Terry Pettus and the 1936 Seattle Newspaper Strike: Pivotal Success for the Early American Newspaper Guild

Abstract

The American Newspaper Guild was struggling for life when Tacoma, Washington, journalist Terry Pettus wrote his 1935 letter requesting to join. Once on board, Pettus then successfully recruited journalists throughout the Northwest to the Guild. He launched, then advised the Seattle Newspaper Guild throughout its successful 1936 strike against William Randolph Hearst’s Post-Intelligencer. Archival records show that Pettus’s actions were pivotal to Guild successes, as the Seattle labor victory ushered in a tripling of Guild contracts with publishers nationwide in just a year. When Pettus’s own Tacoma newspaper closed soon thereafter, he was unable to land a new general interest newspaper job, probably because of publisher blacklisting. However, the experience led Pettus toward decades of subsequent political and labor activism in the Northwest.