Foreign News: Sack Suit & Spy

Newsfolk in Italy work under the only Dictator who knows journalism’s every twist and straightaway. In personal letters to friends abroad last week Rome correspondents built up a backlog of excited rumor against which Il Duce’s way with the Press blazed with startling highlights.

Remembering how Cub Reporter Benito Mussolini once lived in fear of being fired by a capricious editor, the Dictator with his 1927 Charter of Labor protected the status of all Italian employes with a nationwide, mandatory system of labor contracts and gave extra protection to working journalists.

Today the editor who “dismisses for no fault” one of his staff in Italy faces a suit which Italian courts usually decide by awarding the ousted staffman damages amounting to half his yearly salary, plus an extra month’s pay for every year of his service before he was “fired.” On the basis of this law, Correspondent Thomas B. (“Tom”) Morgan was considered by his Rome colleagues last week to have excellent chances of collecting from United Press half a year’s salary, plus one month’s salary for each of the twelve years he has served with that news service, plus other compensation under the Charter of Labor for a possible total of 1,000,000 lire ($81,000).

United Press broke with Newshawk Morgan on Oct. 1, replacing him as Rome manager with G. Stewart Brown. When the imminence of war seemed to multiply his value as the Rome correspondent closest to Il Duce who had made him a Commander of the Order of the Crown of Italy years before, Tom Morgan tried to get his salary multiplied. Getting the sack instead, he is thought to have a routine testimonial to his good work and many scoops of the past twelve years. Such a document, under Italy’s Labor Charter, is prime evidence on the crucial issue of whether he was “dismissed for no good fault.”

Dictator Mussolini, although his Charter of Labor may have made possible one of the great compensation suits in the history of international reporting, has nonetheless carried the U. P. well over the bump of losing the kingpin of its Rome office. From the first shots and bomb thuds, U. P. European Manager Webb Miller has been flying the front with Premier Mussolini’s son-in-law, Count Galeazzo Ciano.

The Morgan affair last week was significant because it pointed up sharply a major Fascist fact, seldom realized outside Italy, namely that under the Charter of Labor the proletariat of Italy is guaranteed rights so drastic that Capital must frequently pay through the nose. Not only journalists, though they are the most pampered, but Italian workers generally see that while Fascism has made striking a crime, it also punishes with heavy cash damages an employer who simply “fires” an employe because he feels like firing him.

Most Italian reporters seem to fit into the bargain the Dictator offers them: “You eulogize my Dictatorship and I protect your jobs.” As to foreign correspondents, the longer they remain in Rome the more they lose their impartiality. Some turn sour and smuggle out whatever they can smell against Fascism. Others settle down sweetly to write as if on the staff of a supereditor who happens to be directing not only all the newsorgans of Italy but all Italy.

In jail last week, so his Rome press friends wrote, sat an embittered anti-Fascist correspondent, International News Service’s Guglielmo Emanuel. The least of Newshawk Emanuel’s incessant conversational jibes has been to refer to the slightly exophthalmic Dictator as “Banjo-Eyes.” After ten years in Rome for I.N.S., this Mussolini-baiter was arrested by the Italian counter-espionage service as an alleged spy in Britain’s pay who cleverly masked his activities by working for William Randolph Hearst.

What if Signor Emanuel should be shot as a spy? But the queasy fears of Rome correspondents on that score were scotched by a Government spokesman at Italy’s Foreign Office who grimly remarked: “The only thing that saves Emanuel from being shot in the back as a traitor is the fact that Italy was not at war at the time of his arrest!”