Wynand said quietly:
“When you are. Now get out of here.”
The city room of the Banner walked out on strike.
The Union of Wynand Employees walked out in a body. A great many others, non-members, joined them. The typographical staff remained.
Wynand had never given a thought to the Union. He paid higher wages than any other publisher and no economic demands had ever been made upon him. If his employees wished to amuse themselves by listening to speeches, he saw no reason to worry about it. Dominique had tried to warn him once: “Gail, if people want to organize for wages, hours or practical demands, it’s their proper right. But when there’s no tangible purpose, you’d better watch closely.”
“Darling, how many times do I have to ask you? Keep off the Banner.”
He had never taken the trouble to learn who belonged to the Union. He found now that the membership was small–and crucial; it included all his key men, not the big executives, but the rank below, expertly chosen, the active ones, the small, indispensable spark plugs: the best leg men, the general assignment men, the rewrite men, the assistant editors. He looked up their records: most of them had been hired in the last eight years; recommended by Mr. Toohey.
Non-members walked out for various reasons: some, because they hated Wynand; others, because they were afraid to remain and it seemed easier than to analyze the issue. One man, a timid little fellow, met Wynand in the hall and stopped to shriek: “We’ll be back, sweetheart, and then it’ll be a different tune!” Some left, avoiding the sight of Wynand. Others played safe. “Mr. Wynand, I hate to do it, I hate it like hell, I had nothing to do with that Union, but a strike’s a strike and I can’t permit myself to be a scab.” “Honest, Mr. Wynand, I don’t know who’s right or wrong, I do think Ellsworth pulled a dirty trick and Harding had no business letting him get away with it, but how can one be sure who’s right about anything nowadays? And one thing I won’t do is I won’t picket line. No, sir. The way I feel is, pickets right or wrong.”
The strikers presented two demands: the reinstatement of the four men who had been discharged; a reversal of the Banner’s stand on the Cortlandt case.
Harding, the managing editor, wrote an article explaining his position; it was published in the New Frontiers. “I did ignore Mr. Wynand’s orders in a matter of policy, perhaps an unprecedented action for a managing editor to take. I did so with full realization of the responsibility involved. Mr. Toohey, Alien, Falk and I wished to save the Banner for the sake of its employees, its stockholders and its readers. We wished to bring Mr. Wynand to reason by peaceful means. We hoped he would give in with good grace, once he had seen the Banner committed to the stand shared by most of the press of the country. We knew the arbitrary, unpredictable and unscrupulous character of our employer, but we took the chance, willing to sacrifice ourselves to our professional duty. While we recognize an owner’s right to dictate the policy of his paper on political, sociological or economic issues, we believe that a situation has gone past the limits of decency when an employer expects self-respecting men to espouse the cause of a common criminal. We wish Mr. Wynand to realize that the day of dictatorial one-man rule is past. We must have some say in the running of the place where, we make our living. It is a fight for the freedom of the press.
Mr. Harding was sixty years old, owned an estate on Long Island, and divided his spare time between skeet-shooting and breeding pheasants. His childless wife was a member of the Board of Directors of the Workshop for Social Study; Toohey, its star lecturer, had introduced her to the Workshop. She had written her husband’s article.
The two men off the copy desk were not members of Toohey’s Union. Alien’s daughter was a beautiful young actress who starred in all of Ike’s plays. Falk’s brother was secretary to Lancelot Clokey.
Gail Wynand sat at the desk in his office and looked down at a pile of paper. He had many things to do, but one picture kept coming back to him and he could not get rid of it and the sense of it clung to all his actions–the picture of a ragged boy standing before the desk of an editor: “Can you spell cat?”–“Can you spell anthropomorphology?” The identities cracked and became mixed, it seemed to him that the boy stood here, at his desk, waiting, and once he said aloud: “Go away!” He caught himself in anger, he thought: You’re cracking, you fool, now’s not the time. He did not speak aloud again, but the conversation went on silently while he read, checked and signed papers: “Go away! We have no jobs here.” I’ll hang around. Use me when you want to. You don’t have to pay me.”
“They’re paying you, don’t you understand, you little fool? They’re paying you.” Aloud, his voice normal, he said into a telephone: ‘Tell Manning that we’ll have to fill in with mat stuff….Send up the proofs as soon as you can….Send up a sandwich. Any kind.”
A few had remained With him: the old men and the copy boys. They came in, in the morning, often with cuts on their faces and blood on their collars; one stumbled in, his skull open, and had to be sent away in an ambulance. It was neither courage nor loyalty; it was inertia; they had lived too long with the thought that the world would end if they lost their jobs on the Banner. The old ones did not understand. The young ones did not care.
Copy boys were sent out on reporter’s beats. Most of the stuff they sent in was of such quality that Wynand was forced past despair into howls of laughter: he had never read such highbrow English; he could see the pride of the ambitious youth who was a journalist at last. He did not laugh when the stories appeared in the Banner as written; there were not enough rewrite men.
He tried to hire new men. He offered extravagant salaries. The people he wanted refused to work for him. A few men answered his call, and he wished they hadn’t, though he hired them. They were men who had not been employed by a reputable newspaper for ten years; the kind who would not have been allowed, a month ago, into the lobby of his building. Some of them had to be thrown out in two days; others remained. They were drunk most of the time. Some acted as if they were granting Wynand a favor. “Don’t you get huffy, Gail, old boy,” said one–and was tossed bodily down two flights of stairs. He broke an ankle and sat on the bottom landing, looking up at Wynand with an air of complete astonishment. Others were subtler; they merely stalked about and looked at Wynand slyly, almost winking, implying that they were fellow criminals tied together in a dirty deal.
He appealed to schools of journalism. No one responded. One student body sent him a resolution signed by all its members: “…Entering our careers with a high regard for the dignity of our profession, dedicating ourselves to uphold the honor of the press, we feel that none among us could preserve his self-respect and accept an offer such as yours.”
The news editor had remained at his desk; the city editor had gone. Wynand filled in as city editor, managing editor, wire man, rewrite man, copy boy. He did not leave the building. He slept on a couch in his office–as he had done in the first years of the Banner’s existence. Goalless, tieless, his shirt collar torn open, he ran up and down the stairs, his steps like the rattle of a machine gun. Two elevator boys had remained; the others had vanished, no one knew just when or why, whether prompted by sympathy for the strike, fear or plain discouragement.
Alvah Scarret could not understand Wynand’s calm. The brilliant machine–and that, thought Scarret, was really the word which had always stood for Wynand in his mind–had never functioned better. His words were brief, his orders rapid, his decisions immediate. In the confusion of machines, lead, grease, ink, waste paper, unswept offices, untenanted desks, glass crashing in sudden showers when a brick was hurled from the street below, Wynand moved like a figure in double-exposure, superimposed on his background, out of place and scale. He doesn’t belong here, thought Scarret, because he doesn’t look modern–that’s what it is–he doesn’t look modern, no matter what kind of pants he’s wearing–he looks like something out of a Gothic cathedral. The patrician head, held level, the fleshless face that had shrunk tighter together. The captain of a ship known by all, save the captain, to be sinking.