THE LAST WORD
Lens, Sidney
THE LAST WORD Reunion Sidney Lens Most of the middle-aged or elderly men and women who assembled one recent Saturday evening at Chicago's Midland Hotel had not seen each other for decades....
...Chicago's Hearst papers are long gone, but the union survives...
...Similar attacks are being mounted today, he noted, against newspaper unions around the country...
...It was an unusual reunion — veterans of a bitter eighteen-month strike of editorial, business, and circulation workers against Chicago's two Hearst newspapers who had gathered, along with spouses, sons, daughters, and friends, to mark the fortieth anniversary of that strike...
...The strike that seemed lost in 1940 is regarded, with the hindsight of forty years, as a victory...
...I walked down the street, took out a library card, and actually read something called a book...
...It's a long time since I've spoken to you," he said, "and I haven't done much public speaking since" — but he didn't do badly for a man long out of practice...
...the greatest education I ever had...
...There's Buddy Goldman," someone said — and Warren Stromberg, and "Ma" Dolan (who had run the strike kitchen), and Audrey Hainke (who had run the Newspaper Guild office), and Jack Wolfsohn, and...
...By the time the National Labor Relations Board presented the Newspaper Guild with a pyrrhic victory in 1940, the ranks of the 400 original strikers had dwindled to 100 or so...
...Some didn't remember most of the words, but they all joined in the chorus — "for the union makes us strong...
...Curtis MacDougall, a retired professor of journalism, recalled what it was like to be a reporter before there was a Newspaper Guild: "We were working seventy-two hours a week, but when the Guild came in it was reduced to forty hours...
...Theirs was, at that time, the longest white-collar strike ever waged, and it had all the earmarks of the "labor wars" of the period — hired goons, police harassment, and recruitment of scabs by a company union...
...They gave a standing ovation to Harry Wohl, now seventy-five and whitehaired, who had led the strike through those eighteen grueling months...
...They had hit the bricks on December 2, 1938, and made labor history...
...And the veterans talked about the strike as "the best thing that ever happened to me...
...Wineberg, another strike veteran and peace activist, had managed to track down a few dozen of the survivors...
...Henry Sidney Lens, a veteran labor leader and peace activist, is a contributing editor of The Progressive...
...They dimmed the hotel lights and looked at three reels of silent film shot by a striking photographer — union leaders meeting with John L. Lewis, a bank of typists pounding out fund-raising letters, a committee trying to persuade a businessman to withdraw advertising from the struck newspapers, sympathetic dentists and physicians providing free care to strikers, parades on State Street, mass picket lines, Christmas parties, songfests...
...1 didn't know what to do with the extra thirty-two hours...
...Hearst had this wrecking crew," he recalled, "a management team that went from city to city, holed up in fancy hotel suites, and scratched names from the employment roster...
...At the end they sang Solidarity Forever...
...Frank Rotecki, who was twenty-one years old when the strike began and who was launched, like many of the other strikers, into a lifetime of work with cooperatives or peace organizations or labor unions, had conceived the notion of a reunion...
...They fired 130 people at Thanksgiving time, and more before Christmas...
...a chance to meet the most beautiful people I have ever known...
Vol. 43 • February 1979 • No. 2
