• U.S.

Press: Publishers Disagree

2 minute read
TIME

“Eternal vigilance is the price that open-shop employes and employers must pay for freedom of employer-employe relations in these days of government-pampered union promoters.” So the Los Angeles Times framed its credo last year when Los Angeles faced a renewed union drive. Eternally vigilant has been the Times since Oct. 1, 1910 when union dynamiters wrecked its plant, injured scores, killed 20. One of the nation’s greatest open-shop newspapers, the Times has helped Los Angeles hold out as an open-shop town. It prints daily a list of concerns where strikes are in progress, asks readers to patronize them.

When Dave Beck, beefy chief of west coast teamsters and tsar of Seattle labor, year ago lent his tough drivers to the American Newspaper Guild, enabled it to shut Hearst’s Seattle Post-Intelligencer for over three months, white-haired, testy, Los Angeles Times Publisher Harry Chandler sent Chapin (“Stubby”) Hall, to pry into Seattle’s “alarming situation.” Fact-Finder Hall scurried home to Los Angeles greatly agitated over the possible spread of Seattle’s acute unionism. When Publisher Chandler nervously watched Dave Beck cripple San Francisco’s waterfront last summer in a union battle with C. I. O. longshoremen, then make motions in the direction of Los Angeles, the Times rushed another investigator to Seattle. Publisher Chandler promptly began to fight Beck by frightening Los Angeles with doleful tales of Seattle’s plight.

Last week the Times wound up a series of inflammatory front-page stories describing the sufferings of a Northwest tyrannized by “davebeckism.” Hewing at Dave Beck, unmindful that it was chopping down Seattle with the same strokes, the Times reported Seattle’s population dwindling, its business and industrial activity slumping, its second-class entry periodicals dropping from 124 to 90. its foreign exports falling off, its residential building virtually stopped, its small industries oppressed—all milestones “along Seattle’s decline under union rule.”

Newspaper neighbors often engage in local feuds, but seldom do they fight across 1,000 miles. Last week, however, John Boettiger, son-in-law of President Roosevelt and Seattle Post-Intelligencer publisher, without exonerating Dave Beck, struck back at Publisher Chandler for attacks “grossly unfair and misleading.” defended his adopted city in a rebuttal editorial boasting Seattle’s ten-month 1937 record as against 1936; carloadings up from 833,794 to 897,701; retail sales up 8%; bank deposits up $25,000,000; postal receipts up $170,751; building permits up $468,000.

Said Publisher Chandler: “We’ve told the story of the infamies.”

Retorted Publisher Boettiger: “Hitting below the belt.”

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