It’s hard to wrap your mind around a timespan of 125 years. That’s well beyond a human lifetime. It’s a sixth of the way to a millenium. But with this edition, the Labor Press enters its 125th year of publishing.
Over the next 12 months, leading up to our 125th birthday a year from now, we’ll celebrate in these pages by looking back at our movement’s history.
What was then called the Portland Labor Press was first published on Aug. 30, 1900. We don’t actually have copies of that first edition. But we have the second. “Dedicated to the cause of industrial freedom,” as its masthead declared, it was endorsed by the “Federated Trades Assembly.”
Portlanders got around by foot, horse-power, or steam train in 1900; the city’s first automobile arrived just nine months before the Labor Press began publishing. And yet a vibrant upsurge of trade unions, ancestors of today’s labor organizations, was already on the move.
“Organized labor is becoming a power in this city,” the second issue declared. Long may it continue to be so.
Since 1900, this newspaper has chronicled the local labor movement in Portland, in Oregon, and the Pacific Northwest. Our work over the last 125 years has created an extraordinary record of a movement that over time — as Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. put it — “transformed misery and despair into hope and progress.”
For decades, Labor Press archives have been available to historians and the public in nearly a dozen libraries. But stored in bound volumes and microfilm, their format has made them very labor-intensive to use. When I became editor in 2022, I was determined to digitize our archives, render them searchable by keyword, and make them available online to the public free of charge.
The work went forward in two phases. First, I worked with the Oregon Digital Newspaper Program, a project of University of Oregon Libraries, and raised money to pay to have them scan from microfilm holdings. I’m grateful to the Pacific Northwest Labor History Association and dozens of individual contributors who helped make that work possible — in particular Marcus Widenor, former director of the University of Oregon’s Labor Education and Research Center. Over about a year and half, the University of Oregon digitized our first 16 years, and those are now available online.
Then I got an email from Newspapers.com. A subsidiary of ancestry.com, Newspapers.com has been digitizing newspaper archives the world over — over 26,000 of them so far — and offered to digitize the Labor Press at no charge. Their collection is incredible, and especially valuable for genealogical research. But it’s behind a paywall. We wanted our own readers to be able to see our own archives without a paywall, and Newspapers.com agreed to work with us to make that happen.
I’m proud to announce that as of this issue, our readers can now get access to our archives — all of them — at nwlaborpress.org/archives.
I’m convinced that archive will be hugely helpful to labor historians, students, and genealogists. It will help local unions recover their own histories. And it will deepen our own current reporting, by opening up the back story and letting us call up detail when it’s time to honor the individuals who make up our movement — as they retire, or after they’re gone.
We know that peering back into our past will reveal the blind spots and mistakes of our ancestors, not just their courage and their vision. But I continue to believe — just as the Labor Press founders believed in 1900 — that our movement’s story is worth telling.
