NOBODY HAD MUCH respect for The Labor Leader. Even Finkel and Kramm, its owners, the two sour brothers-in-law who’d dreamed it up in the first place and who somehow managed to make a profit on it year after year—even they could take little pride in the thing. At least, that’s what I used to suspect from the way they’d hump grudgingly around the office, shivering the bile-green partitions with their thumps and shouts, grabbing and tearing at galley proofs, breaking pencil points, dropping wet cigar butts on the floor and slamming telephones contemptuously into their cradles. The Labor Leader was all either of them would ever have for a life’s work, and they seemed to hate it.

You couldn’t blame them: the thing was a monster. In format it was a fat biweekly tabloid, badly printed, that spilled easily out of your hands and was very hard to put together again in the right order; in policy it called itself “An Independent Newspaper Pledged to the Spirit of the Trade Union Movement,” but its real pitch was to be a kind of trade journal for union officials, who subscribed to it out of union funds and who must surely have been inclined to tolerate, rather than to want or need, whatever thin sustenance it gave to them. The Leader’s coverage of national events “from the labor angle” was certain to be stale, likely to be muddled, and often opaque with typographical errors; most of its dense columns were filled with flattering reports on the doings of the unions whose leaders were on the subscription list, often to the exclusion of much bigger news about those whose leaders weren’t. And every issue carried scores of simpleminded ads urging “Harmony” in the names of various small industrial firms that Finkel and Kramm had been able to beg or browbeat into buying space—a compromise that would almost certainly have hobbled a real labor paper but that didn’t, typically enough, seem to cramp the Leader’s style at all.