“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.
The Press and Labor News
more important than how the news was handled. This meant that when laboring men went on strike they had two counts against them from the start. The editor swung the weight of his powerful pen against them, and the newspapers as a rule made little or no effort to get the side of the union before the public. In the early eighties the movement for the eight-hour day was ridiculed by the press, and even though some states passed laws limiting working hours to eight, these were nullified by contracts permitting longer hours. The Illinois
Reid on Hypotheses and the Ether; A Reassessment
In recent years historians of science have come to see that Thomas Reid’s Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man had a profound impact on the development of British methodological thought in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Larry Laudan has argued that Reid was “the first major British philosopher to take Newton’s opinions on induction, causality, and hypotheses seriously”; and that Reid was thereby instrumental in changing the character of British methodological discourse in the Enlightenment.(1) Geoffrey Cantor has examined in detail the influence of Reid’s critique of ether theories and hypotheses in the Essays on leading protagonists in the nineteenth-century debates surrounding the wave theory of light,(2) and Richard Olson has traced the origins of the scientific style of British physics in the Victorian period to the writings of Reid and other Common Sense philosophers. (3) As well as delineating Reid’s influence, Laudan, Cantor, and Olson have attempted to identify the problems to which he addressed himself in articulating his methodology, and they have analysed with some care the internal structure of his methodological views. Thanks to the work of these historians, therefore, we have a fairly comprehensive picture of Reid’s methodology and its fortunes in the nineteenth century.