SOURCE: “Heywood Broun: It Seemed to Him,” in Men Who Lead Labor, Modern Age Books, Inc., 1937, pp. 115-42.

[In the following essay, Minton and Stuart discuss Broun's efforts as a leader of the progressive labor movement in the United States.]

The publishers greeted the formation of the American Newspaper Guild with sad shakes of their heads, predicting that newswriters could never successfully be organized. As Roy Howard, president of the Scripps-Howard chain of newspapers, complained to his employee, Heywood Broun, “You're doing a very silly and evil thing in trying to get reporters into a union. That would rob them of their initiative and take the romance and glamour out of the newspaper business. Still, I don't have to worry; the Guild will never get to first base.”

Roy Howard was wrong. Not only did the Newspaper Guild grow, but it fought William Randolph Hearst, the most powerful anti-labor publisher, and emerged from the showdown victorious. Actually Howard, Hearst, and the rest of the prophets who scoffed at the idea of unionizing newspaper workers overlooked the change of attitude through which professional and white-collar workers were passing. Loss of jobs, pay cuts, longer hours with no increase in earnings, insecurity of tenure, retrenchments that preluded dismissals did not bolster the myth that salaried employees somehow enjoyed a favored position in the economic structure. The dignity of profession that accompanied the supposed romance of editorial work proved insufficient recompense when the landlord and corner grocer presented overdue bills.

The depression spared the white-collar and professional employees no more than the wage workers. At first, the heavy blow of “retrenchment” was delayed; once it came, the salaried groups had even greater difficulty obtaining new jobs than the wage workers, and the rate of reëmployment among the salaried categories proved far slower. And just as, in the years of economic crisis, the newly formed Committee for Industrial Organization broke away from the bankrupt Gompers tradition that ruled the American Federation of Labor, so the salaried categories began to question the illusion that they were “different” from wage workers. The most successful of the pioneering organizations to emerge from the depression was the American Newspaper Guild.

At the time of his election to the presidency of the Guild, Heywood Broun, like most professional and white-collar workers, had no training in union organization. Aside from a previous brief and abortive attempt to unionize newswriters, he had given the problem little thought. When the Guild came into existence, Broun was firmly established as one of the leading columnists in America. His large salary assured him far more security than that possessed by the average professional. Yet he brought to the Guild a passionate devotion, a fervor that speeded the union's growth and did much to establish the Guild as a leader in the field of white-collar and professional organization.

Certainly Samuel Gompers, with his distrust of “intellectuals,” would never have countenanced Heywood Broun. Gompers disapproved of such men in the labor movement: too often they introduced new ideas, and Gompers resented new ideas, considered them dangerous. Like Gompers, William Green and William Hutcheson and the rest of the A.F. of L. executive council felt uneasy about this new type of labor leadership, heading a union of professionals and white-collar employees. But in 1933 Gompers could have done no more to end the heresy of a union electing a president who had gone to Harvard, had written novels, had been an editor and a war correspondent, than the executive council was able to do—which was nothing. Still, there was always the prospect, as the employers also pointed out, that newswriters would be easily discouraged or lacked sufficient drive to meet the obstacles in the way of organization.

The election of Heywood Broun to the Guild's presidency seemed to buoy that hope. For Broun had a reputation for being something of a dilettante, too easy going and undisciplined to solve the vexing problems that would confront a new union in a traditionally unorganized profession. Broun's career just didn't hold promise that he could stick with the Guild for long. The union, critics agreed, would start out with glowing promises and ambitious plans, but in a year or so it would peter out.

True, Heywood Broun had always shown more than casual interest in the plight of the oppressed. He had played a leading rôle in the fight to save Sacco and Vanzetti from legal lynching. He had even run for Congress on the Socialist ticket. But such incidents, according to those who foresaw disaster for the Guild, were for the most part the dramatic adventures in Broun's life. Building a successful and aggressive union meant hard work; the personal satisfaction of achievement was often obscured by dreary, day-by-day struggles to consolidate the union and draw in new members.

Nothing in Broun's career seemed to equip him for the task. Born in Brooklyn in 1888, he went through school and to Harvard where his inability to pass an elementary French examination kept him from receiving a degree. He began to work on newspapers while still an undergraduate. At the time of the Guild's inception, he was in his twenty-sixth year of newspaper work, having acted as reporter, rewrite man, sports editor, dramatic and literary critic, and columnist. He painted a little “for the fun of it.”

Large, loosely built, with a diffident, amiable smile and a genial manner, Heywood Broun prided himself on his sloppy dress, his membership in the Thanatopsis Literary and Inside Straight Club, and his ability to make others like him. He talked well and fluently, whether to a select group in a drawing room or to a mass meeting at Madison Square Garden, and what he had to say was distinguished by a good-natured directness, a sharp wit tempered by a disarming candor, and an impatience with hypocrisy. During the years following the War, when America basked in prohibition and a business boom, when the professional and white-collar workers enjoyed a deceptive security, Broun was looked upon as the playboy of the newspaper industry, sought after by the financially mighty who were amused by his humor, and who chuckled tolerantly at his light, persuasive prods to their smug contentment. In the days when prosperity arrived in America supposedly never to depart, when economic alchemists declared that American industry and finance had discovered the formula that forever abolished depression, the big publishers and theatrical producers, the wealthy patrons of art and the socially élite could afford to indulge themselves by enjoying Broun's jovial irony. At times, the columnist felt vaguely uncomfortable, for he was conscious of the relationship existing between himself and his hosts, the relationship of employee to employer. In the New York Tribune office, and later at the New York World, he was aware that other newspapermen and women, who worked harder than he did and whose ability he admired, received salaries that were far too low and worked hours that were far too long. The inequality bothered Broun, but he had no clear idea what he could do about it. Besides, he was paid a large salary; he was secure, exceptional, able to write what he pleased.

Broun had always been troubled by injustice. He went to France in 1917 as correspondent for the American Expeditionary Forces and found that he did not like war and could work up no enthusiasm for the murder that was to preserve democracy. Instead Broun gibed at the inefficiency of the War Department, and George Creel of the Bureau of Public Information sent him home. The correspondent came out of the War with a dislike for Creel, a vague annoyance at himself for his incapacity to express a proper patriotism, and a belief in disarmament. A confirmed pacifist, he remarked, “Of all cleaning fluids, blood is the least effective.” Nor did he succumb to the Red scare that followed the War. He derided it, resisted it. Later as a columnist for the World he lashed out at injustice, discrimination against Negroes, the Ku Klux Klan. But it was the Sacco-Vanzetti case that opened Broun's eyes to the insecurity of the professional's job in general and his own in particular, and enlightened him on the true meaning of the phrase sacred to all publishers, “freedom of the press.”

When the Italian anarchists, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, were condemned to the electric chair as blood sacrifice to the Red scare, Broun became thoroughly aroused. He used his column in the World to fight the frame-up, to expose it. Of the men who had condemned Sacco and Vanzetti, he wrote:

I've said that these men have slept, but from now on it is our business to make them toss and turn a little, for a cry should go up from many million voices before the day set for Sacco and Vanzetti to die. We have a right to beat against tight minds with our fists and shout a word into the ears of the old men. We want to know, we will know, ‘Why’?

For two successive days Broun's emphatic attacks appeared in the World. But two later columns were excluded. The World refused to print them. Broun resigned from the newspaper. In his letter to Ralph Pulitzer, the publisher, he wrote:

By now, I am willing to admit that I am too violent, too ill-disciplined, too indiscreet to fit pleasantly into the World's philosophy of daily journalism. And since I cannot hit it off with the World, I would be wise to look for work more alluring. … In farewell to the paper, I can only say that in its relations to me it was fair, generous and gallant. But that doesn't go for the Sacco-Vanzetti case.

It was not a final farewell. With Sacco and Vanzetti executed, Broun patched up his difference with Pulitzer in January 1928. The reconciliation lasted four months. In April, Broun wrote an article for the Nation in which he declared that New York had no liberal newspaper. Perhaps, he went on, the World most nearly approximated the liberal position, but it did not truly attain it. The same night that the article appeared, Broun read in the World that he was no longer in the newspaper's employ.

The incident impressed on Broun that despite his reputation, his popularity as a columnist, his large salary, his friendly relations with the publisher, he was in the last analysis only another paid employee. So long as he conformed, he would get his salary and be “free” to do as he pleased, and he could also enjoy Pulitzer's warm regard. But once he ran counter to the interests of his employer, the management dropped him precipitously, just as it fired any other recalcitrant worker. The press, boasting its freedom and liberality, would not permit such license as the expression of ideas that in any way endangered or embarrassed the ruling class.

Broun soon had another column, on the Scripps-Howard chain, where his contract specified that his opinions would appear “without regard to the paper's editorial policy.” But even with this guarantee, Broun was not free of all restriction. In 1934, his comments on the San Francisco general strike failed to appear in the San Francisco Scripps-Howard paper. Editorial censorship continued. Broun, however, had come to realize that he alone could not fight even his own battles with the publishers. He was by that time deep in the task of building the American Newspaper Guild.

For one brief moment before this, in 1930, Broun had entered politics to run for Congress on the Socialist platform. He could never quite explain how he happened to campaign for office. “I might lose my job on the Telegram,” he remarked, “and then the radio people might not like my socialism either, and I might get fired by them too.” But he campaigned—and was defeated.

He left the Socialist Party soon afterward—dissension within the Party discouraged him. Yet he wanted to help the underdog. His interest in the theatre prompted him to write, produce, and act in “Shoot the Works,” a coöperative venture to provide employment for actors and stage hands who had been unable to find work during the depression. The venture had some success, but Broun remained at loose ends.

In 1933, when the newspaper code was being formulated—by the publishers—in compliance with the N.R.A., spontaneous organization sprang up in several newspaper offices in different parts of the country. The first unit was formed in Cleveland. New York followed, and groups appeared in Tulsa, Minneapolis, St. Paul, Toledo and elsewhere. Heywood Broun, whose lazy energy until this time had lacked direction, showed immediate interest in the new organization. “The fact that newspaper editors are genial folk,” he pointed out in his column, “should hardly stand in the way of organization of a newspaper writers' union. There should be one. Beginning at 9 o'clock on the morning of October 1, I am going to do the best I can to help in getting one up.”

He did not have to wait that long. September saw the formation of the New York Guild. In December the local guilds called a convention in Washington, D.C., and launched the American Newspaper Guild with Heywood Broun as president.

The economic pressure that led to the organization of newspaper workers likewise affected all other salaried employees. For forty years, as industry throughout the world underwent basic changes, a new category of workers had been rapidly emerging: it was a vast army of salaried employees that steadfastly blinded itself to the economic bonds which linked it to the working class. Instead, these salaried groups clung to the self-deception that their economic interests more nearly coincided with those of their employers. They cherished unfounded hopes that some day they could break into the owning class. Actually their propertyless, insecure position forced them, like the wage workers, to sell their labor power: it doomed them to mounting exploitation and, with the coming of the post-war depression, to unemployment.

Yet the majority of salaried workers rejected reality. Their thinking was not unlike that of the executive council of the American Federation of Labor which refused to acknowledge the basic shift in the American industrial setup and which concentrated on organizing skilled workers at a time when the composition of the working class had become overwhelmingly semi-skilled. Similarly, the salaried groups failed to comprehend economic changes brought about by the intense concentration of capital and affecting their relationships both to the owning and working classes.

In 1870, salaried employees constituted about three percent of the gainfully employed; by 1930, this proportion had risen to twenty-two percent. From approximately 670,000 white-collar and professional employees in 1870, the number had shot up to almost 12,000,000 in 1930. Gone was the opportunity to serve a salaried apprenticeship in preparation for a more lucrative and responsible job of manager or supervisor. As the consolidation of industry progressed, monopolistic corporations replaced the small, individually owned enterprises, and simultaneously altered the function and composition of the salaried groups. On the one hand, mechanization and expansion transformed the clerk from a more or less trusted managerial assistant with a knowledge of the problems and needs of his employer, into a low-paid, unskilled employee working in a huge office. On the other hand, professionals and technicians found themselves unable to exist as self-employed individuals, and forced to accept salaried jobs from corporations.

Salaried employees (as a rule paid by the month and not by the hour or according to the job performed) could be conveniently classified as either white-collar employees, or salaried professionals and technicians. The white-collar category included all manner of clerks, office workers, transport and express agents, promotion and sales agents, assistants to professionals and technicians; anyone of the network of inspectors, salesmen, messengers, recorders, accountants, and civil service workers, which the complicated superstructure of modern industry required and the frenzied efforts to boom sales for all kinds of necessary, as well as useless, products entailed. The category of professionals and technicians embraced those employees whose “occupation is based on specialized intellectual study and training, the purpose of which is to supply skilled service or advice to others”—the architects, engineers, chemists, teachers, social workers, musicians, artists, actors, writers, economists, doctors, lawyers, and others, all highly trained and highly specialized men and women who were employed by the state, by public and private institutions, and by manufacturing and commercial enterprises.

Of the two categories, the white-collar group was by far the larger. In composition it was overwhelmingly native born and white: only 9.2 percent of the white-collar workers were of foreign birth, one percent was Negro, and 4 percent other races. In 1930, at least 8,000,000 of the 52,000,000 gainfully employed in America were engaged in white-collar pursuits, an increase of over 2,067 percent since 1870. This phenomenal rise took place as capital accelerated its concentration, which allowed vigorous corporations to swallow smaller manufacturers and merchants, or to press them out of business. As Karl Marx had predicted, the former owners became “overseers and underlings.”

The growth of large scale enterprise and constantly rising productive capacity demanded ever expanding promotion and sales forces to raise consumption and to overcome public resistance to the flood of new products. Manufacturers of “luxury” goods, makers of gadgets, owners of “service” organizations swelled their staffs of salesmen, clerks, and promotion men. Large, centralized offices required a host of clerks to perform the numerous functions of billing, accounting, stenography, circularizing, tabulating. With the technical perfection of the telegraph, telephone, and radio; with the growth of transportation facilities; with the mass use of automobiles and the accompanying chains of filling stations; with the thousands of new devices arising from mechanization and electrification, the demand for salesmen, canvassers, demonstrators, messengers, and clerks seemed unlimited.

These white-collar employees thought of themselves as part of the middle class—which unlike the working and owning classes had no common economic interest. Instead, the middle class fell between the two fundamentally opposed classes of capitalists and workers, a group in constant flux without economic homogeneity, and therefore without any possibility of class allegiance within itself. Vague middle class ambitions inspired the white-collar workers. Many came from middle class homes; those with worker backgrounds fervently desired to enter into what they considered the socially more desirable middle class. Almost without exception, white collar employees, no matter what salary they received, looked down upon wage workers, considered themselves superior. The “new middle class” of salaried employees dazzled itself with dreams of economic “independence,” too proud to accept any theory of action that admitted the existence of the class struggle, fortifying its pride by denying class antagonisms.

As a rule, each salaried employee harbored a fantasy of owning his own business, or some property, or of rising to managerial station, though such hopes, because of the restrictions accompanying the intensification of monopoly capitalism, were impossible of fulfillment. White-collar workers depended on large capital for employment. Supervisory and managerial posts were few, and if anything the demand was contracting as industry became more centralized. Certainly the number of highly paid positions was infinitesimal compared to the supply of white-collar workers, while the aggregate of small enterprises was diminishing rather than growing. Opportunities to earn sufficient to buy property or to achieve any sort of economic independence became increasingly slim. Actually, those of the middle class who still owned houses or small businesses or a little property found the struggle to retain these possessions growing yearly more bitter. Small owners who formed a large part of the middle class were cruelly pressed from above, and were rapidly losing their holdings. Their former limited security gave way to despair as they saw themselves dispossessed, bankrupt, declassed.

Of course, the high salaried overseers and directors shared the economic interests of their employers. Those who were paid well for serving in a supervisory or executive capacity had a stake in the successful working of the capitalist system; their jobs depended on their ability to increase the owners' profits. Their alliance with the big owners had economic justification. This was not true of the average salaried employee. While most white-collar workers were slow to comprehend what was happening to them, the process of proletarianization continued just the same. White-collar employees could anticipate no greater opportunity to improve their status than factory workers could to improve theirs. They enjoyed no greater security of employment. They sold their labor power to the owning class which exploited them just as it exploited the industrial and agricultural workers. The difference in clothes worn to work in no way altered the white-collar employees' economic relationship to the employers.

Nor did the failure of white-collar workers to realize that they were members of the working class prevent them from experiencing harsher oppression as financial monopoly spread. Mechanization and expansion, which in the beginning had intensified the demand for white-collar workers, also lowered salaries. Machines simplified the jobs; on the whole, white-collar jobs demanded little skill and paid the employee less than skilled wage work and often less than manual work. Moreover, machines and speedup cut down the demand for office workers.

The economic depression which followed the post-war boom tended to bring home to white-collar workers their relationships both to the employers and to the wage workers. They found that like the wage workers, their jobs were insecure. While the first year of depression did not affect white-collar employees so drastically as it did workers in industry and agriculture, unemployment set in soon afterward, and with it, wage cuts. In many instances salaries sank far more drastically than wage rates. In New York City, for example, salaries of women clerical workers diminished from twenty-five to forty percent, to the depressed average of $11.39 per week. On the basis of a 1932 survey of 218 companies with 111,700 clerical workers, Business Week concluded that 19.4 percent of the 4,000,000 clerical workers were unemployed; the remainder had experienced salary cuts averaging 14 percent. While in certain industries wages rose in 1933 with the passage of the N.R.A. (largely in those industries where effective union organization existed), salaries for the most part fell, and salary minimums tended to become the maximums. Thus, the New York University Employment Bureau pointed out that “the $20 and $22 job is now about a $15 job.”

What was true of the white-collar workers also held for professional and technical employees. The same economic forces drove this category into the “new middle class”; once they assumed a salaried post, they became economically a part of the working class. Formerly, professionals and technicians were able to support themselves through individual practices; but like the small merchants and manufacturers they could not resist the pressure of an expanding monopoly capitalism and the majority accepted employment from corporations or their varied subsidiary institutions. Others, particularly among the “free professions” of medicine and law, maintained a status of semi-employment; part of their income came from private practices and the remainder from some form of salaried professional employment. In other words, many doctors and lawyers struggled to keep their badly paying practices by propping low incomes with clinical, institutional, or corporation work. Even so, approximately two-thirds of the professionals and technicians were crowded out of the self-employed field and into salaried posts.

Once this process began, professionals and technicians found that because they lacked organization and therefore the power to resist exploitation, their salaries in no way reflected the responsibility or quality of their work. Technological improvements and the oversupply of professional men forced salaries not infrequently to the level of wages for unskilled work. In addition, with the economic depression, unemployment among professionals and technicians reached staggering proportions. In 1933, it was estimated that ninety-eight percent of the architects were unemployed, eighty-five percent of the engineers, sixty-five percent of the chemists. Per capita earnings in the same year for public school teachers, including supervisors and principals, averaged only $1,414 annually; physicians and surgeons averaged $3,079; dentists, $2,413. Inasmuch as these averages included the well paid and successful “top” professionals, the earnings of large numbers were below even a subsistence level. Technical employees in 1933 received as low as thirty-five cents to forty-five cents an hour. Salaries of qualified chemists fell to $14 a week. And since in 1930 four out of five of the 3,500,000 or so professionals and technicians were salaried employees, these men and women began to understand that their lot was if anything more calamitous than that of the average worker.

The smashing of all standards proved that without union organization neither the white-collar nor the professional and technical employees could hope for improvement or relief. Psychological resistance to unions impeded the action of both groups. Unions meant struggles against employers which led to strikes and all the methods which duplicated the wage workers' opposition to exploitation. And members of the “new middle class” found it difficult to relinquish all their illusions by finally admitting that they were in the same foundering boat as the wage workers and must use the same methods to bail it out or sink. After the first three years of depression it was clear to many more that only unionization could protect the mutual interests of salaried and wage workers. And it also began to dawn on both the professionals and technicians, as well as on the white-collar employees, that unions designed to impose just claims on the exploiting class could hardly be considered undignified.

Unions were not altogether unknown to either white-collar or professional employees. Among professionals, the American Federation of Musicians, which grew out of twenty-seven local unions of musicians and a number of branches of a professional society, joined the A.F. of L. in 1896 and successfully organized most of the profession in the succeeding years. By 1936, the A.F. of M. included 110,000 members and virtually controlled the commercial field. In 1930, the union had jurisdiction over ninety percent of all musicians in New York City. But technological developments had taken a drastic toll among musicians, so that 50 percent of those who worked in motion picture theaters had been displaced by the introduction of sound films. The union also suffered from most of the diseases that Gompersism bred: racketeering, failure adequately to protect unemployed members, the granting of exorbitant salaries to the officialdom while earnings of the membership steadily diminished. Craft barriers kept the musicians from successful joint action with other unions. During the 1937 sit-down strikes in Detroit and Flint, for example, members of the A.F. of M. continued to play over the radio for the General Motors Corporation, while industrial workers were struggling to gain recognition of their union and collective bargaining.

Another important professional union, the Associated Actors and Artistes of America, affiliated with the A.F. of L. in 1919. Composed of several units, the largest being the Actors Equity Association, it maintained independent affiliates among chorus dancers, opera singers and choruses, vaudeville actors, screen actors, and other groups. With 14,000 members, the 4 A's enforced a virtual closed shop in the legitimate theater. Yet the Association was hesitant to demand unemployment relief for its membership, and was riddled with craft snobbery. In the early days of the Association when it was necessary to strike to obtain recognition and contractual agreements with the employers, organized electricians, stage hands, and other theater workers aided the Association. Unfortunately, once it was firmly established, the Association often refused to support the wage workers, considering them on a plane “below” salaried professionals.

On the whole, however, the A.F. of L. took even less interest in professional employees than it did in unskilled workers. The fear of “intellectuals,” the resistance of professionals themselves to organization, the narrow craft outlook and do-nothing policy of the executive council with its reluctance to invade new fields, blocked extensive organizational work. Moreover, professionals and technicians, believing that they had little in common with wage workers, formed associations which were soon dominated by the very wealthy doctors or lawyers or professors or architects, whose economic interests coincided with those of the owning class. Such associations, instead of improving the lot of the membership, actually impeded progress by fostering misconceptions concerning economic relationships between professionals and technicians and their employers by obscuring the main issue of economic security with vague ethical generalizations. Too often these associations fought any advance that smacked of liberalism. The American Bar Association endorsed reactionary legislation, and thereby actually sacrificed the economic interests of the majority of lawyers. The American Medical Association, ruled by a highly conservative leadership, resisted popular health insurance and socialized medicine. The American Association of University Professors, with 12,000 members, while concerned with problems arising from the violation of academic freedom, “investigated” and made reports of abuses but seldom took steps to enforce its decisions.

In 1916, the A.F. of L. chartered the American Federation of Teachers. The union had an early history of militancy, but later became dormant until revived by the depression. Thereafter, despite dissension within the union caused by reactionary cliques which utilized the Red scare to impede organization, the A.F. of T. raised its membership to 25,000 in 1936, and with a newly elected leadership took an active rôle in the fight for higher salaries, academic freedom, and relief for their unemployed. Teachers suffered severely from unemployment; those with jobs experienced the highest degree of speedup, salary cuts which reduced pay to a vanishing point, or in many cases delays in pay which stretched over many months.

On the other hand, the International Federation of Technical Engineers, Architects, and Draftsmen (A.F. of L.) chartered in 1918, never succeeded in gaining a foothold in the profession. Its membership dropped steadily during the depression until in 1936 it claimed 1,800 members and actually had less than 1,000. Significantly, the independent and militant Federation of Architects, Engineers, Chemists and Technicians, formed in 1933, grew in three years to 7,000 members, largely because of its all-inclusive character which allowed workers employed by W.P.A. professional projects, the unemployed, and those engaged in civil service and private industry to join. The Federation's realistic struggle for adequate relief, higher salaries, and improved standards met with astonishing success and attracted new members steadily. It was also the first professional union to affiliate with the C.I.O.

Since 1930, organization of the professional groups received a strong impetus. The Air Line Pilots (A.F. of L.) and the independent American Radio Telegraphists Association, both formed in 1931, expanded rapidly in their respective spheres. Particularly did the Radio Telegraphists (affiliated with the C.I.O. in 1937) play a part in the successful West Coast maritime strikes of 1934 and 1936, and continued to coöperate with wage workers and other groups of licensed personnel. The depression fostered scores of other professional unions, many independent, and a few affiliated with the A.F. of L. and some with the C.I.O. Artists, cartoonists, nurses, physicians, pharmacists, dental and laboratory technicians, authors, dramatists, screen writers, librarians, research workers, clergymen, social workers formed unions which for the most part were progressive in their leadership, controlled by the rank and file, and militant. And almost all of these young unions waged struggles of the utmost importance for more adequate unemployment relief and against curtailment of W.P.A.

Similarly, in the white-collar field, organization proceeded rapidly during the depression. Here too A.F. of L. unions existed, but on the whole they played a static, ultra-conservative rôle. The largest white-collar union, the Brotherhood of Railway and Steamship Clerks, Freight Handlers, Express and Station Employees, founded in 1898, closed its ranks to Negro workers, and though it enrolled 135,000 members, it relied on lobbying to achieve concessions, and failed to resist severe salary cuts. In the same way, the National Federation of Post Office Clerks (A.F. of L.) with 40,000 members, based its policy on recognition “that legislation and not strike is the last resort in the adjustment of our grievances, and therefore we oppose strikes in the Postal Service.” Among the postal groups, the A.F. of L. maintained two other unions with a total membership of 55,345. Likewise, three independent unions of postal employees with a combined membership of 83,519 remained largely conservative in outlook.

The A.F. of L.'s policy of neglecting white-collar workers was reflected in the low memberships of such organizations as the Retail Clerks International Protective Association, and the Bookkeepers, Stenographers and Accountants Union (the B.S. & A.U.). After 1890, the Retail Clerks managed to enroll only 15,000 of the half million or so eligible to membership. Recently, in San Francisco, the Retail Clerks received encouragement from the success of the maritime unions. And in the beginning of 1937, the sit-down strikes in the automobile industry served as an example to clerks in such stores as Woolworth's and H. L. Green's in New York City who adopted similar methods, and won new members, higher wages, and better working conditions. In protest against the reactionary, racketeering leadership of the International, many locals of the Retail Clerks joined the C.I.O. and established the United Retail Employees of America. The B.S. & A.U., formerly a federal union, was organized in New York City in 1910; while the New York union was the largest of over fifty similar federal unions, the total membership of these unions was approximately 10,000, with nearly 5,000 in New York and with over 2,000,000 eligible for membership. In New York City, the disbanding of the militant and independent Office Workers Union and the entry of its progressive membership into the B.S. & A.U. helped to activize the older union. It was the Office Workers Union that conducted the successful strike against the Macaulay Publishing Company in 1934, one of the first white-collar strikes to rally professionals to assist clerical workers, and it served to encourage union organization among salaried employees generally. Recently, the B.S. & A.U. elected progressive rank and file candidates to office and under young Lewis Merrill, president, the union immediately showed a more aggressive and active interest in spreading its organization. In May 1937, this and other federal locals broke all ties with the A.F. of L. and affiliated with the C.I.O., a necessary step that initiated for the first time in fifty years a nationwide organizing campaign of all office and professional employees into one industrial group, the United Office and Professional Workers of America.

Among government and civil service employees, the American Federation of Government Employees (A.F. of L.) with 22,000 members was the most progressive. In 1932, the more conservative group quit the Federation and formed an independent union which retained control of 64,000 employees, the largest union of civil service workers. The A.F.G.E. also split in June 1937 when 3,200 members affiliated with the C.I.O. under the title of the United Federal Workers of America. Altogether, approximately eighteen unions existed in this field, almost all conservative and largely working at cross-purposes. Again the C.I.O. stepped in, forming one union for government employees which would bring order out of chaos.

Other white-collar unions embraced substantial numbers of workers but, as a whole, organization within the white-collar and professional groups still lagged even in 1936. Of the 8,000,000 in the white-collar category, less than 1,000,000 belonged to unions. Less than 300,000 of the 3,500,000 professionals and technicians were organized. The lack of adequate organization not only exposed salaried workers to even more intensified exploitation but also threatened them and the rest of the working class with the danger of Fascism. At the mercy of the employers, retaining illusions as to their class relationships, the “new middle class” could easily be misled and used as a foil against organized industrial and agricultural workers. Monopoly capitalism, raising its own contradictions that necessitated more stringent exploitation of the working class, could still in the future hope to utilize the insecurity and false conceptions of the “new middle class” to reinforce reaction.

The precedent for such a manoeuver was only too clear. In Germany, lack of coöperation between the “new middle class” and the wage workers immensely aided Hitler's rise. Not that white-collar and professional groups alone enabled Hitler to achieve power: the split in the working class, the collaborationist policies of the Social-Democratic leadership, the inability of working class political parties to arrive at a common program of action, contributed largely to the victory of the fascist National Socialist Party. But the disillusioned, hard pressed, unattached white-collar and professional employees were easily deceived by the spurious promises of the Nazis. Still believing that they were in some way “different” from wage workers, the white-collar and professional employees flocked into Storm Troop and other Nazi organizations, and so became a powerful weapon in the hands of the extreme reaction. Though the “new middle class” groups were fighting against their own best interests, they lacked an understanding of class relationships and therefore a comprehension of their rôle. Middle class psychology and the false dream of white-collar workers that some day they could slip into the ranks of the capitalist class aided the Fascists in victimizing the salaried groups.

So long as the “new middle class” preserved similar misconceptions, they would run the same danger of serving reaction in America. Certain sections of the salaried groups in this country had already been seduced by the Huey Longs, the Father Coughlins, the Gerald K. Smiths; had already shown their willingness to grasp at such panaceas as the Townsend Plan, the Social Credit Plan, the Utopian Plan, the Share-the-Wealth Plan. However, once organized into strong, progressive unions, white-collar and professional employees soon learned that no real chasm separated them from the wage workers. Both were constantly subject to the same oppression. Both were ruled by the same economic laws. And salaried employees began to perceive that they had as much to lose under Fascism as their wage earning brothers.

“Small fry are no longer small when they begin to organize,” Heywood Broun remarked. “They take on purpose and power.” Organization of white-collar and professional employees, no less important, was no more impractical than organization of wage workers in basic industries. Governed by identical laws, both salaried and wage workers could become effective in their fight for better wages, better working conditions, and in their common stand against reaction if they organized, as Heywood Broun insisted, into unions industrial in form. The C.I.O., comprehending that white-collar and professional employees were an important section of the working class, laid plans for organizing them into solid united unions and so implementing them toward the struggle against Fascism and in defense of democratic rights.

In the spring of 1935, Heywood Broun wrote:

The snobbishness of the white-collar groups is on the whole exaggerated. If clerks, newspapermen, accountants, and professional men have been slow in organizing, it has not been altogether because of reluctance. It is rather an inability. We have neither the tradition nor the training. … A very considerable proportion of white-collar workers are ready now to join the parade of organization if only space is assigned to them.

The experience of the American Newspaper Guild served to encourage unionization among other groups within the “new middle class.” Newspapermen met every form of opposition from legalistic red tape to intimidation and violence. The success of the Guild illustrated the ability of professionals and white-collar workers to overcome the powerful hostility of the employers, and in the face of it to achieve unity.

The Newspaper Guild was by no means the first attempt to organize newswriters. In 1900 William Randolph Hearst smashed a small pioneering union in Chicago. During the War, when unionization advanced in all fields, Boston reporters and editorial workers organized into the International Typographical Union. The I.T.U.'s jurisdictional claim over editorial workers was recognized by the A.F. of L., and with the help of the printers, reporters succeeded in raising their salaries. Other attempts in New York City and elsewhere did not fare so well. The pension and insurance benefits carried by I.T.U. members necessitated high dues which proved prohibitive for most editorial workers. The union refused to make an exception for the newcomers. The result was that the Boston group lagged, the New York reporters were defeated, and the I.T.U. soon gave up the project of organizing editorial staffs as a bad job. By 1923 the I.T.U. went so far as to relinquish jurisdiction over editorial workers. Newspaper unions continued in Milwaukee, Wis., and Scranton, Pa., but as a whole editorial workers remained unorganized.

With the depression, salaries of newspaper employees were cut from 10 to 40 percent: earnings of reporters with twenty-years' experience averaged $38 a week. Speedup, discharge, longer hours ruled the industry. Yet when the publishers drew up a so-called newspaper code under the N.R.A., they saw to it that the code did not interfere with their right to hire child labor, and did not include any section guaranteeing editorial employees a shorter work week and minimum wages. Furthermore, in order to protect “freedom of the press,” the code specifically provided that no provision could be altered without the consent of the nation's 1,200 publishers. To be doubly certain that the code would in no way benefit editorial workers, the publishers carefully classified members of editorial staffs as “professionals,” and thus excluded them from wage and hour provisions.

Newswriters balked: spontaneously they formed local unions and by December 1933 the locals had called a conference which formed the national Guild. Jonathan Eddy was elected executive secretary, and Heywood Broun president. All officers served without salary.

Broun at first conceived of the Guild both as a professional organization, a sort of liberalized American Medical Association of newswriters, and a bargaining group to raise economic standards for editorial workers. Of himself he said, “As one of the early leaders of the guild I saw my job to be that of a kind of ballyhoo man and advance agent.” Like most of the first members to join the Guild, Broun was reluctant to consider the relationship between the salaried newspaper employees and the publishers as one of “boss and his wage slave. All my bosses,” he declared, “have been editors and not a single Legree in the lot.”

But Broun soon lost his confidence in the publishers' reasonableness. The American Newspaper Publishers Association, formed in 1887 “to protect newspaper publishers against labor,” took an immediate and violent dislike to the Guild. The Association had little patience with labor organizations. Guildsmen, and especially local leaders, were dismissed—for reasons of “economy”—and replaced at the same salaries by non-Guildsmen. Heading the offensive was William Randolph Hearst, who admired the labor policies of Hitler and Mussolini. Accordingly, when R. L. Burgess of the San Francisco Examiner joined the Guild and was elected chairman of the local unit, Hearst fired Burgess without delay. Redfern Mason, music critic on the Examiner for over twenty years and active in the Guild, was demoted and forced to resign. Dean Jennings of Hearst's San Francisco Call-Bulletin planned to use his vacation to attend the 1934 Guild convention at St. Paul; Hearst shifted the vacation period at the last moment and obtained Jennings' resignation.

The Jennings case more than any other event in the early days of the Guild revealed to the membership what it could expect from the publishers. Appeal to the San Francisco Regional Labor Board resulted in delay and postponement; after months, the case was shunted to the National Labor Relations Board, then to the Newspaper Industrial Board (composed of four publishers and four labor leaders who split on every important issue and were unable to reach any decision), back to the San Francisco Regional Board, and finally to the National Labor Relations Board in Washington. In the end, the N.L.R.B. ordered the Call-Bulletin to reinstate Jennings. The publishers, acting as a man, threatened to withdraw from the N.R.A. Donald Richberg thereupon persuaded the Board to reopen the case. Once more the N.L.R.B. decided in favor of Jennings, and when Hearst disregarded the reinstatement order, the Board demanded that he relinquish the Blue Eagle insignia. The American Newspaper Publishers Association retaliated by calling a meeting of all publishers to consider resignation as a body from the N.R.A. In a panic, the National Recovery Administration referred the Jennings case to President Roosevelt who voided the twice given decision and reprimanded the N.L.R.B. for its presumption. Hereafter, the President decreed, matters involving publishers would be left to the Newspaper Industrial Board—which the publishers controlled, or at least could hamstring. The Guild had previously been refused representation on this “impartial” board; only the voluntary withdrawal of a labor member made room for the appointment of a Guild delegate.

As Heywood Broun remarked, in the Jennings case “the publishers cracked down and the President cracked up.” To Broun it was plain that “the government of the United States has been held up by the publishers of the United States. The President surrendered at the point of a wooden gun.” Guild members began to realize that a polite professional organization would not get very far. Open opposition from the publishers compelled the Guild to undertake traditional union tactics, and relegate to a less harassed future the original Guild plans to improve professional standards, institute sick benefits, open schools for copy boys, and start employment offices for those out of jobs. Obviously the Guild's existence rested on its success or failure on the economic front. Above all, the Guild must establish its right to bargain collectively; it must gain sufficient strength to win better hours and working conditions, higher pay and a minimum wage.

I am proud of the fact that when organized newspapermen made their first articulate demands [Broun declared], I did make a short speech in which I said that if we could not get those things which we needed through the N.R.A. and through a guild type of organization, we would seek them through trade unionism … I based my prophecy on the distinct feeling that the newspaper publishers would not meet us half-way, one-third of the way, or even one-hundredth of the way.

But the publishers considered themselves prepared for the attack. They had what they considered an all powerful joker up their sleeves: “Freedom of the press.” And after the care with which they had written the newspaper code, after the meticulous manner in which they had guarded freedom of the press by making sure that the code in no way supervised or restricted their anti-labor policies and that it assured them the liberty of firing Guildsmen, the publishers continued the fight for their precious “freedom” by practicing any and all repressive measures against the young newspaper union. Purely in the interests of this mythical free press, the publishers objected to the unionization of reporters because, they protested, once newspapers were organized all labor news would thereafter reflect an undue sympathy to organized workers—an interference with “free press” which to that time had been consistently hostile to labor. Still more, the publishers worried lest Guildsmen would lose their devil-may-care attitude, and might even become politically minded. Then their reporting would be colored by personal beliefs. Formerly, of course, even before the Guild was formed, newspapermen had voted and held political beliefs without endangering the editorial policies of the papers for which they had worked. Somehow, objected the publishers, that was different. The practice that publishers had of reflecting the political and labor views of their large advertisers also did not interfere with the press' freedom. And the employers refused to be comforted by the Guild's constitution which stated that no one, under any circumstance, could be excluded from the Guild because of his political opinions, or because of any views he expressed in his writing.

Furthermore, the owners would not admit that the experience of English publishers was valid, even though in England a powerful reporters' union had in no way impeded the presentation of news in accordance with the individual paper's editorial policy. Instead, American publishers clung to their slogan, “freedom of the press”; it was the guillotine by which they hoped to decapitate the Guild. The weapon had a general usefulness, too, whenever publishers were hard pressed: a Boston publisher whose plant had been condemned as a firetrap howled that “freedom of the press” was being trampled upon; the same cry sanctified opposition to child labor laws interfering with the right of newspapers to employ children. Unfortunately, the too ardent repetition of the slogan dulled its edge. It began to bore the public, especially when William Randolph Hearst, the Guild's bitterest enemy, aired it daily in his papers which continued “freely” to falsify and censor news.

For the first eighteen months, organized newspapermen met with discouraging defeats. Yet in the face of the Jennings case, widespread dismissals of Guild leaders, and two small unsuccessful strikes, the Guild's membership grew. The one bright spot of those months was the strike against the Newark Ledger, the owner of which refused even to meet Guild representatives. He displayed his determination by firing eight of the more active unit leaders before leaving for Florida on his vacation. Forty-five Guildsmen on the editorial staff responded to the strike call. The walkout dragged along for over four months. The usual mass arrests, intimidation, police brutality, instead of discouraging the Guildsmen, rallied numerous professional and working class organizations to their support. In the end, the strikers were reinstated. Broun estimated the strike as a substantial victory:

I do not think that anybody can question the success of the settlement achieved by the white-collar union [he said] even though it did not gain its entire list of objectives. There may be some criticism of the fact that the fate of the employees, who were originally discharged, was left to arbitration, but any agreement which provides for the return of all strikers and the discharge of strikebreakers deserves to stand as a labor triumph. … In Newark, an effective part of the public could and did stop buying the Ledger while the hostilities were on. … P. W. Chappell, the federal mediator, forced me to nibble a few of my words in which I maintained that no good thing could come out of Washington. The principle remains the same, however. The strength of a labor group remains within its own hands. No sort of legislation will work for weak unions. ‘Them as has gets.’

Members of the Guild knew that they could only survive if they built the union's economic power. The former resistance characteristic of white-collar and professional workers to straightforward union methods disappeared. The Guild adopted a militant policy. In the strike against the Amsterdam News in New York City, the Guild won all its basic demands. Moreover, the strike found white and Negro employees side by side; equality, guaranteed by the Guild's constitution, was (unlike the practice in many A.F. of L. unions) accepted as a matter of course.

Meanwhile the employers continued their attacks on newswriters who joined the Guild. The Associated Press discharged Morris Watson, veteran employee and vice-president of the Guild. The National Labor Relations Board, petitioned by Watson, ordered the Associated Press to reinstate him and to pay his salary for the time he was out of work. The A.P., however, refused to comply with the decision: it appealed to the Federal District Court, which ruled against the corporation. Next, it took the case to the Circuit Court which also upheld the N.L.R.B.'s finding. Finally, the case, upon which hinged the constitutionality of the Wagner Labor Relations Act, was appealed to the United States Supreme Court where the decision of the N.L.R.B. was upheld.

By the spring of 1936, the Guild was strong enough to strike Hearst's Wisconsin News in Milwaukee. Broun led the picket line and with other strikers was arrested and jailed. The public and the rank and file of the unions supported the Guild. Again the young union emerged triumphant, with all strikers returned to work, and winning substantial gains that granted a minimum wage, hours of work, dismissal notices, overtime, and vacations with pay. The Guild had fought Hearst and, to the astonishment of most publishers, had forced him to capitulate.

Still, Broun realized that the union needed more powerful support than could accrue from the union's own membership. It needed roots in the organized labor movement; to obtain these roots, the Guild must affiliate with the A.F. of L. A certain section of the Guild's membership revived all its white-collar pride and snobbishness to block affiliation when it was proposed in 1935. Yet in the space of a year, even the formerly backward Guild members had changed their opinion. Publishers' overeager advice to shun the A.F. of L. rang suspiciously offkey. As Broun remarked, “The very same publishers who talk of the Guild's not seeking counsel from experienced labor leaders are the very ones who say, ‘Don't you realize that it would be fatal for you boys to go into the American Federation of Labor?’” In the fall of 1936, the national convention of the Newspaper Guild voted overwhelmingly to join the A.F. of L. The Guild had come of age. Struggle and necessity had blasted its original vague aspirations to build another professional organization; the old suspicion of unionism had disappeared, and in its place had arisen an acceptance of the urgency for realistic organization. “The publishers,” Broun admitted, “had convinced them of the necessity,” and had encouraged the union to affiliate with the Federation “not by words but by deeds.”

Late in the summer of 1936 occurred the strike against Hearst's Seattle Post-Intelligencer. This strike taught the Guild its most valuable lesson. With the dismissal of two veteran members of the editorial staff for “inefficiency,” the staff walked out. Because the Northwest labor unions had learned the value of solidarity during the 1934 maritime strike, because the Guild had been attacked by Hearst who had consistently advocated the destruction of all unions, teamsters, teachers, longshoremen, sailors, lumber and metal workers, hundreds of union members joined the Guild in picketing. Typographical workers refused to pass through the line. Hearst's powerful newspaper closed down and Seattle was without a morning newspaper except for the Guild Daily. The Central Trades and Labor Council endorsed the strike; Mayor Dore spoke in its favor. Naturally, the publishers of rival newspapers lined up with Hearst against the Guild, screaming violation of “freedom of the press.”

The Post-Intelligencer, however, did not appear. Hearst's elaborate plans to import thugs and strikebreakers, to organize vigilantes and launch a reign of terror, failed in face of the iron unity of all Seattle labor. The strike ended with another victory for the Guild, the second against Hearst in three months. In its wake came agreements with all the major San Francisco and Bay Region newspapers (including three Hearst papers, two of which, the Examiner and Call-Bulletin, had so strenuously opposed the Guild in its early days). By the middle of 1937 membership had risen to 11,000. Seventy-eight newspapers had signed contracts recognizing the Guild, including the New York Daily News with the largest daily circulation of any newspaper in America. In three years the Guild, Roy Howard's predictions notwithstanding, had quite noticeably succeeded in worrying the publishers. A number of papers in the Scripps-Howard chain signed Guild contracts.

It was the Post-Intelligencer strike that finally convinced most Guild members that solidarity with, and mutual support of, all other labor organizations, whether these organizations were composed of wage or salary workers, meant the success of any single union. It was the Post-Intelligencer strike that strengthened Heywood Broun's determination to fight for industrial organization in the American labor movement. He joined, as an individual, the Committee for Industrial Organization. “Labor's job and labor's obligation are perfectly plain no matter who sits in the White House,” he insisted. “It must develop large and aggressive organizations. It must organize not only the mass-production industries but also the white-collar workers and the unemployed. And it must organize along industrial lines.”

The false distinction between salaried employees and wage workers was breaking down. The Guild, more than any other union of white-collar and professional men and women, blazed the trail. Significantly, the importance of organizing white-collar and professional groups was also recognized by John L. Lewis. In his 1937 New Year's Day speech, Lewis as chairman of the C.I.O. emphasized that the Committee

is urging the American workers to a great appreciation of the value of organization and its influence is extending into the ranks of the technical, professional and white-collar workers in a manner which indicates that they too will avail themselves of the opportunities to participate in the benefits of modern collective bargaining. … Employers have treated them with the same ruthless lack of consideration universally extended to the workers in the mass-production industries. … Labor demands collective bargaining and greater participation by the individual worker, whether by hand or brain—in the fruits of the genius of its inventors or technicians.

The sympathy with which Guild members watched the drive for industrial unionism, the Guild's real inner democracy that gave the rank and file members a dominant voice in the conduct of the union, its militant and clear cut program distinguished it as one of the most progressive unions in the A.F. of L. The Guild threw its weight behind most progressive legislative proposals, such as the Workers' Unemployment Insurance Bill, the extension of W.P.A., reform of the federal courts. But it was the outline of policy in relation to the A.F. of L.—C.I.O. controversy that showed the real maturity of the Guild. Fully supporting and coöperating “with the progressive movement in American labor,” the Guild at first demanded “the return of autonomy and democracy in the American Federation of Labor,” and deplored splits in state and central labor bodies—splits engineered by the A.F. of L. executive council. In June 1937, when it was clear that the Federation executive council was determined to smash the C.I.O. even if that meant the end of the American labor movement, the Guild's fourth annual convention at St. Louis voted overwhelmingly to affiliate with the C.I.O. and give all support to the organization of the mass-production industries, extending the union's jurisdiction to include business, circulation, and advertising workers in newspaper offices. In addition, the convention called for the building of independent political action and full support to the Spanish People's Front.

Heywood Broun, dramatic critic, novelist, columnist, had become a far-sighted labor leader, who understood the threat of Fascism. With him, the majority of Guild members grasped the importance of immediate and continued resistance to reaction in this country. Broun stressed the need to politicalize the labor movement, to build a Farmer-Labor Party that would rally all liberals and progressives in the middle classes to the support of a militant working class, “I think there is small question that Franklin D. Roosevelt's labor policy will be very much governed by labor's own strength,” he predicted. By pointing out that industrial unionism in conjunction with a progressive political program alone could protect workers—white-collar as well as industrial, professional as well as agricultural—Heywood Broun took his place among those progressive labor leaders pledged to prevent the horror of Fascism from overwhelming America.