The Butler County press. [volume] (Hamilton, Ohio) 1900-1946, 1942-05-15
FACING
THE -
FACTS
With PHILIP PEARL

a limb the other day and we're going
to chop him down.
He had the colossal gall to say that
labor is bribing newspapermen to
write nice stories about unions!
That is the damndest lie ever pub
lished.
Pegler based his libelous charge on
a paragraph from an article written
by B. L. Stanford, editor of the South
ern Teamster, which was printed
March 27 in the New Orleans Fedora
zionist, labor paper Mr.. Stanford
said that Central Labor Councils in
various parts of the country, in an
effort to get the truth about labor pub
lished in the press, had gone to the
extent "of putting reporters of the
newspapers on their payrolls."
Pegler leaped on this statement with
both feet without taking the trouble
to check it. We did We discovered
that Mr. Stanford referred to the hir-
ing of former newspapermen as pub
licity representatives for central labor
councils. What's wrong with that ?
Union officials are not trained to pre-
pare news announcements for release
to the press, SO they hire experts to
do it, The American Federation of
Labor at its last convention officially
urged all central labor unions to do
this. Unfortunately, not enough Of
them can afford to spend the money.
Labor unions don't have the bankroll
Of private corporations like the Du-
Pont Company which, we are in
formed, has forty-three press agents
on its staff. The United States Gov
ernment has hired thousands of news
papermen for the same purpose.
A Poll of the Press
We took poll of the newspapermen
who cover labor in Washington to find
out whether they had been bribed and.
if so, by whom. The response was in
dignant, as we expected. We asked
them if they had ever been "taken for
a free ride" to national labor conven-
tions and "entertained and likkered
up" by the unions. Well, that stirred
up hornets nest.
In fact, one of the newSpapermen
took occasion to come back at Pegler
with the charge that the self-righteous
columnist has consumed in his time
more free liquor than any other dozen
newspapermen in the entire country
But, most of the newspaper writer's
insulted by Pegler were inclined to
take his scurrilous statements in a
more serious vain. They recalled the
fact that Pegler has consistently
fought organization of newspapermen
into trade unions and that the writer's
covering labor have been active in
this field. They wondered whether
Pegler's attack sprang from sinister
motives.
However, the best answer to Pegler
came from New York. 1t was an
nounced in that city that Louis Stark,
of the New York Times, had been
awarded the Pulitzer prize for distin-
guished telegraphic reporting. And
Louis Stark, as everyone knows, is the
dean of labor reporters in the entire
country, respected by everyone who
has come in contact with him. Lou
knows more about labor than Pegler
knows about whiskey. They are each
experts in their respective fields.
Truth From Lippmann
But now let's drop Pegler and move
on to a more intelligent and literate
columnist. We refer to Walter Lipp-
mann. He wrote piece the other day
that was so cogent and compelling in
its logic that we wish to quote from
it at length. Here goes:
at is all very well for Congressman
or newspaper writer's to say: let US
pass laws forbidding strikes, laws
freezing industrial relations, laws
freezing wages. They do not have to
administer those laws The President
would have to administer them. And
if he can outlaw strikes, if he can pre-
serve order in industrial relations, if
he can stabilize the wage structure,
if he can do all these things with the
active assistance of labor leaders and
labor unions, the ultimate effect will
be infinitely surer and more satisfac-
tory. Let us never forget that you
can lead horse to water but that you
cannot make him drink You can lead
a workingman to his tools but you
cannot make him work with his whole
heart.
obviously we cannot win the war
and have strikes. We cannot win the
war and have endless wrangling about
the closed shop. We cannot win the
war if wages go into a competitive
spiral as employers bid against one
II