The War on Labor’s Press
A fiery editorial calls out C.W. Post for his attempts to silence organized labor by pressuring publishers to refuse their advertising.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
C.W. Post of Battle Creek is going to have labor organizations put out of business by having editors deny them space. In a letter to the Editor and Publisher, he has expressed amusement at the ease with which the 'labor trust' fools the editors and publishers of the country by getting free advertising without paying for it, while capitalists have to come over with cold cash. Post is conducting what he is pleased to call a newspaper that will not print truthful items about labor people except as advertising matter. He calls on the press to follow his example. It never occurs to him that the newspapers print what Gompers and other labor men have to say because they are recognized as men of affairs in their spheres. Post displays his ignorance of the labor movement when he suggests a conspiracy of silence as a means of destroying it. Up to the middle eighties, the press not only refused to print news of trade unions, but went so far as to deny that there was a 'labor question.' There was, however, and it grew until now even capitalists like Post cannot deny the existence of labor issues. Meantime, an aroused sense of decency and a love of humanity will yet make the publishers refuse Post’s money when he offers it to pay for one of his ridiculous creeds.
“It never occurs to him that the newspapers print what Gompers and other labor men have to say because they are recognized as men of affairs.”
This editorial exposes the tension between industrial capital and the labor press, foreshadowing modern debates over media consolidation and the silencing of union voices in corporate-owned outlets. C.W. Post, founder of the Postum Cereal Company, was a notorious union-buster whose 'conspiracy of silence' approach prefigures today's algorithmic suppression of labor-aligned news.
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