History of American Newspapers - Ethnic Press

Ethnic Press

While the English language press served the general population, practically every ethnic group had its own newspapers in their own language. At one point there were a thousand German-language papers. The German papers nearly all folded in World War I, and after 1950 the other ethnic groups had largely dropped foreign language papers. After 1965, there were many new immigrants but they set up few major papers.

Representative was the situation in Chicago, where the Polish Americans sustained diverse political cultures, each with its own newspaper. In 1920 the community had a choice of five daily papers - from the Socialist Dziennik Ludowy (1907–25) to the Polish Roman Catholic Union's Dziennik Zjednoczenia (1921–39) - all of which supported workers' struggles for better working conditions and were part of a broader program of cultural and educational activities. The decision to subscribe to a particular paper reaffirmed a particular ideology or institutional network based on ethnicity and class, which lent itself to different alliances and different strategies. Most papers preached assimilation into middle class American values and supported Americanization programs, but still included news of the home country.