President Obama is getting razzed for seeming oblivious to the hard-left associations of his new campaign slogan, “Forward,” which was once used by the Marxists, the socialists, and even the communists. Glenn Beck’s Web site, The Blaze, posts an anthology of communist posters featuring the word and asks “IS OBAMA’S NEW ‘FORWARD’ SLOGAN REALLY A COINCIDENCE?” Lou Dobbs is notingthat the word has “a very long history with Marxists and socialists and communists.”

All that’s true—and fair enough. But the jibe doesn’t quite fit the newspaper that made the name “Forward” one of the most famous in all of journalism. That was the Jewish Daily Forward, issued in New York under the editorship of Abraham Cahan. It may be the most anticommunist newspaper in American history. It would not be wrong to say that it was the Forward that found the formula for winning the Cold War.

Like the Vorwarts in Germany from which the Forward took its name when it was founded in 1897, the paper sprang from the left. In the Jewish ghetto on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, the Yiddish-language Forward fixed into its headquarters busts of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, among other leftist icons. But as the communist tyranny gripped the Soviet Union, the Forward turned against the Reds with a fury and effectiveness that was never equaled.

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