The Right to Publish

April 8, 1963

Let us hope that the settlement of the New York newspaper strike will not be followed merely by a sigh of relief but by absorption of its elementary lessons and action to prevent similar calamities.

It has been a strike in which everybody lost. There will be no victors. Let us pass over the incalculable loss to the New York public in being deprived of the daily news for nearly four months; the losses of small newsstand owners, department stores, specialty stores, theaters; the staggering losses of the newspapers themselves, and the losses that their 20,000 employees, including the strikers, can never make up. Let us concentrate on one question: how was it possible for one private citizen, or at best a small handful of men, to do what Congress and the President are expressly forbidden to do in the Constitution—not only to abridge the freedom of the press, but to shut it down entirely for nearly four months?

In the enormous discussion of the New York newspaper strike, the answer to this question was almost never frankly given. Yet that answer is clear. Partly this result was possible because Federal law gravely abridges the bargaining freedom of individual workers and of employers. It is so drawn as in effect to deny them injunctive relief from irreparable injury. The main reason the newspapers stayed closed was the simple fear of their managers that any attempt to publish would lead to violence and bloodshed.

FEAR OF VIOLENCE

It is greatly to be deplored that no one attempted to publish. Even if the fears had proved justified, at least the public would then have recognized clearly that what was keeping the newspapers shut down was the threat of union violence and vandalism, and the inability or unwillingness of the city authorities to protect the workers or the plants.

Those who are tempted to accuse the newspaper owners of timidity and cowardice, however, should seriously consider the risks they faced. Victor Riesel, in a recent syndicated column, gave details from unpublished accounts by Federal investigators of “shootings, slashing of tires, planting of nails on roadways, rubber truncheoning of opponents; beatings, breaking of arms and some really major assaults too numerous to list here.”

Yale & Towne’s Philadelphia plant, in late 1961, courageously and successfully stayed open during a stormy five-and-a-half-month strike, but had to organize its defense with the care of a military operation. To collect evidence it took 2,000 still photographs and 6,000 feet of motion-picture film during the strike. Its operations (I quote from the October issue of Mill & Factory) “included . . . a big magnetic broom to pick up nails thrown by strikers in the main driveway of the plant during the night hours. The broom picked up over a thousand nails in one day.”

THE KOHLER STRIKE

Those who want an illuminating case history, showing how even an “honest” union like the United Automobile Workers operates, should read The Kohler Strike by Prof. Sylvester Petro of the New York University School of Law (Regnery, 1961). There they will find described in detail the techniques of mass obstruction, violence, and vandalism, and how those who try to return to work can be frightened by vicious telephone calls in the night, by acid sprayed on their cars, by paint bombs hurled through their living-room windows.

The remedy? Mainly enforcement of the laws against violence. As Petro writes: “There are plenty of police. If hundreds are used to keep order when it is a question of protecting Communist bullies visiting the United Nations in New York City, it is not asking too much to have adequate police protection against union bullies.” It will help, too, if all picketing in numbers is outlawed. Among other measures Petro suggests: “The special privileges of compulsion granted unions by the NLRA must be repealed, and personal freedom must be restored to workingmen. . . . The duty to bargain must be repealed, for it cannot be enforced without reaching a result which nobody wants: namely, agreements, compelled by governments.”