Labor Newshawks

Biggest U. S. news story of 1937 is the resurgence of Labor. Far longer lived than the Great Flood story and even deeper in its social and political significance than President Roosevelt's battle with the Supreme Court, it is news breaking on a hundred fronts and its ultimate direction and meaning are as exciting as they are as yet unpredictable. The great process of U. S. daily journalism is fashioned along reportorial rather than interpretive lines. Therefore, the very nature of the newspaper business--as well as the diffuse and widespread nature of the phenomenon itself--has made it almost impossible for U. S. newspaper readers to discover, except in opinions of the small partisan press of the Left, the inevitable larger action taking place behind the daily tactics of the Labor struggle. The motivations that lie beneath the strikes, picketings, conferences and ultimatums have not generally broken the roily surface of the story. But day to day information from the Labor front was being gathered and conveyed last week by typewriter and camera (see p. 13), with enterprise and resource by an organization which had to be made for the occasion.

When the story of Labor and its new demands suddenly fell into the lap of the U. S. Press, it was poorly prepared. The number of Grade A Labor specialists among reporters could be counted on the fingers of one hand. Also the story was popping in too many places for any paper to cover it with one man. First move was to handle it like the flood, rush an ace reporter (but not necessarily a Labor specialist) to the scene of greatest violence, rely on the press associations for complete coverage, and tell Washington correspondents to get some quotes from John L. Lewis, William Green, and Government sources. Notable in the year's early reporting of Labor were the dispatches of Paul Gallico, former sports editor, who returned to the New York News in January to cover the human side of the General Motors sit-down strike at Flint.

By the time the steel strike flared last month in six States from Pennsylvania to Illinois, the press was ready for it. Associated Press and United Press set up strike desks in Cleveland, each in charge of an editor who gives assignments to his staff on the six-State front, turns their reports over to rewrite men for coordination into major stories going over trunk wires to the nation's newspapers. A.P. estimates 15,000 words out of Cleveland daily.

In charge of the A.P. strike desk sits Lewis Andrew (''Andy") Brophy, dapper six-footer, day supervisor in the New York office, who made a name for himself by a two-hour beat on the Shenandoah dirigible crash. He got a broken ankle when his car turned over returning from the wreck. A.P. rewarded him with, among other things, a cane capped with inscribed metal from the dirigible.

United Press moved Julius Frandsen from New York to head the strike desk and Joe E. Morris from Washington to help him. Young Cyrus Sulzberger, nephew of the New York Times's publisher, is one of the U. P. Labor specialists remaining in Washington. All U. P. men have been ordered to write strictly down the middle of the road, to balance each line favorable to one side with one for the opposition.

William Watts ("Bill") Chaplin, who put his Ethiopian war observations into a book called Blood and Ink and who learned about sit-down strikes in France last year, is covering the Labor front for Hearst's Universal Service. His itinerary since January: Flint, Detroit, Lansing, Pontiac, Oshawa (Canada), Pittsburgh, South Chicago, Johnstown, Youngstown. He, like many another 1937 Labor newshawk, rarely has time to use anything except airplanes. Universal's Labor specialist in Washington is handsome Eugene Kelly who turned reporter after studying for the priesthood at the North American College in Rome and for the law in Philadelphia and Washington. His most famous specialty is baiting William Green: "Come, come, Mr. Green, will you stop handing us that flubdub?"

All lists of Labor reporters begin with Louis Stark of the New York Times, and, until this year, most lists could easily end with him. He made Labor news his career when most papers buried such stories back among the want ads and comic strips, when his current crop of colleagues were school boys or cub reporters. Yet he is not old (49). He began work in New York with the City News Association in 1912, went to the Times in 1917. Since then he has made himself so well informed on Labor that both William Green and John Lewis have on occasion turned to him and asked. "Isn't that right, Lou?" Reporter Stark is conscientious to the point that he resigned last year from the American Newspaper Guild because he wanted to convince himself that nothing was swaying him from unbiased reporting. Last week Reporter Stark was in Cleveland, Ohio, filing his painstaking front-page stories to the Times. He had just returned from Reed College, Portland, Ore. where his career was capped with an honorary degree.

In Chicago the dispatches of Edwin A. Lahey of the Daily News have stood out for their fairness, though his boss, Colonel Frank Knox, has no love for the C.I.O. Lahey, who previously had been covering the local garbage situation, was at the theatre seeing an Ibsen play on the evening of Jan. 2 when he was told to take the midnight train to Detroit. There was hardly a day from then on that Chicago did not see a Lahey story from the strike front. Once he got home for a few days and promptly went out to cover the Fansteel plant battle so closely that he inhaled a load of gas.

In Detroit reporters and photographers have learned to expect gas and clubs as a matter of routine. During the Flint strike Reporter Gay Girardin of the Detroit Times was at a phone inside the Chevrolet plant talking to his city editor when rioting started. Tear and nausea gas clouds rolled in on him as he continued phoning his story, coughing and vomiting. Once he looked up to see a striker coming at him with a club. Girardin stopped the club in mid-air with a "Hello Tony." Most thoughtful Labor expert to emerge in Detroit has been lanky, young, bespectacled Reporter Archie Walter Robinson of the News.

Biggest Labor scoop so far achieved was by two Paramount newsreel men at the South Chicago riot, and by Paul Y. Anderson, Washington correspondent of the St. Louis Post Dispatch, who obtained a description of the suppressed film (see p. 13).

Newest idea for covering Labor is Capt. Joseph Medill Patterson's Economic Battle Page started last week in his tabloid New York News. Like the Presidential Battle Page which he published last fall during the campaign, it was a series of arguments and sassy talk approved before publication by leaders of both camps and run in adjoining columns on the same page. Interviews were made by two News crack reporters, Carl Warren and Fred Pasley. One page last week quoted the wives of a striker and non-striker in a steel mill at Monroe, Mich.:

First wife: "He [my husband] used to come home cooked like a rare hamburger. There are no bathhouses at the mill. He'd be so choked with acid and gas fumes and soot that half the time he coughed up his breakfast."

Second wife: "Everything was just beginning to go well and people were beginning to get their rent and grocery bills paid and women a few new dresses when along comes this trouble."

Sociologically-minded Capt. Patterson was ready to syndicate his Economic Battle Page, announced in an editorial that "we're now open for orders."

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