Press: Invitation

Last fortnight in St. Louis, at its fourth & largest annual convention, the American Newspaper Guild not only switched affiliation from the American Federation of Labor to the militant Committee for Industrial Organization, but served notice that it was out for industrial bear by voting 118 ½-to-18 ½ for industrial unionization—which would mean eventual Guild membership for every last copy boy, circulation solicitor and advertising stenographer in a newspaper plant (TIME, June 21). Hardly had word of this bold decision dried on the front pages of the nation’s press than the publishers answered the challenge. Goaded to action by chesty little James Geddes (“Jimmy”) Stahlman, publisher of the Nashville Banner and newly elected president of the American Newspaper Publishers Association, the ten leading U. S. publishers’ associations issued an invitation to some 1,800 U. S. publishers to gather for mass action at Chicago’s Palmer House next week.

Promising that the conclave would be “one of the most important, if not the most generally attended of all newspaper conventions in the history of the country,” and italicizing the fact that it would be limited to “executives from the home office,” Publisher Stahlman & friends summed up their clarion call thus: “[The closed shop] is a most serious threat to a free press, and consequently to the liberties of a free people. Many publishers throughout the country have already expressed the feeling that the newspapers should stand together against this common danger. . . . We cannot urge you too strongly to attend. . . .”

As spokesman as well as originator of the convention, the Banner’s Stahlman explained that “collective bargaining is not an issue”; nor would the meeting “consider any interference with nor violation of the letter or the spirit of the Wagner Act.” At week’s end, however, as acceptances indicated at least 1,000 publishers or their home-office representatives would attend, the Guild in its Reporter solemnly recognized the publishers’ threat: “It voices a challenge to the Guild on one of the most fundamental of the new requirements for contracts laid down at St. Louis, the Guild shop.”