Louis Stark

Background

Louis was born on May 1, 1888 in Tibold Daracz, Hungary, the son of Adolph Stark and Rose Kohn Stark. Two years later the family immigrated to the United States, where they lived on the Lower East Side of New York City.

Education

He attended the New York Training School for Teachers (1907 - 1908).

Career

Stark turned from teaching to journalism but the New York Times, the goal of his reportorial aspirations, rejected him for lack of experience. He was assigned instead to the newspaper's business office, where he performed clerical and advertising duties from 1909 to 1913. Meanwhile, he kept asking the city editor, Arthur Greaves, for night assignments on minor stories. Greaves encouraged his interest but told him that the Times was too big and busy to serve as a journalism school. He therefore helped Stark obtain a job at the New York City News Association, a local wire service.

Stark worked for City News until 1917, then served for a few months on the staff of the New York Evening Sun before achieving his ambition to become a reporter on the Times. He started with a miscellany of general assignments; but in 1919, when the country was being torn by a rash of strikes in the wake of World War I, he received his first major labor assignment - coverage of the American Federation of Labor's annual convention in Atlantic City.

At that time labor news was not taken seriously by most of the American press. Because violence and radicalism were so much a part of labor's impact on the general community, newspapers tended to assign news of unionism to police reporters. Stark led the transformation of newspaper thinking toward an awareness of labor's overall importance long before the emergence of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal and the meteoric growth of unions in the mass-production industries made that importance readily apparent.

Moreover, his close friendships with labor and management leaders in the 1920's and the trust they had learned to place in him proved invaluable to the Times and its readers in the early New Deal years.

In 1933, immediately after President Roosevelt's inauguration, Stark was transferred from the city room to the Washington Bureau, where he became chief national labor correspondent. On his first day in the new post, Stark obtained a significant scoop: the text of an executive order that the president was about to issue appointing James B. Eastman coordinator of a vast government effort to rehabilitate the railroads, which were carrying heavy debts but little freight.

When other reporters sought confirmation, Roosevelt looked on his desk, said he recalled having seen such an order there the day before, and jokingly suggested that perhaps Stark had taken the president's own copy. Even while the president was jesting with White House correspondents, Stark had come into possession of a bigger exclusive - the presidential plan to establish the National Recovery Administration.

From then on, scarcely a day passed in those historic early months of the Roosevelt administration that a Stark scoop did not inform the country about some new presidential design for stimulating the prostrate economy.

His success quickly convinced the editors of other major papers that they needed full-time labor reporters in Washington. Stark helped to break in dozens of newcomers to the labor beat.

A generation of reporters learned from him, but his own wide acquaintance with newsmakers and his ever-growing esteem gave his stories a comprehensiveness and authority that others could seldom match. The difficulties of reporting objectively on labor news were complicated in 1935 following the split in organized labor, which did not end until a year after Stark's death.

Stark succeeded so well in maintaining impartiality that in 1951, when he left reporting to become a member of the Times editorial board in New York, he received plaudits not only from President Harry S. Truman but also from William Green and Philip Murray, respectively the heads of the AFL and CIO. John L. Lewis, by then isolated from both groups, sent his own effusive congratulatory note.

His final editorial, written just before his death in New York City, was entitled "Trade Union Democracy. "

Achievements

• Louis Stark preeminence was recognized by the award of the 1942 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting. As an editorial writer he applied his comprehension of labor-management affairs to an evaluation of the strengths and weaknesses of collective bargaining and industrial relations. He wrote Labor and the New Deal: Public Affairs Pamphlets, Number 2 (1936). He also wrote for the annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Survey Graphic, The Atlantic Monthly, The Yale Review, The Nation's Business, The Outlook, and Current History. A foundation was established in his memory, to subsidize fellowships for aspiring labor reporters.

Views

Quotations: When asked long afterward for the secret of his access to stories no one else seemed able to get, Stark explained: "I stood on the third floor of the Commerce Department and saw everybody I had known around the country for the last ten years. Everyone stopped to say hello, and nearly everyone had a story for me. "

Personality

A small, bespectacled man, shy in manner and quiet in speech, Stark moved with equal ease among the toughest of longshoremen, truck drivers, and coal miners and the most aloof of corporate executives.

Quotes from others about the person

• Harry S. Truman called Stark the "dean of all reporters on the labor scene. "
  
  A memorial article in the New York Times described Stark as:
  
  "a colleague for whom we had a warm affection, Quiet and unassuming, with a kindly sense of humor, he had a devotion to duty that found him writing a final editorial on the very day of his death, even though he had excused himself from coming to the office. .. .By contributing to full information on the problems of labor, its living conditions, its working conditions, and its aspirations Louis Stark served, by his own efforts, to improve the lot of the working man".

Connections

During his apprenticeship at the press association, Stark married Jennie House, an elementary school teacher, on August 17, 1916; they had one son.

Father:

Adolph Stark

Mother:

Rose Kohn Stark

Spouse:

Jennie House

colleague:

Arthur Greaves

Son:

Arthur Stark