ANG to CIO

Meeting in Manhattan last spring, the three-year-old American Newspaper Guild voted to affiliate with the American Federation of Labor. Since that time a whole flood of new water has flowed under U. S. Labor's bridge. No one was greatly surprised when the Guild, one of the youngest U. S. craft unions, met in St. Louis last week and voted to turn itself into an industrial union and to join the Committee for Industrial Organization, A. F. of L.'s insurgent offshoot. The only embarrassing aspect of this switch was that the Guild borrowed $2,000 from the A. F. of L. after voting to affiliate last spring and has not yet paid it back. That it could and would soon was evident from the healthy statistics brought out at the thriving union's fourth convention.

According to dour executive vice president Jonathan Eddy, the organization's professional, permanent chief who is satirically known to the membership as "the laughing boy from Connecticut," 47 Guile wage and working condition agreements are now in effect, where only seven flourished a year ago. The 47 current agreements cover 78 newspapers (many of them chainpapers). Membership in the twelve-month had increased from 5,716 to 11,112. The treasury had $231 on hand last year, $10,049 this year. A $20,000 war chest is to be collected. In one important aspect, however, the Guild remained unchanged. The convention's votes (143 this year) are still dominated by the solid bloc of 24 from the New York City delegation, which is affectionately devoted and subservient to Scripps-Howard Columnist Heywood Broun, the Guild's founder and perennial president.

Under mussy, good-hearted Columnist Broun, who has been aptly described as "an unmade bed," the New Yorkers and their convention allies lost no time last week in introducing and passing a succession of liberal-radical resolutions through the convention:

P: Demanding indictment of the Chicago police for the "murder" of seven strikers outside the Republic Steel plant on Memorial Day (TIME, June 7).

P: Asking Federal appropriation of $3,000,000,000 to assure continuance of WPA.

P: Denouncing Fascism and encouraging the Spanish Loyalists.

Key resolution of the New Yorkers and most significant of the whole convention was the one to amend the Guild constitution so as to throw the organization open to workers in advertising, circulation, business and other unorganized departments, and to apply for affiliation in the C. I. O. Rolypoly Reporter Robert Buck of the Washington News has constituted himself the leader of the Guild's loyal opposition ever since the union was founded. His faction, conservative and contrary individuals from the Southwest and Midwest who resent the "New York domination," approved joining C. I. O. but opposed broadening the union's membership base. On the grounds that coupling the two issues was like "hitching up a dead horse and a live one," "Bob" Buck's insurgents called for a unionwide referendum on admitting non-editorial people to the Guild. To that President Broun evoked a simile of his own. He said that voting for C. I. O. affiliation and against industrial unionization was like "ordering corned beef and cabbage, without the corned beef or without the cabbage."

More eloquently, "Martyr" Morris Watson, whose firing from the Associated Press was one of the cases on which the Supreme Court upheld the Wagner Act, warned: "Nowadays, if a reporter walks out on strike, they can replace him with some more boilerplate. But when the elevator boy quits and the publisher has to lumber up five flights of stairs, he'll know a strike is on." The proposal carried 118 1/2 to 18 1/2.

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