The Press: Showdown

Police clubs clunked on the heads of Newspaper Guildsmen and blood was spilled in the shadow of Chicago’s Civic Opera Building on Wacker Drive last week as the Guild staged its biggest strike. Out of the Hearst-owned Herald & Examiner and evening American had walked 600 editorial, business and circulation workers on the grounds that their contracts with the papers had been systematically violated.

Striking photographers snapped the Guild’s solid picket line in front of the Hearst Building (see cut), the bleeding head of Organizer Charles Cain as he and seven other Guilders were roughed up and carted off to a police station, Hearst trucks as they backed up to the line and kept their motors running. Strikers promptly dubbed handsome Publisher Merrill C. (“Babe”) Meigs of the American “Monoxide Meigs.” Two pickets put on gas masks. Last January the Chicago Hearst management and the Guild signed a one-year contract. Now pending are over 60 chargesof contract violations preferred by the Guild. Meantime, two new A. F. of L. newspaper unions (Editorial Association of Chicago, headed by Herex Rewrite Man Larry Kelly, and Newspaper Commercial Associates of Chicago) began signing up Hearstlings right & left. The climax came when Publisher Meigs declined to negotiate a new contract with the Guild before the NLRB settled the inter-union squabbles.

Claiming a walkout of more than half the 1,000 employes eligible, the Guild closed 71 of the 91 Hearst home circulation offices the first day. On the second the American advertised “$5 FOR PHOTOS.” Later the Herex offered “$50 WEEKLY FOR NEWS TIPS AND NEWS PICTURES. . . . ALL INFORMATION IS CONFIDENTIAL.” But both papers continued to get editions out with police assistance. Most distant striker: American Sports Writer Jim Gallagher, who was in New Orleans for a baseball meeting. Notable strike breaker: Margaret (“Maggie”) Sikora, who has been working as a Herex stenographer since her “Model Husband,” Rudolph, was acquitted of killing her sweetheart. At week’s end, 46 American strikers announced through a Hearst spokesman that they were going back to work, adding “It was fun while it lasted!” Guild headquarters insisted their main lines were holding fast.