Thunder, Left & Right

When the late-Heywood Broun whipped up the American Newspaper Guild in 1933, he put in a generous helping of yeast. As the Guild, a C.I.O. affiliate since 1937, grew big and 25,000-strong, its members turned out to be such passionate unionists that many a local meeting developed into a battle royal that lasted half the night. Few hairs remained unsplit, whether the issue was politics or personalities. Last week it was both.

Personalities. At the International Executive Board meeting in Chicago's Stevens Hotel, members were divided into two implacable factions. At the center of the controversy was the Guild's tall, dark and garrulous president, Milton Meadowcroft Murray.

Murray, 42, an ex-Detroit reporter of Scotch-Irish-English-Dutch descent, was swept into his unpaid office in 1941 on a clean-out-the-Reds ticket. During the war, when few unions changed their leadership, there were only muffled rumblings of dissent, chiefly from left-wingers. But this year, with Murray coming up for renomination or rejection in June, volley and thunder have come at him from right as well as left.

Many who formerly favored Murray as a good symbol had found him a bad president. They accused him of inefficiency (in six months as a $125-a-week organizer for the Washington local,' they said, he had recruited only two new members) and opportunism (he has twice campaigned to make his job a salaried one).

With only two of the 13 Executive Board members still solidly behind him, it looked as if Milt Murray were well on the way out. The opposition was lining up behind closemouthed, stubborn Sam Eubanks, the Guild's executive vice president who was elected on the Murray Red-hating ticket, but fell out with Murray on administrative matters and now seldom speaks to him.

Politics. In February, Murray said in an Editor & Publisher interview that he was "leaning toward the proposition that no Communist should be allowed to be a member of the Guild." Next month he appeared voluntarily before the House labor committee, testified that two Guild officers (John Ryan, New York executive vice president, and William Brodie, Los Angeles executive secretary) were Communists, and that the New York and Los Angeles locals were "probably" Communist-dominated.

The Editor & Publisher statement flew in the face of the Guild constitution, which protects newsmen from being barred from Guild membership "by reasons of sex, race, or religious or political convictions." The Congress statement made a lot of good Guildsmen think that talkative Milt Murray was talking out of turn. It brought angry denials from Los Angeles and New York, and rebukes from five other strong locals. Said the Executive Board of the St. Louis local: "... A deliberate and calculated campaign to undermine the responsible position which the Guild now occupies."

At week's end the International Executive Board adopted, by a 10-to-3 vote, a resolution deploring Murray's "intemperate statements . . . which create the impression that a Communist emergency exists in the Guild." This did not mean that Eubanks & Co. denied Communist influence in certain locals. It did mean that they thought the Guild could handle the Communists--without Murray's help.

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