Guild & Grail

Arthur Hays Sulzberger of the New York Times, Norman Chandler of the Los Angeles Times, Harry Bitner of the Hearstpapers, John Cowles of the Des Moines Register & Tribune, Chain-Publisher Frank Gannett (see col. 2), the Chicago Tribune's McCormick, the publisher of the Chicago Drover's Journal and 558 other publishing executives great and small from up & down the land converged in Chicago last week for a one-day emergency convention. It would be, they had been told, a "most important meeting" (TIME, June 28). At the rallying cry of Nashville's young James Geddes ("Jimmy") Stahlman, busy-bustling new president of the American Newspaper Publishers Association, they had come to defend their profession's holy grail, the Freedom of the Press.

Threatening their grail, they all knew without crusading Jimmy Stahlman telling them, was the American Newspaper Guild, freshly allied with C.I.O. In its annual convention in St. Louis last month, the Guild had nailed to its new platform a plank demanding a "Guild shop" (TIME, June 21). That meant that although an employer could still hire whatever news or editorial worker he wished, the Guild would insist that the worker join the Guild within 30 days thereafter. Anyone refusing to join should be summarily dismissed. To Guildsmen such a ukase was more than a shade removed from the closed shop, wherein an employer may only hire from union ranks. But to embattled publishers, the Guild shop would be a closed shop, especially since the Guild now meant C.I.O. and John Llewellyn Lewis.

Last week's Chicago conclave, encrusted though it was with the finest jewels of U. S. newspaperdom, was more like a resolutions committee-of-the-whole than like a convention. No one was elected to anything. No one was even nominated. After he had delivered himself of a 1,500-word oration on Freedom of the Press, President Stahlman, whose wit is as nimble as his sarcasm, settled down in the speaker's chair to conduct the meeting with good-natured flippancy, cutting short the long-winded, moving things along at a swift pace. Only real business at hand was the wording of an anti-Guild resolution.

A long first-draft preamble was soon sliced down to one paragraph remarking the Guild's partisanship on the Supreme Court plan, the Spanish civil war, "the support of a particular political party," its affiliation with C.I.O. Some small-town publishers, still comparatively free from unionization, wanted in the resolution no recognition of the right to collective bargaining, fearing that it would inspire immediate mass organization in their plants. But broad-viewing publishers like Roy Howard fought for and won inclusion of such recognition as a means of gaining public goodwill. Up on his feet a dozen & more times jumped the Times's Sulzberger to explain the fine points of the resolution as it stood when it came out of committee.

What caused most argument during distillation was the choice of one word in the last paragraph: should the publishers express "determination" not to enter into contracts for a Guild shop, or "refusal," or "unwillingness?"

At day's end, copies of the polished resolution were handed out to newshawks who, denied admission to the secret Freedom of the Press meeting, had been cooling their heels in Palmer House corridors since morning. The first twelve paragraphs reiterated the publishers' readiness to play along on bargaining, hours, pay, working conditions. They called attention to the current necessity for "uncolored presentation of news," claimed that "no newspaper can command confidence ... if it selects all employes from only one political party, one religious denomination, or any one group devoted to a single cause." Then the resolution resolved:

"That as editors & publishers ... we declare our unalterable opposition to the closed Guild shop or any other form of closed shop for those who prepare and edit news copy and pictures for newspapers, and we hereby express our determination not to enter into any agreement upon such basis."

Grunted mountainous Guild President Heywood Broun: "The publishers should have brought a copyreader with them to the convention. . . . The Guild will continue to stick to its knitting. . . ."

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