Chicago Star
former weekly newspaper
The Chicago Star was a weekly publication, founded in 1946 and financed by trade unions. The board of directors were Ernest De Maio, Frank Marshall Davis, William L. Patterson, Grant Oakes, and William Sennett. Davis was the executive editor, Sennett the general manager, and Carl Hirsch managing editor. Howard Fast was a columnist, and Rockwell Kent a contributing editor. In an introduction to a book about Davis, John Edgar Tidwell indicated that the first issue was launched on July 4th to "[wrap] itself in the holiday's symbolic meaning." The paper carried Davis's weekly editorial "Frank-ly Speaking".
The newspaper has been described as "openly leftist". In 1947, the Spokane Daily Chronicle called the paper "a red weekly" saying that it "has most of the markings of a Communist front publication." The Chicago Star had a goal to "promote a policy of cooperation and unity between Russia and the United States" seeking to "[avoid] the red-baiting tendencies of the mainstream press."
One of its writers was Richard Durham, who would later produce the notable radio series Destination Freedom.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Chicago Star” as former weekly newspaper. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as former weekly newspaper. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5095787. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1946 and 1947.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Chicago Star” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.