The Press: Fireworks in Memphis

For one minute last January, Boss Edward Hull Crump was Mayor of Memphis, Tenn. His sole official act was to cancel his city’s invitation to the American Newspaper Guild to hold its seventh annual convention in Memphis. Said Boss Crump: “You will not be welcome.”

Last week, nevertheless, 150 Guild delegates met in Memphis without Boss Crump’s blessing. Chief issue before them was a factional fight over the re-election of a small group of Manhattan executives (including Vice President Milton Kaufman, Secretary & Treasurer Victor Pasche, both paid officials, and Vice President Morris Watson, paid by C. I. O. as a union organizer) who actually run the Guild. Back of this factional fight was a bitter controversy.

For the last nine months, sharp-eyed, sharp-tongued Columnist Westbrook Pegler, onetime Guildsman, onetime friend & neighbor of the Guild’s first president, Heywood Broun, has pounded away relentlessly at the Guild with charges of Communist domination (TIME, Jan. 22). Six insurgent members of the executive board last spring banded together, issued a pamphlet attacking the Guild’s management (on grounds of centralized power and incompetence) in words almost as strong as Pegler’s. They went to Memphis last week bent on throwing the rascals out.

Unity. For three days the word “Communism” was taboo on the convention floor, was whispered only in corridors and ‘caucuses. On the fourth day it exploded on the floor after a Denver “regular” presented a resolution cautiously condemning subversive movements, “Trojan horses or fifth columns.” Up sprang a Seattle insurgent to offer an amendment: “That Communism, Naziism and Fascism are not . . . indicative of [the Guild’s] beliefs . . . and that this organization will not tolerate any attempt by these subversive elements to … control [Guild] policies. . . .”

Delegates wrangled for an hour over the amendment, heard the New York Herald Tribune’s Lewis Gannett say its effect would be “to fill the Red-baiting maw of Westbrook Pegler,” finally tabled it.

Barman. Next day Guildsmen spent twelve hours nominating and electing officers. Insurgent Candidate Kenneth Crawford, who had filled out Heywood Broun’s unfinished term, went down in defeat. By a vote of 78⅔ to 66⅓ Regular Candidate Donal Sullivan became the Guild’s new president. Secure in the saddle remained Milton Kaufman, Victor Pasche, Morris Watson.

President Sullivan, 29 years old, is a Harvard graduate, a graduate of Boston University’s school of law, court reporter for the Boston Globe. Reporter Sullivan helped to organize the Globe’s Guild unit in 1937, saw it disband again last year when Globe employes, in an election ordered by the National Labor Relations Board, voted to get along without a union. He takes over the Guild with contracts in 150 news offices, 15 more than in 1939, but with a membership down this year (through elimination of non-paying members) from 19,500 to 17,210.