A Tribute to Louis Stark
DUBINSKY, DAVID
Tribute to Louis Stark By David Dubinsky Through three-and-a-half decades, Louis Stark sat at the press tables of scores of meetings and conventions of the AFL, the CIO, the international unions,...
...Millions of this nation's workers will remain deeply indebted to him...
...His columns had become a window on the world—a window through which labor could see how it looked to the rest of the nation, a window through which the nation, in turn, could gain insights into the problems of working men and women...
...As a newspaper man, he walked a path apart...
...In the columns of the nation's newspapers, there was little about labor, and that little was almost entirely concerned with violence, police action, brutality...
...In a field where passions run high, in which contests are bitter and the stakes affect millions, Lou Stark walked with pencil and paper gathering the facts, questioning the parties, studying the issues, setting them down in clear, accurate prose for America to judge...
...He made labor his beat at a time when many questioned whether labor had any obligation to respond to public opinion...
...Louis Stark was the first to show labor that the entire press was not controlled, that not all journalists were dominated...
...He had recognized labor's role in society...
...Often, it seemed, the men on convention platforms spoke directly to him rather than to the delegates...
...First in his reports and more recently in his editorials, he had enormous influence on important decisions made recently by the AFL and the CIO—decisions concerned with no-raiding, with the waterfront, with greater union democracy and with other community responsibilities...
...Working men and women, reading these columns, felt that the reporting as well as the editorializing was dominated, controlled by employer groups...
...They therefore considered that they had no obligation to respond to a body of public opinion so largely manufactured and influenced by hostile publications...
...he understood the constructive part it could play in the future...
...He matched all of these against what he had seen himself, first-hand, on the picket lines and in the factories, in the union halls and in workers' homes, pouring all of this into his wonderfully factual reports which delegates and officers read next morning even before they read the official record of their deliberations...
...Most labor leaders felt that the press served only its masters, that the pages of the newspapers were closed to labor's point of view...
...His faith and his confidence won the support of the constructive, progressive forces of labor...
...He wanted labor to recognize its shortcomings, to realize its constructive responsibilities, to become responsible to the community as well as to its own needs...
...Tribute to Louis Stark By David Dubinsky Through three-and-a-half decades, Louis Stark sat at the press tables of scores of meetings and conventions of the AFL, the CIO, the international unions, sifting the convention oratory, weighing the convention resolutions, translating the heat of argument and the logic of debate...
...By reporting the truth, he helped win for them the powerful ally of public opinion...
...I know of no one who had as much influence on labor, although outside its ranks, as Louis Stark had...
...He stood in mid-ground, acting as the intermediary presenting labor's problems to the public and picturing public opinion to organized labor...
Vol. 37 • May 1954 • No. 22
