The SUNDAY VOICE was Cleveland's first successful Sunday newspaper, surviving for 30 years as a weekly publication. It was founded 15 Oct. 1871 by 4 partners, with W. Scott Robison emerging as sole owner. Edited for a time by HARRY L. VAIL, the Sunday Morning Voice, as it originally was called, survived the calumny of local clergymen and in its turn campaigned against some of the city's lingering Sunday laws. It also survived a growing field of competitors. Both the CLEVELAND LEADER and the HERALD added Sunday editions in 1877, while the SUNDAY POST, begun by ORLANDO J. HODGE in 1875, was merged with the Voice on 16 June 1878. Hodge became editor and eventually sole proprietor of the Voice, as Robison left to start his second Sunday paper, the Sunday Sun, on 10 Oct. 1880. It was merged into the Voice on 15 Nov. 1885. At 14,200 copies, the combined Sun & Voice claimed to have Cleveland's largest Sunday circulation. The paper later went through a period as the Ohio Sun-Voice before settling on the Sunday Voice. Always Republican in political affiliation, the Voice nevertheless sublimated its partisanship to the feature material deemed appropriate for a day of leisure, such as fiction, literary reviews, a chess column, and a question-and-answer box. For a time in the 1880s, there was also a column devoted to social coverage of the city's black population. Although its circulation eroded to around 5,000, the Sunday Voice survived until shortly after 1900.
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