty’. Sanford understood well that a vital press was arguably among a political organization's most important resources, a lesson he undoubtedly learned from his father. It would be a lesson that he would carry with him for the rest of his life as a union printer and avid collector of radical and labour ephemera.

I.

Before the advent of electronic media, there were few better ways of building a movement than through the press. Indeed, the press, then as now, provides a vital link between leaders and members. It serves as an invaluable recruiting tool. It is a powerful reinforcer of convictions, whether Whig, Democrat, abolitionist, Republican or socialist. It educates, informs and even entertains, all the while laying out the party line.