The Press: Seattle Strike (Cont’d)

With a minimum of physical disorder, the American Newspaper Guild strike, which has “indefinitely” suspended publication of William Randolph Hearst’s Seattle Post-Intelligencer, continued last week. Skeleton picket lines, reduced at times to a single placard-carrier, were posted at the P.I. building. In thoroughly unionized Seattle, no union printer cared to enter even such a sparsely-picketed establishment. Seattle’s stevedores quietly let 1,500 copies of the Hearstian San Francisco Examiner grow yellow on the docks. Attributing his difficulties to “Communists” and describing the Seattle situation as one of “open revolution,” Mr. Hearst, vacationing in Rome, called for the formation of vigilantes to attack the Seattle strikers. Fifty Pacific Northwest newspaper publishers, members of the American Newspaper Publishers’ Association, met and muttered in secret session. At Seattle’s Washington Athletic Club, a “Law and Order League” gathered, ap pointed a “Secret Six” to smash the strike. But in its third week, the nation’s first major effective newspaper strike continued to be fought in ink rather than blood.

The non-violent nature of the P.I. strike became doubly manifest when Labor Boss “Dave” Beck filed suit for $250,000 damages against arch-conservative Publisher Clarance Brettun Blethen of the Times, who had changed overnight from Mr. Hearst’s worst enemy in Seattle to his most sympathetic defender, for denouncing him as a “racketeer.” Declared Publisher Blethen: “There are certain things no decent American can arbitrate. If the neighbor’s dog attacks your child, you don’t telephone the mayor to have the case considered by some special board. . . .” In Manhattan, the Guild’s President Heywood Broun drawled: “Some volunteer [Law and Order League] members and other members hired by Mr. Hearst will go out and pick a fight on the picket lines, and people will be hurt, and some may be killed, and then Mr. Hearst will say that the revolution has come to Seattle and blame it on the New Deal.”