page_title: WEVD
section_title: Origins
hierarchical_section_title: WEVD / History / Origins
caption_attribution_description: English: Norman Thomas (1884-1968), American socialist, pacifist, and six-time presidential candidate for the Socialist Party of America.
context_page_description: WEVD was an American brokered programming radio station with some news-talk launched in August 1927 by the Socialist Party of America. Making use of the initials of recently deceased party leader Eugene Victor Debs in its call sign, the station operated from Woodhaven in the New York City borough of Queens. The station was purchased with a $250,000 radio fund raised by the Socialist Party in its largest fundraising effort of the 1920s and was intended as spreading progressive ideas to a mass audience. A number of national trade unions and other institutions aided the Socialists in obtaining the station.
  Originally broadcasting at 1220 kHz AM, later on 1300 kHz, for many years on 1330 kHz and finally on 1050 kHz, operation of the station was taken over by the publishing association responsible for producing the Yiddish-language social democratic daily newspaper The Jewish Daily Forward in 1932. An FM station using the same call sign was added during the 1950s. After briefly leaving AM broadcasting in 1979, The Forward swapped its FM frequency for another AM frequency and continued broadcasting as a small ethnic station until divesting itself late in the 1980s.
context_section_description: Radio broadcasting emerged on a mass scale in the United States during the first half of the 1920s, with the number of stations in operation rising from 28 in 1921 to 571 in 1925. A new form of mass media had emerged. Congress passed federal legislation called the Radio Act of 1927 early in that year establishing a Federal Radio Commission (FRC), which was granted power to regulate the emerging industry, granting licenses and assigning broadcasting wavelengths to bring order to a chaotic market.
  Under this legislation, broadcasters would not own the right to broadcast at a certain frequency but would rather use what was deemed a public resource for a limited period of time, not to exceed three years. To earn continuation of the privilege of broadcasting over the public airwaves, stations would be forced to demonstrate service to the public interest under the new law.
  The Socialist Party of America was in the throes of a membership decline throughout the decade of the 1920s, the communist left wing of the organization having been suspended, expelled or split from the organization beginning with the seminal 1919 Emergency National Convention of the party. Dues-paying membership fell during this period from more than 100,000 to less than 10,000. The party's finances were similarly deeply affected and the organization felt pressed to explore new means of reaching an increasingly apathetic public. At its December 1926 quarterly meeting the governing National Executive Committee of the Socialist Party decided to erect a radio broadcasting station as a memorial to its recently deceased co-founder, Eugene V. Debs, who had died in October of the previous year.
  In March 1927 the Socialist Party of America launched a fundraising drive aimed at generating $250,000 for the purchase of an AM radio station. Party leader and head of the League for Industrial Democracy Norman Thomas was chosen as chairman of the Board of Trustees for the new enterprise and venerated party founder Morris Hillquit was appointed as treasurer.
  A total of 21 others from the liberal, labor and socialist community were appointed as a Board of Trustees including such publicly recognized figures as pacifist minister - John Haynes Holmes, Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters founder A. Philip Randolph, Amalgamated Clothing Workers leader Sidney Hillman, novelist Upton Sinclair and American Civil Liberties Union head Roger Baldwin. G. August Gerber, son of New York Socialist Party functionary Julius Gerber, was named as secretary of the Board and director of the fundraising drive.
  At the time of the fundraising drive's launch Norman Thomas remarked:
  The usefulness of a well established radio station open to full and frank discussion of great economic and social issues is beyond doubt. Past experience combines with common sense in assuring us that the commercial broadcasting stations cannot be expected to give much time or attention to the great vision for which Gene Debs gave his life. I am glad to observe that you have invited and obtained the acceptance of men and women as trustees who are not members of the Socialist Party. Such ... [shall] guarantee that the Debs Memorial Radio Fund will be free from a narrow and intolerant partisanship.
  Thomas and Hillquit were explicit in their desire to make the radio station a memorial to the departed Debs. In a joint statement they called for a "monument" which was to be "a living instrument of social service ... to be operated in the interests of all progressive movements and ideas and in aid of all struggles for social justice in the tolerant and broad-minded spirit of Gene Debs."
  The Debs Memorial Radio Fund launched its fundraising campaign with a mailing of 15,000 letters soliciting funds for the establishment of a Socialist Party-owned radio station. This first round of solicitation brought in just over $2650 — barely more than 1% of the declared goal $250,000 sought for the project. The Radio Fund's trustees estimated cost of launching a station at $100,000 and hoped to invest the balance to generate sufficient inter
caption: Norman Thomas, who would run 6 times for President heading the Socialist ticket, was Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Debs Memorial Radio Fund.
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