“We Used Every Effort to be Impartial”: The Complicated Response of Newspaper Publishers to Unions
Abstract As large employers of labor and owners of businesses that conveyed information about organized labor to a wide audience, publishers were intimately connected to the labor movement during the 1930s and 1940s. Publishers such as William Randolph Hearst were condemned for controlling a press determined to fight unionism. Newspaper owners, however, were business operators, journalists, and community leaders and these broad interests led to the creation of diverse content on organized labor in the nation's newspapers. For some publishers, civic and professional motivations encouraged an effort to remain neutral or to offer balance in reporting and commentary. Other publishers expressed support for unions, if only to claim market share. Regardless of personal views on unions, many publishers showed an honest respect for the line between opinion and news. This article examines the complex response of publishers to the growth of unions in American life.
Political Name Calling
pOLITICAL name calling is as American as the wearing of campaign but1 tons. The 1940 presidential battle was no exception-in the closing days of the campaign the recitation of three names, 'Martin, Barton, and Fish,' became, for the Democrats, the political epithet supreme. But the hurling of verbal or written brickbats is not confined to the period before election day, and this has been especially apparent during the almost continuously controversial days since Franklin D. Roosevelt entered the White House in 1933. During all, or most, of that period, three other names stand out-Johnson, Pegler, and Ickes. General Hugh Johnson has been on both sides of the fence (sometimes simultaneously); Westbrook Pegler, since he graduated from sports authority to political commentator, has been anti-New Deal; Harold L. Ickes, Secretary of the Interior, has been the most outspoken defender of the Roosevelt administration. Pegler and Johnson have worked for the most part through the medium of their syndicated newspaper columns, although the General has been a public speaker on many occasions. Ickes has carried on his part of the running battle chiefly as a speaker. The collection given here of the fighting words of these three prominent public figures does not pretend to be complete. Too many damns have flowed over the words. Pegler himself once referred to the proclivity of certain 'liberals' for 'free and insulting speech.' This, then, is a sampling of the obviously free and undoubtedly insulting speech of Johnson, Pegler, and Ickes, compiled, not from the point of view of the historian or the political scientist, but simply as a case study of how certain representative Americans use their language when they go forth to political battle.l During the first Roosevelt administration, General Johnson's tongue and typewriter battered away at the Republican opposition. Some of the opponents of the New Deal were the scum of intellectual prostitutes; others were academic mercenaries; and Republican thinkers were intellectual
The Nature of Aesthetic Experience
The traditional business of Aesthetics has been the study of the aesthetic experience and activity of mankind, in order to show what it is and how it can be distinguished from other experiences and activities. The assumption commonly made is that we ourselves, like others before us, have had a specifically aesthetic experience in the enjoyment of art or the beauty of nature, or have been engaged in the making of something unquestionably artistic. This basic assumption has been challenged recently by I. A. Richards, who calls aesthetic experience “a phantom.” His view is shared by other contemporary philosophers, who also maintain that there is no appreciable difference between an aesthetic reaction and any other frame of mind, or between artistic behaviour and other forms of creative work. We can certainly appeal to experience for the support of a postulate usually taken for granted and say that most artists, authors, and ordinary people in fact regard their aesthetic experience as something entirely distinct from what they do or feel at other times. Analysis will show whether this common-sense opinion is illusory.