Labor Defender

Labor Defender

Labor Defender (September 1929): workers imprisoned for Loray Mill strike
Categories	Communist
Frequency	Monthly
Publisher	International Labor Defense
Paid circulation	5,500
Unpaid circulation	16,500 (bundle sales)
Total circulation (1928)	22,000
Founder	International Labor Defense
Year founded	January 1926
First issue	January 1926
Final issue Number	December 1937 Volume 13, No. 11
Country	United States of America
Based in	New York City
Language	English

Labor Defender (1926–1937) was a magazine published by the International Labor Defense (ILD), itself a legal advocacy organization established in 1925 as the American section of the Comintern's International Red Aid network and thus as support to the Communist Party (which in 1926 was legally the Workers Party of America).

In January 1926, the ILD began publishing Labor Defender, as a monthly, profusely illustrated magazine with a low cover price of 10 cents. Magazine circulation boomed. It rose from some 1,500 paid subscriptions and 8,500 copies in bulk bundle sales in 1927 to some 5,500 paid subscriptions with a bundle sale of 16,500 by mid-1928. This mid-1928 circulation figure was said by Assistant Secretary Marty Abern to be "greater than the combined circulation of The Daily Worker, Labor Unity, and The Communist combined.

Labor Defender depicted a black-and-white world of heroic trade unionists and dastardly factory owners, of oppressed African Americans struggling for freedom against the Ku Klux Klan and the use of state terror to stifle and divide and destroy all opposition. Writers included both non-party voices such as novelist Upton Sinclair, former Wobbly poet Ralph Chaplin, and Socialist Party leader Eugene V. Debs, as well as prominent Communists such as trade union leader William Z. Foster, cartoonist Robert Minor, and Benjamin Gitlow, a former political prisoner in New York.

The magazine made a constant plea for additional funds for jailed labor activists across the country. A regular column called "Voices from Prison" highlighted the plight of those behind bars and reinforced the message that good work was being done on the behalf of the so-called "class war prisoners" of America.

The magazine's masthead included<ref name=Marxists.org>:

January–August 1926 Editor: T. J. O' Flaherty Business: George Maurer National Officers: Andrew T. McNamara (Chairman), Edward C. Wentworth (Vice Chairman), James P. Cannon (Executive Secretary)