Guilded Age

A good newspaperman would rather have his name above a story than in it. Last week Morris Watson, legal guinea-pig of the American Newspaper Guild's test case against the Associated Press (TIME, June 29 et seq.), not only had his name in a story but that story was before the Supreme Court of the United States and its climax became the law of the land.

Child of Trouble. The night Morris Watson was born his mother died, and his house burned down. That was in Joplin, Mo., Jan. 29, 1901. He ran away from home in 1915 having completed but one year of high school; 1916 found him a soldier in the U. S. Army on the Mexican Border. A year later he landed in France, a private in the 18th Infantry, 1st Division, A.E.F. Hotheaded, he was swapping punches with a sergeant inside a barracks room one day when another soldier entered, started helping the sergeant. Watson grabbed a chair and knocked the newcomer cold. Horrified, he discovered he had floored his Lieutenant, a court-martial offense. From the guardhouse he was released to fight at Seicheprey.

Twice gassed and wounded, he was given vocational training by the Veterans Bureau after the War, trying successively art, salesmanship, photography, journalism. On the Omaha World-Herald, his dark skin, long, sharp nose, thinning hair and bespectacled seriousness earned him the nickname "Gandhi."

When the Denver Post, where he was next employed, discontinued its morning edition in 1928, Watson started back East in a second-hand flivver with his wife, then pregnant, and $25 capital. At Fremont, Neb. they ran out of gas and money, but got on to Chicago where Watson landed a job with the AP, which in time shifted him to its New York office. There his job, besides rewriting and editing, included important reporting assignments.

When Heywood Broun, the New York World-Telegram's crusading columnist, called the first meeting to form a Newspaper Guild in December 1933, Morris Watson was one of the handful that showed up. From the outset he was a zealous Guild organizer and officer, outspoken not only against his employers but leading a campaign against the Brooklyn Eagle, an AP member. He headed deputations to Washington, signed demands by the Guild to his AP superiors. He was told his Guild activities were lessening his value at the AP and finally, Oct. 18, 1935 he was fired "because we are dissatisfied with your work, you are dissatisfied with us, and I am convinced you will be happier elsewhere." He was given an extra month's pay ($295) which Guild lawyers made him refuse.

The Case. The Guild appealed to the National Labor Relations Board which summoned the AP to a hearing with Dean Charles E. Clark of the Yale Law School as Trial Examiner. John W. Davis, 1924 Democratic Presidential candidate, counsel for the AP, denied the jurisdiction of the NLRB, made no argument as to the facts of Watson's discharge. Clark ruled the AP must reinstate Watson because he had been 'discharged for Guild activities. The AP refused. NLRB then asked the Second Circuit Court of Appeals for an enforcing order against the AP. This was granted and the AP appealed from it to the Supreme Court, arguing that the National Labor Relations Act of July 5, 1935, also called the Wagner Act, was invalid against the AP because: 1) it violated Freedom of the Press; 2) the AP's activities were not interstate commerce; 3) the NLRA was unconstitutional.

The Decision. This week, by a five-to-four decision, the minority differing only on the point about Freedom of the Press, the AP lost on all three counts. Having refused to argue whether Watson's work had actually become unsatisfactory, the AP after the NLRB hearings, had made its bed and had to lie in it. "We therefore accept as established," said the Supreme Court, "that the AP did not . . . discharge Watson because of unsatisfactory service but... for his activities in connection with the newspaper Guild."

Does the NLRA abridge AP's Constitutional guarantee of freedom? "We hold that it does not," ruled the Court. "We think the contention not only has no relevance to the circumstances of the instant case but is an unsound generalization. . . . The Act... does not require that the petitioner retain in its employ an incompetent editor or one who fails faithfully to edit the news to reflect the facts without bias or prejudice. The Act permits a discharge for any reason other than union activity or agitation for collective bargaining. . . . The restoration of Watson to his former position in no sense guarantees his continuance in petitioner's employ.

The petitioner is at liberty whenever occasion may arise, to exercise its undoubted right to sever his relationship for any cause that seems to it proper, save only as a punishment for, or discouragement of, such activities as the Act declares permissible. The business of the AP is not immune from regulation because it is an agency of the press. The publisher of a newspaper has no special immunity from the application of general laws."

Warned Justice Sutherland, reading the minority dissent: "Freedom is not a mere intellectual abstraction. ... It is an intensely practical reality. . . . When applied to the Press the term freedom is not to be narrowly confined. ... If freedom of the press does not include the right to adopt and pursue a policy without governmental restriction it is a misnomer to call it freedom. . . . The judgment of Congress--or still less the judgment of an administrative censor--can-not, under the Constitution, be substituted for that of the press management in respect of the employment or discharge of employes engaged in editorial work. For many years there has been contention between Labor and Capital. . . . The daily news with respect to labor disputes is now of vast proportion. . . . Strong sympathy for or strong prejudice against a given cause . . . has too often led to suppression or coloration of unwelcome facts. It would seem . . . reasonable prudence for an association engaged in part in supplying the public with fair and accurate factual information with respect to the contest between Labor and Capital, to see that those whose activities include that service are free from either extreme sympathy or extreme prejudice one way or the other."

If AP Attorney Davis was rebuffed on his freedom of the press argument he was overwhelmed on his claim, startling to lay minds, that the far-flung AP is not engaged in interstate commerce. His brilliant legal argument, his citation of prior cases in which the Supreme Court had ruled that such businesses as insurance, buying and selling bills of exchange and reporting credit standings, are not interstate commerce even though they operate interstate, were swept aside in a ruling that "interstate communication of a business nature, whatever the means of such communication, is interstate commerce regulatable by Congress under the Constitution.

"This conclusion," continued the Court, "is unaffected by the fact that the petitioner does not sell news and does not operate for profit, or that technically the title to the news remains in the petitioner during interstate transmission."

That the Wagner Act was unconstitutional was denied by the Court in the other NLRA cases decided by the Court that day and the AP's third argument was disposed of by reference to them. Dutifully the AP notified the NLRB to have Reporter Watson return to work the next morning.

Significance. Exultant in his private office which one enters through the anteroom to the men's toilet in Manhattan's Ritz Theatre, Morris Watson made plans to return, at least long enough to collect the accumulated back pay due him under the Labor Board's ruling that the AP must compensate him for the difference between his WPA pay, $200 monthly, and his $295 AP salary. Pleased at his victory and at receiving $1,710, Morris ("Gandhi") Watson was not sure that he wished to abandon what has begun to be a successful theatrical career as director of the WPA's "Living Newspaper" project.

Armed with the decision, the American Newspaper Guild resumed its move for national negotiations with the United Press whose San Francisco office has been boiling with a Guild row since February. National officers studied ways of applying it to their negotiations with chain newspapers. The decision, said Guild President Heywood Broun, means a nationally Guilded U. S. Press with closed shop conditions prevailing by 1941.*

*RecapituIating its national strength last week, the Guild reported 8,000 members in 250 local units in 82 regional groups, a sharp gain from last October's 5,800 members, 220 locals, 63 regionals. Defeated last week in its demand that the New York World-Telegram grant a closed shop in its new Guild contract, Guild organizers listed 210 newspapers with Guild units, of which 22 have signed Guild contracts, twelve Guild agreements, and 25 have issued "Bulletin Board statements." These, say Guildsmen, were issued by publishers to forestall Guild activity, are thus to the credit of the Guild movement. Viewing the total of 26,700 U. S. editorial employes many of whom are in small towns about which the Guild does not bother, Guild organizers guessed that their basic organization job up to last week was about 30% done.

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