The Press: The Union Beat

Whenever the good, grey New York Times scored a notable beat on labor union news over the past quarter-century, competing papers scarcely needed to look at the byline to know who had scooped them. Almost always it was studious, mild-mannered Louis Stark, ablest of U.S. labor reporters.

Thus he was first with the story that the A.F.L. had secretly decided to pull out of the United Labor Policy Committee (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS). For Stark, the scoop was a valedictory. Last week, after 28 years in the rough & tumble of the union beat, ailing Reporter Stark, 62, left the Times’s Washington bureau for a month’s vacation. On his return he will take up the easier chore of writing Times editorials and interpretive articles.

Slight, short (5 ft. 5 in.) Lou Stark won his name by covering such stories as the Sacco-Vanzetti case, the pitched battles in Harlan County, the sitdown strikes of the ‘303. Whatever he covered (typing out his copy hunt & peck, then checking and re-checking until his deadline-conscious editors squirmed uneasily), he won the confidence and respect of both sides without ever favoring either. When the accuracy of an exclusive Stark story about coal bargaining was questioned two years ago, Illinois’ Paul Douglas said on the Senate floor: “I have never known Lou Stark to make a factual error in a story.” The facts later proved Stark’s story true.

“Dead Work.” Lou Stark, born in Hungary and brought to the U.S. as a child, grew up on Manhattan’s East Side, joined the Times as a reporter in 1917, after a stint at schoolteaching and as a City News Association reporter.

In 1923, when few papers thought union news worth reporting, Stark got the job of covering it fulltime. Those were the years of what Stark, borrowing a coal miner’s term, calls his “dead work,” i.e., unpaid time spent blasting, cleaning out debris, etc. He spent the time getting to know everybody in the union movement, learning the problems of labor & capital inside out. In 1933, when unions began their great upsurge under the New Deal and unionists and their friends became Washington powers, all his “dead work” paid off. The Times sent him to the capital on a “temporary” three-week assignment (which did not end until last week). In his first two days he scored two beats one on the creation of the N.R.A.), causing some admiring competitors to say that Stark had been sent to Washington “on a contract to deliver a beat once a day.”

Stark’s own version: “All I had to do was . . . hold my hat in my hand, and people whom I’d been cultivating for ten years and who trusted me would come and drop stories into it.”

A Note for Lewis. Many labor bigwigs did seek him out when they had important news. When they didn’t, Stark flushed them out himself. Once, when reporters were vainly trying to get at John L. Lewis, holed up in his Washington headquarters during an executive board meeting, meek Lou Stark simply sent up a sharp note, and Lewis came right down.

Stark believed in the validity of unions, but when the fledgling Newspaper Guild joined the C.I.O., Stark resigned, lest his impartiality be questioned. For the cumulative excellence of his reporting, he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1941.

At Washington’s National Press Club last week, 50 capital correspondents and friends gave Stark a farewell dinner. At the head table Stark sat embarrassedly peering through his thick glasses as messages were read from President Truman (“You have been the dean of all reporters on the labor scene in the capital”), William Green, Lewis, the C.I.O.’s Jack Gold (“Please convey our sympathies to Page One”) and many others. When they were all over, Lou Stark said simply: “The thing that pleases me more than anything else [is that] despite the rivalry, the men with whom I have worked by & large have held me in esteem.”