Happy May Day, America

Sunday, May 1, 2011 — Today is May Day, and in many parts of the world people are celebrating the rights of workers. Here in America, we do things a little differently.

The way things are going right now, perhaps it’s just as well — celebrating the rights of working men and women while they’re being actively subjugated would be in poor taste.

Even in America, though, there is something to celebrate today: the 21st Anniversary of the reappearance of The New Hampshire Gazette in tangible form.

The Nation’s Oldest Newspaper™ had last been seen in print in January of 1960. Published every Saturday, in tandem with the daily Portsmouth Herald, the Gazette was being treated as a sort of rotogravure section.

Then, for reasons we can’t begin to imagine, the owners of the Herald chose to begin calling their Saturday paper the Herald Weekend Edition. That would have been the end of the Gazette, had they not begun inserting the following notation in the Herald’s masthead (this example is from January 29, 1979):

Merging newspapers that way has long been common practice in the newspaper racket. So long as the Herald continued to publish — which it has — the Gazette could not die. The caution reflected by that masthead inclusion had limits, though. The Herald’s lawyers carelessly allowed the registration to lapse.

The current editor, third cousin five times removed of the paper’s founder, Daniel Fowle, discovered that lapse while investigating an old family story: “There was a printer in the family, way back in the olden days, who printed something the authorities didn’t like, and they threw him in jail.”

On May 1, 1989, William Gardner, New Hampshire’s Secretary of State [For Life], in exchange for a $40 fee paid to the state, assigned the legal rights to the tradename New Hampshire Gazette to the current editor.

One year later the first tangible copy of The Nation’s Oldest Newspaper™ in more than thirty years was printed, in a very small format, in Hillsboro, New Hampshire. Thirty five issues were published over the next ten years (the paper ran on a schedule that was more episodical than a periodical).

On another May Day, this time in 1999 — ten years to the day after the rights were acquired — the Gazette began publishing in Portsmouth in its current format and with its current frequency.

And how, as the nation slides down the greased chute to indentured servitude, do we propose to add any merriment to this occasion? By announcing that we may be on the brink of a breakthrough sought after for more than a century: a way of organizing a newspaper in such a way that it can reach significant numbers of people without ceding its editorial independence to the corporate world. Details will be forthcoming.