Publishers on Freedom

In the tiered ballroom of Manhattan's Waldorf-Astoria Hotel one night last week, some 3,000 fingers, which are normally on the nation's pulse the rest of the year, were curled amiably around tall glasses. Their 600 owners, members of the American Newspaper Publishers' Association, were in town for their annual convention.

Year after year, baseball magnates gather to barter clubs and players. Year after year, motormakers convene in Manhattan to show their cars. And year after year, when A. N. P. A. members gather, it is equally foreordained that they will spend most of their time talking politics and making a big to-do about the freedom of the U. S. Press. Events of the past twelvemonth had so disturbed the publishers about their freedom that scholarly Arthur Hays Sulzberger of the New York Times found himself distinctly in the minority when he mildly remarked: "Unlike some of you, I am not convinced that the present Administration in Washington has or had designs upon the freedom of the Press or upon any of the other fundamental rights of our citizenry."

The Committee on Freedom of the Press, under the guidance of rampant, liberty-loving Publisher Colonel Robert Rutherford McCormick of the Chicago Tribune, labored long & noisily to bring forth four thundering resolutions:

1) That the A. N. P. A. congratulate the Louisiana publishers who carried their case against their State's punitive newspaper advertising revenue tax to the U. S. Supreme Court, there won a historic victory (TIME, Feb. 24).

2) That the publishers of the Philadelphia Inquirer be felicitated for beating a criminal libel charge brought by Pennsylvania's Attorney General Charles Joseph Margiotti (TIME, March 2).

3) That criminal proceedings be started against Senator Hugo La Fayette Black and his Senate Lobby Investigators for subpoenaing Publisher William Randolph Hearst's telegrams (TIME, March 23), thus violating "the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution by taking the property of citizens without due process of law."

4) That since "officials of the State of Minnesota have long sought to restrain the Press in the performance of its functions" and since "the oppressions of the Press have been characterized by a campaign of violence against editors criticizing improper political-gangster alliances, culminating in the murder of Walter Liggett . . . the Press of this country should resist the attempts of such alliances in Minnesota or any other State to abridge the freedom of the Press."

From Minnesota Governor Floyd Bjornstjerne Olson promptly cracked back: "If Colonel McCormick would devote his efforts to promoting free speech for people who are seeking social justice . . . and stop devoting his talents to the defense of his fellow muckrakers, he would live down his present reputation as a journalistic faker."

In the four days at their disposal, A. N. P. A. conventioneers also:

P:Heard the Special Standing Committee on Labor assure worried members that: "Any strike is futile if it meets determined and courageous publisher resistance."

P: Were told by the Committee on the Newspaper Boy that minimum age standards of 12 years for newspaper vendors would "serve to show the good faith of publishers and to minimize any chances of an opportunity being taken away from American boys."

P: Sympathized with small publishers who said they wanted a better newspicture service.

P: Re-elected President Jerome De Witt Barnum, publisher of the Syracuse, N. Y. Post-Standard.

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