The Press: Seattle Strike (Cont’d)

Striking for recognition of the American Newspaper Guild and better working conditions, 29 editorial workers walked out of the newsrooms of William Randolph Hearst’s Milwaukee Wisconsin News last February. The management slipped enough writers through the picket lines to fill the News’s columns. The mechanical staff stuck by its contracts and jobs. Guildmen circularized and picketed News advertisers & subscribers. Now, after six months, they claim that they have managed to reduce News circulation some 50%, appreciably curtail advertising lineage. Nevertheless, the Milwaukee Wisconsin News continues to appear on the newsstands six afternoons a week.

In Seattle, however, Publisher Hearst’s Post-Intelligencer did not appear on newsstands at all last week. When local members of the Guild struck there fortnight ago to protest the discharge of two old-time P.I. staffmen who had been active in the Guild, the typographical workers elaborately explained that they dared not risk their necks passing through the picket lines, stayed away also. Under Labor Boss Dave Beck, moving force of Seattle’s Central Labor Council, a cordon of demonstrators from the American Federation of Teachers (see p. 35) and the Teamsters’, Lumbermen’s and Longshoremen’s Unions tied the plant up tight. Publisher William Vaughn Tanner was thereupon obliged to ”suspend indefinitely” (TIME, Aug. 24).

Seattle’s oldest paper was silent for the first time in its 71 years.* Nevertheless, William Randolph Hearst was not without a voice in Washington’s largest city. Open to his almost daily diatribes against his absent employes were the columns of the leading afternoon paper, which had fought him tooth & nail since he invaded Seattle in 1921. Clarance Brettun Blethen’s Times not only printed Mr. Hearst’s pronouncements, but independently condemned the strikers and their tactics. These, it seemed to rich, reactionary Mr. Blethen, were outrageously irregular. The Hearst pressmen were remaining away from work in violation of their “contractual obligations” and without consent of their international officers. The picketing was being largely conducted by unions, which had no legitimate interest in the dispute. Moreover, Seattle’s Mayor sent no police to escort the News’s 650 technically nonstriking employes to their work.

To Publisher Blethen, the strike marked “the most shameful page in Seattle’s his-tory.” Snorted he: “The merits of the controversy … are of no consequence whatsoever. . . . Only two questions are involved: Is the Constitution of the State of Washington valid? Is the Constitution of the United States in effect?” His queries he answered himself: “The Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of Washington were suspended by one Dave Beck, head of the Teamsters’ Union, and one John Dore, Mayor of Seattle. Gone is constitutional government. Gone is majority rule and the freedom of speech. Seattle is now the plaything of a dictator.”

Plump, fun-loving Mayor John Francis (“Johnny”) Dore, onetime Post-Intelligencer reporter, was elected last March by Seattle’s labor vote. After the P.I. walkout, he invited Publisher Tanner to meet with a proposed labor mediation board to arbitrate. Tanner bluntly refused. Insulted, “Johnny” Dore, who does not like the P.I. anyhow, snorted: “I’m washing my hands of the business. I don’t care now if the P.I. never publishes and I think it would be a good thing for the town if it didn’t!” He refused to order his police to molest the strikers, warned that he would jail “gunmen-strike-breakers as I would any other thug.”

David Beck, Seattle’s undisputed labor boss, who not only made the strike but made the Mayor, lost no time in labeling Publisher Blethen’s charges as “malicious libel and groundless.” With his own Teamsters’ Union forming the backbone of the Guild picket lines, Dave Beck had also tried to persuade Publisher Tanner to arbitrate. That he had not succeeded was probably no great blow to Dave Beck. A longtime Hearst foe, he, too, would probably not care much if the P.L never publishes again.

Meanwhile Publisher Hearst kept the wires hot between Seattle and Rome, Italy, where he was vacationing. From Seattle flashed harassed Publisher Tanner’s strike reports ; back from Rome went the publisher’s tart commentaries. Angrily cried Septuagenarian Hearst: “It has cost me over a million dollars to conduct my paper in Seattle. … If the Communists want to relieve me of that cost … it is not an unmixed evil. I would save money. However, there is a greater issue at stake … the issue of a free press and a free country. No press is free that is subject to mob rule. No country is free where the public officials are too cowardly or too corrupt to protect the fundamental rights of loyal and law-abiding citizens. . . . Whether anybody else makes the fight against Communism and mob rule or not, I am going to make it. . . .”

On the winning side of a major strike for the first time since he assumed the Guild’s presidency Heywood Broun in Manhattan said: “There has been no violence on the part of trade unions picketing the Post-Intelligencer. … It is no crime, except in the judgment of the Hearst management, to help fellow trade-unionists. . . . The first issue … is the right of organized newspapermen to seek fair working conditions, and the right of organized workers to support them in a strike brought on by a denial of these conditions.”

—Except for two days during the great Seattle general strike of 1919.