Word: stahlman
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Threatening their grail, they all knew without crusading Jimmy Stahlman telling them, was the American Newspaper Guild, freshly allied with C.I.O. In its annual convention in St. Louis last month, the Guild had nailed to its new platform a plank demanding a "Guild shop" (TIME, June 21). That meant that although an employer could still hire whatever news or editorial worker he wished, the Guild would insist that the worker join the Guild within 30 days thereafter. Anyone refusing to join should be summarily dismissed. To Guildsmen such a ukase was more than a shade removed from the closed shop...
...other publishing executives great and small from up & down the land converged in Chicago last week for a one-day emergency convention. It would be, they had been told, a "most important meeting" (TIME, June 28). At the rallying cry of Nashville's young James Geddes ("Jimmy") Stahlman, busy-bustling new president of the American Newspaper Publishers Association, they had come to defend their profession's holy grail, the Freedom of the Press...
...with the finest jewels of U. S. newspaperdom, was more like a resolutions committee-of-the-whole than like a convention. No one was elected to anything. No one was even nominated. After he had delivered himself of a 1,500-word oration on Freedom of the Press, President Stahlman, whose wit is as nimble as his sarcasm, settled down in the speaker's chair to conduct the meeting with good-natured flippancy, cutting short the long-winded, moving things along at a swift pace. Only real business at hand was the wording of an anti-Guild resolution...
Promising that the conclave would be "one of the most important, if not the most generally attended of all newspaper conventions in the history of the country," and italicizing the fact that it would be limited to "executives from the home office," Publisher Stahlman & friends summed up their clarion call thus: "[The closed shop] is a most serious threat to a free press, and consequently to the liberties of a free people. Many publishers throughout the country have already expressed the feeling that the newspapers should stand together against this common danger. . . . We cannot urge you too strongly to attend...
...spokesman as well as originator of the convention, the Banner's Stahlman explained that "collective bargaining is not an issue"; nor would the meeting "consider any interference with nor violation of the letter or the spirit of the Wagner Act." At week's end, however, as acceptances indicated at least 1,000 publishers or their home-office representatives would attend, the Guild in its Reporter solemnly recognized the publishers' threat: "It voices a challenge to the Guild on one of the most fundamental of the new requirements for contracts laid down at St. Louis, the Guild shop...