The '67-68 strike against the News and Free Press was the longest press strike in U.S. history to that point. That record has been shattered by the current dispute.

"I have never known a good newspaperman who was not loyal to his paper. Regardless of his salary, whether high or low, if he is a born newspaperman he is as loyal to his paper as a good Mohammedan is to Allah."

-- Malcolm Bingay, Editorial Director, Detroit Free Press, July 23, 1937

When Malcolm Bingay published these remarks in the mid-1930s, his faith in the loyalty of "good" newspapermen must already have been shaken, for blasphemy was everywhere on the rise, the old virtue in decline. At Bingay's own paper, the traditional disdain for unions so long characteristic of editorial and white collar workers was palpably eroded, leached away by the wage cuts and layoffs that swept over the newspaper industry after 1929.

Good newspapermen were joining the American Newspaper Guild, and in 1937, Local 22 of the Guild won significant concessions and de facto recognition from the publisher of Bingay's paper.

Bingay's passionate jeremiad invoked the horrors that would doubtless result from such backsliding: "The plan of the labor union," he warned, "destroys the spiritual essence of our work lower the level of personal achievement and makes the day's job a thing of factory routine. ...The competition that has been the joy of the job is gone".

Today, Bingay's exaggerated fears seem a little comical - easily dismissed as the hyperbole of the disappointed evangelist. But while ironies abound in his audent pleading, the singular irony is that even as journalists at the Free Press and Detroit Times joined the Detroit Newspaper Guild, their counterparts at the Detroit News remained true to Bingay's faith, then, and for the next 40 years.

During those four decades, the DNG made repeated efforts to organize the News' editorial and commercial workers; until 1974, every organizing drive ended in failure. This paper makes a tentative effort to describe and interpret this 40 year lucuna in the DNG's organizational history.

The paper's first section will examine the Guild's rise in Detroit, focusing on the successful organizing drives at the Free Press and Times; the second section will examine the basis for the Detroit News' successful resistance to this initial upsurge, and specifics of its NLRB victory over the Guild in 1942; the third the section will look at the foundations of the News' continuing success in repelling the Guild between 1945 and 1968; and a brief closing section will tentatively outline the events which finally culminated in the Guild's 1974 NLRB victory at the News.

For the young man (and occasional woman) entering the Detroit newspaper industry before 1929, a journalistic career seemed to offer perpetual romance and adventure: the prospect of participating in late-breaking news, immortalizing the famous, exposing the corrupt, and "scooping" the competition.

The hours were long, weekend work was routine, and entry-level wages were at or below the earnings of the average autoworker; but in general, these drawbacks spawned little more than a characteristic cynicism or heavy drinking, not an interest in unions. Low wages were simply part of the apprenticeship, a rite of passage the industrious reporter would presumably leave behind as he climbed in status and security.

Indeed, the promise of upward mobility seemed occasionally fulfilled in the well-known stories of enterprising young men, many with only a high school diploma, who'd risen through the Unions were for the mechanical trades: the pressmen, typographers, mailers and other craft workers who labored on the lower floors of the News, Times, and Free Press. These men were workers, destined to remain in their "lower" occupations. Journalists were professionals, destined for higher things, and a union contract would only inhibit the more ambitious among them. So it seemed in the 1920s, when new papers still could be formed - the Detroit Daily, for example, in 1929- and when nearly half the cities in the United States had at least one daily paper, if not more. Opportunities seemed unbounded. As with so many other Americans, the economic collapse of 1929 forced a rude awakening upon Detroit's journalists. Both the Detroit Daily and the Detroit Mirror closed, the latter without warning and with only one week's severance pay for its stunned employees.

Steep wage cuts and layoffs were inaugurated at the Free Press almost immediately, At the Times, owner William Randolph Hearst initially maintained wage levels, but as the crisis deepened, editorial salaries were cut three times in the space of nine months, reducing average earnings between 30 and 40 percent.

The axe didn't fall at the News until 1932, when a dozen reporters "walked the plank" on what became known as Black Friday. Among the laid off were "men of 10 or 16 years service, conscientious, able workers whose loyalty was unquestioned". Wage cuts averaging 25% soon followed. For surviving workers at the News, "security walked out the door with those men and fear walked in".

For every reporter, this succession of bankruptcies, layoffs, and wage cuts decisively altered career expectations. The future, far from seeming like the upward plane of the 1920s, now tilted downward, with a long slide into professional oblivion and financial ruin a possible outcome for many. While some reporters redoubled their efforts at individual salvation, others began looking for a collective means of protecting themselves.

For these men and women, the craft unions now took on a very different appearance, for it was widely recognized (even by management) that the union contracts in the mechanical departments had protected blue-collar workers from wholesale wage cuts and layoffs.

At the Times, editorial workers earning between $15 and $40 a week in 1934 discovered that unionized stereotypers and pressmen were still making between $41 and $52 a week, At the News, editorial workers who "didn't know what our income would be the next pay day", began to recognize that some News employees apparently had a firmer grasp on the future: "They were the men who worked in the organized departments. They had to take cuts when the depression came, but the cuts were the result of negotiation. They knew what was coming, they had a say in it, and they had time to prepare".

On the last day of 1933, 78 Detroit reporters set out to win some comparable form of protection by forming the Newspaper Guild of Detroit. Like similar groups of journalists meeting around the country, the founding members of the Detroit Guild were encouraged by the pro-labor planks of the National Industrial Recovery Act, particularly Section 7a; the highly publicized NIRA code-hearings for the newspaper industry in the fall of 1933 served as an added stimulus. But the aims of these early Guild members, in Detroit as well as nationally, remained ill-defined and tenuous.

Some others, probably the majority, favored organization along union lines. Preferred something more professional demeanor - a club, perhaps, or an organization like the AMA. The very choice of name - the Guild, suggests how reluctant these pioneer members were to identify themselves with the "non-professionals" in the craft unions, The Guild, in contrast, wasn't for just anybody: James Sweinhart, selected local President at the first meeting, announced he would accept the position only if the members agreed to pay a staggering initiation fee: 20% of one week's pay per month for three months. As a close friend of Henry Ford and a 17-year veteran at the News, Sweinhart could apparently afford this draconian levy; so, apparently, could the majority of founding members who voted to accept Sweinhart's terms.

Guild committees were immediately formed at all three Detroit dailies, but for a combination of reasons, organization proceeded fastest and furthest at the Times.

Wages at the Times had plunged from the highest in the Detroit industry to the lowest, and management was hamstrung in its efforts to head off the Guild by Hearst's centralized control over salaries.

Merit raises in particular were strictly forbidden in the Hearst chain, effectively denying management the use of selective raises to buy loyalty and divide the editorial staff. In its place, Times management devised a complicated schedule of permanent overtime, a stop-gap measure which led "to some of the weirdest pay arrangements you've ever heard of". The resulting confusion must have contributed to the bitterness of Times reporters, whose collective labors had helped push the paper's circulation past the News in the spring of 1934, making it number one in the city. On April 4, 1934, Guild members at the Times drafted a telegram to Hearst.

Acknowledging his "40-year pre-eminence among publishers for raising the wage standards of editorial workers", the Times Guildsmen drew Hearst's attention to the paper's climbing circulation and unrestored wage cuts, asking only that he "acknowledge receipt of this communication and give us your earnest consideration".

Whether Hearst immediately acknowledged this polite communication is unclear. There's little doubt, however, that by mid-1934, Hearst was in no mood to give the Guild or any other union his "earnest consideration". Like most employers, Hearst was thoroughly alarmed by the labor upheaval of 1934, particularly the General Strikes in San Francisco and Minneapolis.

Hearst quickly backed away from his earlier support of the New Deal, characterizing the NRA as "absolute state socialism", and openly endorsing Hitler's anticommunist crusade in Germany. "This is the great policy, the great achievement", Hearst remarked after visiting the Fuhrer in September, "which makes the Hitler regime popular with the German people". The National Recovery Administration, in turn, was unable and unwilling to move Hearst or any other publisher towards real collective bargaining.

When Hearst and the Scripps-Howard chain both refused to participate in the government's 1934 survey of editorial salaries, the NRA simply let the matter drop.

When Hearst fired the head of the Guild chapter at the San Francisco Examiner on April 4 (the same day Detroit's Guildsmen wired San Simeon), the NRA also deferred action, eventually turning this and all other cases over to the powerless Newspaper Industrial Board.

With little or no backing from the NRA, the Guild could neither force publishers to bargain, nor adequately protect its members from harassment and possible dismissal. Guild membership began a two year decline in Detroit as Hearst's stonewalling and retaliation created "a feeling of helplessness" among members of the local's strongest unit.

Demoralization was compounded by continuing confusion over the Guild's nature and goals: was it a professional organization, committed to improving journalistic standards and open to all "newspapermen"?; or was it a union, committed to collective bargaining and open only to non-managerial employees? Many Guildsmen seemed to opt for the first answer. When the Times unit for example, prepared to petition Hearst in 1934, 10 of the members whose salaries were surveyed were department heads.

Two years later, a managing editor could not only still join the organization, but could win election as Treasurer of the Guild's Lansing chapter. With the Guild's ill-defined ranks open to middle-level management, conflict over the organization's goals was inevitable and, not surprisingly, was provoked in at least one case by the Lansing chapter's threat to secede if the Guild Reporter didn't cease it's "distasteful" pro-union propaganda.

Local 22 President Ralph Holmes, who favored cooperation with organized labor, nevertheless opposed affiliation with the AFL in 1935 for fear it would drive away the Guild's remaining members. While he was outvoted on this score by a chapter-wide vote of 29 to 7, the small turnout suggests how little confidence Detroit's journalists had in the moribund and ineffectual AFL. By 1936 the Guild had no organized presence in either the Times or the News; only a small chapter at the Free Press and scattered units in Detroit's weekly papers had survived the earlier disappointments. Even so, the elements of Local 22's eventual success were rapidly falling into place as the year wore on.

The decline in membership over the previous months had left a small core of dedicated, pro-union activists. Most were apparently young, low-seniority reporters whose adult expectations had been shaped by the depression, not the boom years of the 1920s. William Fanning and Poland Goodmen both had less than two years experience on the Free Press when they represented the Guild in its first meeting with the pteus' publisher in November of 193.

Of the 66 members in the Free Press unit they represented, only 10 were considered "oldtiPr" nmnng the 56 younger members were men like Edward Edstrom, 24 years old, unmarried, a student for two years at Wayne State before joining the Free Press in 1935; Fred Carter, 23, unmarried, a student for two years at the University of Chicago before joining the Free Press in 1934; John Cummings, also 23 and unmarried, a graduate of the a University of Detroit and a Free Press reporter since 1935; and Milt Plumb, 22, unmarried, holder of an MA in literature and philosophy from the University of Chicago when he became a Police reporter for the paper in the mid-1930s. Several of these younger members began as copy boys at the Free Press, but none of them had worked in the industry long enough to acquire the deferential habits of some of their senior co-workers. Their liberal arts background, while potentially the source of a different sort of elitism, also made them less dependent on newspaper work than the many older reporters who had entered the trade with no more than a high school diploma.

The political orientation of these new members is hard to determine, but the presence on the Guild's Executive Board of George Morris, a member of the Communist Party and a correspondent for the Daily Worker, suggests that the Guild's leadership, at least, had by late 1936 swung to the left.

Most rank and file members probably weren't members of left groups, but the majority were to varying degrees committed to the labor movement, Plumb, for example, notified the Guild after he was laid off in 1937 that his interest "in serving the labor movement is such that I am willing, even anxious, to go anywhere...to help labor" - a sentiment that would have seemed entirely foreign in 1933 to founding members like James Sweinhart.

The enthusiasm and determination of these young recruits was reinforced in 1936 by a succession of economic, political, and trade-union events, all of which confirmed the impression that "organization on a live basis" would finally bring newspapermen into the union.

Business conditions had visibly improved during the year, an upturn marked by the steady increase in newspaper ad lineage, and by the Statler Hotel's decision to collect rent from the Guild for meeting space it had previously donated, In October, the NLRB declared the Guild the exclusive bargaining agent at the Associated Press, and ordered the premiere wire service to rescind its firing of Morris Watson, the union's International Vice President.

At the same meeting where Detroit Guild members learned of this heartening legal victory, at least one speaker also made reference to the "healthy growth" in Detroit's labor movement; "the case of Akron's rise to strength" was cited as further evidence that labor in general was on the rise. Less than a month later, "Morris urged that the time was ripe for real organizing now that Roosevelt was in, The Guild will be able to ride on the wave". Two weeks following, Robert Ferry, Holmes' successor as Local 22 President, "enlightened the (Free Press Unit) on the more favorable set up of the Michigan government agencies toward labor", a direct result of Frank Murphy's election as Governor.