Media Capital: Architecture and Communications in New York City

5. Postwar News

= five Postwar News This merger represents for each of us a break with a long tradition. It represents a new direction for our individual publishing interests with all the attendant hardships. —William Randolph Hearst Jr., Jack R. Howard, and John Hay Whitney, “Text of Statement on Papers’ Merger,” New York Times, March 22, 1966 By 1945, New Yorkers were getting used to taking their papers with doublebarreled names—the World-Telegram, JournalAmerican, and HeraldTribune— but they were soon to have difficulty taking them at all. Unlike the two more famous New York newspaper strikes of December 1958 and December 1962 to March 1963, the 1945 strike did not hit during the holiday season, a blessing perhaps to advertisers, but no gift to families waiting to read about Times Square postcard, ca. 1920. (Author’s collection) Wallace_Media text.indd 117 8/24/12 2:49 PM returning soldiers.The major papers—the New York Times, New York Herald Tribune, New York World-Telegram, New York Journal American, Wall Street Journal, New York Sun, New York Post, Daily News, New York Daily Mirror, and Brooklyn Daily Eagle—along with the Brooklyn Citizen, the Long Island Daily Star-Journal and Bronx Home News, all belonged to the Publishers Association of New York City and their deliverers to the News Mailers and Deliverers Union (NMDU), who put their deliverers in a strike position as of 12:01 a.m. Sunday, July 1, 1945. In anticipation of a strike many drivers failed to show up to work on Saturday, and knowing that the papers would likely not be delivered, the usually large Sunday print runs of these papers were cut back dramatically.1 A simultaneous International Typographers Union strike in Jersey City and Bayonne, New Jersey, made the dearth of newspapers a regional, rather than simply a municipal, epidemic. The summer of 1945 saw an estimated 425 strikes taking place in the United States. The Chicago Tribune reported that the high volume of activity was attributable to the war’s end; that “victory in Europe, with its seed in union rivalry, unsettled grievances in war plants, and a reawakening struggle for local union leadership” made for unusually high levels of labor unrest.2 Having won important concessions in some industries and not others, the increasingly powerful trade associations the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) sought to improve working conditions across a wide variety of industries. Newspaper plants, unlike many others, did not have to be retrofitted back to domestic production from munitions making, and the basic technology had changed little during the 1940s—but working conditions were similar to those in other production facilities: “heavy, dirty, physical work, requiring real muscle power and athletic limberness” as Richard Kluger wrote.3 Newsprint rations, which took effect in 1943, may have lessened the load of each individual paper, but did nothing to lighten the burden for the deliverers . Bundles continued to roll off the presses, and the demand for war news kept readers and news dealers anxious for timely deliveries.The hours were long, and the pay was minimal. Vacations were unpaid, and there were no medical benefits nor retirement fund. Despite the production schedule that demanded around-the-clock work, the graveyard shift was not compensated any differently than the day shift. Newspapers were uniquely vulnerable to any form of work stoppage because news cannot be printed in advance in anticipation of a strike, and missed days can never be made up for later. The 1945 strike caused major urban papers to scale back their advertis118 / chapter five Wallace_Media text.indd 118 8/24/12 2:49 PM ing as a result of vastly diminished circulation. The Herald Tribune printed only items of public notice, including death notices, and the Brooklyn Eagle dropped all of its ads except at the insistence of advertisers.4 The New York Post and the Bronx Home News, who shared owners, stopped publishing altogether on the second day of the strike.5 Advertisers, including the newspapers themselves, began buying air time on local radio stations, for which the stations demanded premium rates.Those who turned to television, still an infant medium, did not venture far into the live-motion capabilities of moving pictures with sound; many simply held up the newspaper ads in front of the camera. On a screen a fraction of the size of a modern television screen, the visual...