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The Press: Life with Worker

3 minute read
TIME

As the new managing editor of the Daily Worker in 1934 (see above), one of James Glaser’s first acts was to write a brief announcement of his shift from the New York Times to the Worker. When he picked up the Worker the next day, he was “shocked” to find “a completely different story” announcing that he would write a series of inside stories about graft and corruption on the Times.

Glaser rushed from office to office of party leaders to learn who had been changing the managing editor’s copy. He was finally introduced to “Mr. Edwards, the representative from Moscow,” who explained that the new version was necessary to assure readers that Glaser did not bear the taint of a capitalist paper and was really “tried and true.” Glaser never gave in to the pressure to write such a series, but he saw a lot more of Mr. Edwards.

He turned out to be Gerhart Eisler, who later became propaganda chief of the Communist East German government.

After working a five-day week on the capitalist Times, Glaser found that Worker workers were laboring six days, so he ordered a five-day week. Eisler vetoed the order. “He told me,” explained Glaser, “that we couldn’t delay the revolution for a day.” It was Eisler who also ran the paper’s editorial policy. Once the foreign editor, then Harry Cannes, turned in a story that revolution was imminent in France. “I hadn’t heard of it,” said Glaser, “and I asked Cannes where it came from.

‘Comrade,’ he said, ‘This is the line.’ ‘Do you mean,’ I said, ‘that you just sat down and dreamed this up on the typewriter?’ He said I shouldn’t talk that way to a comrade.” When Glaser killed the story, Eisler called him on the carpet and told him he “had insufficient political development and still had bourgeois traits.”

Glaser found the Worker as inefficient as it was journalistically dishonest. Once he asked a copyboy for a cut of William Green, the late A.F.L. leader. After much searching, the cut was found filed under “P”—for “prominent labor fakers.”

But the Worker always liked to accommodate its friends. Once a woman representing a Communist front came in to demand a front-page story on a money-raising women’s bazaar—and with a banner headline, too. In his simple bourgeois way, Managing Editor Glaser scoffed: “You can’t have an eight-column line on a bazaar.” But, after Eisler intervened, that was just how the story ran.

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