Intermezzo: Fighting for Writers' Rights

WIW, the American Writers Congress, and the National Writers Union

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Washington Independent Writers

     On March 10, 1980, I received a letter from Senator Howard M. Metzenbaum (D-Ohio), the chairman of the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust, Monopoly and Business Rights, asking me to testify before his panel, along with a handful of other authors—including Barbara Tuchman and E.L. Doctorow—and publishing executives, at a one‑day hearing about corporate concentrations in the publishing industry.  What sparked Metzenbaum's interest in my statement was the June 29, 1978, article by Herbert Mitgang in the New York Times about Simon & Schuster's brazen attempt to sabotage and suppress my 1978 book, The Hoffa Wars.

     After receiving the senator's letter, I spoke with my “big sister,” Barbara Raskin, who then worked for Sam Brown, the director of ACTION.  Raskin—the author of three books at that time and the devoted mother of three children, including future U.S. Representative Jamie Raskin—was a founder and a former president of Washington Independent Writers, an organization I had joined the previous July.  A strong advocate of writers’ rights issues, Raskin encouraged me to accept Senator Metzenbaum's invitation and to provide testimony to the subcommittee—even though I risked alienating potential publishers of books I hoped to write in the future.

     On Thursday, March 13, accompanied by Barbara, I appeared before the senate panel.^[1]  During my testimony, I ran the committee through my battles prior to switching publishers from the New Republic to Paddington Press after Simon & Schuster had refused to distribute my book. 

     Before answering questions, I concluded my prepared remarks, saying:

     As a member of Washington Independent Writers, I am concerned for others who have been, are now, or will in the future [be] confronted with a similar dilemma—without agents and attorneys, like mine, who are willing to gamble on the future of equally unknown freelance writers. . . .

     As Herbert Mitgang wrote in his June 29 article, each such case is an example "of [a] possible loss of independence—with implicit censorship—where there is conflict on a controversial nonfiction book."

     Naively or not, I walked away from this experience absolutely convinced that only by remaining free and independent could I become the crime reporter and author I always wanted to be, unencumbered by the politics and conflicts of interest inherent with the Big Media.  However, I also realized that by following this course, I would open myself up to professional isolation and a complete lack of institutional protection, as well as a harrowing feast‑and‑famine existence—just as Mrs. Nolte, my writing coach, had warned in her last letter.

     From the outset of this realization, I knew that I had to learn how to parlay moments of success into a strategy for long‑term survival—while attempting to discover sources of strength and even joy during those moments of inevitable failure that were sure to arise during my writing career.

     Also, I sought to discover how other independent writers handled similar situations in their own lives, wondering if there was any common ground upon which we could help each other.

     The week after my appearance before the Senate subcommittee, Barbara Raskin asked me to accompany her and author Kitty Kelley, who had recently published a best-selling book about Jackie Kennedy Onassis, to a meeting of the board of directors of the Washington Independent Writers (WIW). 

     The previous Christmas Eve, Kitty and I had been featured together in a story written by reporter Rudy Maxa and published in the Washington Post Magazine, entitled, “Be An Author, Make Enemies.”  Soon after, I became involved in the writers' rights movement, accepting a vacant seat on the WIW board, which Kitty gave up for me.

     Just as independent truckers viewed their own profession, many authors believed that the term, "independent writer," was more of a hope than a reality. That belief was supported in the spring of 1981 by the results of an Authors Guild poll, which revealed that the median writing income of its members was less than $5,000 a year.  In other words, a writer who didn't make enough money probably couldn't remain independent for very long, especially if he or she had family responsibilities.

     No one needed a crystal ball to understand that corporate concentrations in the publishing industry, among other institutional problems, would continue to hurt those who wrote and published for a living.  Also, problems with uncooperative publishers and editors, as well as uncommitted memberships and officers, were monumental obstacles for most writers' groups.  Confronting all these problems without large sums of independent money had caused many of these organizations to fade or disband between crises. 

     Sometimes the old faces returned, but personal, professional, and financial problems usually took their toll.  The latest crop of writers' leaders were usually those, like me, who had been most recently abused by the publishing industry and would, sometimes, organize for motives other than a real commitment to writers’ rights issues.

     A major problem for each wave of writers' organizations was a lack of continuity from one to the next.  There didn't seem to be any way to learn from the mistakes of earlier groups or parallel organizations.  Group after group—with different names and acronyms—searched for their own unique identities, throwing away yesterday's rulebook and writing their own.

     By May 1981, after nearly a year on the WIW board of directors, I had become extremely pessimistic about the direction of the publishing industry, as well as the writers' rights movement.  Still, even though I had delivered a gloomy keynote speech about the state of the writing profession at the second annual WIW Spring Writers Conference in May, I was elected president of WIW the following month.

     In a written statement to the membership during my campaign, I explained that I wanted to fight for writers' rights while building coalitions with other local and national writers' organizations.

     Also, I proposed a "feasibility study" for a Washington writers' union, similar to the Writers Guilds in Los Angeles and New York.  That idea was extremely controversial—especially among some independent writers who did not want a union or anyone else speaking for them, as well as among those who did not write for a living and wanted organizations, like WIW, to remain small cliques of hobby writers who only wrote occasionally for profit.

     Although I stood firmly against "politicizing" WIW outside the arena of writers' rights, I knew that the interests of politicians and writers would occasionally clash, forcing us to become more political—as in the anticipated fight with the Reagan Administration, which had already announced its intention to water down the Freedom of Information Act.

     To me, politicizing the association meant taking stands on issues like abortion or the then-current war in El Salvador.  Regardless of my personal positions on these matters, I did not think that WIW, which had a remarkably conservative membership, had any business getting involved in them.  Many of us wanted to help to unite writers, not look for wedge issues to divide them.

The American Writers Congress and the National Writers Union

DEM at the American Writers Congress (AWC Collection)

    Soon after my election, the Nation Institute, the public‑interest arm of The Nation magazine, announced that it would sponsor the American Writers Congress, the first such conclave of writers in forty years, scheduled for October 9‑12 at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York.

     During a local organizing meeting in Washington, author E. Ethelbert Miller, the head of the Ascension Poetry Reading Series at Howard University, and I were selected to co‑chair the Washington delegation to the Congress—where many hoped that the first national writers' union would be created.

     On September 11, 1981, Ethelbert and I took the train to New York for a meeting about the American Writers Congress, scheduled for the following day at the New School for Social Research, across the street from The Nation.  Hosting the meeting were members of the Congress's steering committee, mostly staffers at the Nation Institute. 

     The editor of The Nation, Victor Navasky, also attended, along with a couple of dozen writers from around the country, representing a variety of writers' organizations.

     In a written statement, the New York Media Alliance, promoting the immediate establishment of a writers' union, stated:

     A national writers union would bargain collectively with publishers, editors, and other employers for the rights of writers.  It would establish and enforce standards and practices pertaining to such issues as:  wages and fees, payment schedules, kill fees, advances, editorial accountability to writers, indemnity and warranty clauses, copyrights, royalties, and subsidiary rights.  It would represent writers in grievances against employers.  It would supply standard contracts for book and magazine writers.

     As a large organization, the union would be able to gain medical, legal and other benefits for members.  It would act as a lobbying organization to advance the rights of writers and to oppose laws that discriminate against us.  It would fight censorship.

     Even though I fully supported a feasibility study for the eventual creation of a writers' union—which, while running for WIW president, was a major plank on the platform I had won on—I wanted to know more about this particular effort by the Media Alliance.

     In my own written statement—fully aware that I was responsible to WIW's conservative board and membership—I posed several questions to the organizers of the proposed union, based upon my knowledge of the problems that the independent truckers had experienced with their own collective bargaining efforts:  How would the issue of unionizing independent contractors be addressed?  Would there be local affiliations?  If so, how much power would the national union have over its locals?  How would the national board be elected?  What would be the dues structure?  Would dues be paid to both the national union and to its locals?  And, generally speaking, would there be bottom‑up union democracy or a top‑down autocracy?

     None of these questions were even addressed in the union organizers' written statement.

     Pushing my own agenda, I concluded in my prepared statement:

     I believe that a strong and militant—but loosely organized—national alliance of writers' organizations is presently needed. . . . [A]n activist national board, broadly‑based in its national representation, could help defend individual writers and publicize their problems.  Money which would be used fighting the National Labor Relations Board under the union scenario would be better spent if poured into legal and education funds with non‑profit, non‑partisan tax status.  Each dollar spent would be a contribution toward the critical issues writers are facing in these very conservative, very dangerous times.

     In other words, short‑sighted or not, I wanted a radicalized version of a WIW‑like trade association operating on the national level.  And I was not alone in this belief.  During the meeting, Doug Ireland of the Village Voice, a key member of the Congress's steering committee and a union supporter, also advocated “a fighting writers' organization," a National Rifle Association for writers.

     The pro‑union people did not disagree with our ideas.  In fact, most of them supported a national trade association of writers' organizations.  However, they also strongly believed that the time had come for the creation of a national writers' union, concentrating on organizing individual writers, which would be launched at the American Writers Congress in October.

     By the end of the meeting, Ethelbert and I couldn't have been more impressed with The Nation crowd, who were also heavily promoting the idea of the National Writers Union.  Even though they represented "management," we were convinced that they were essentially telling the Congress's participants, "Okay, the American Writers Congress is yours.  Take it wherever you want.  And we'll help you in any way we can."

     Because of this remarkable gift from The Nation, the 1981 American Writers Congress was a smash hit.  Nearly 3,500 writers—an anthology of novelists, poets, investigative journalists, short story writers, technical writers, and small press operators, among many others—attended four days of meetings, hearings, panels, workshops, and roundtable discussions while learning about each other and finding some common ground.

     "We don't need any more writers as solitary heroes," author Toni Morrison declared during her keynote address to the Congress.  "We need a heroic writers' movement—assertive, militant, [and] pugnacious."

     The Congress's action‑packed, five‑hour plenary session—along with supporting the writers' union and my proposed association of writers' organizations—considered and passed resolutions on numerous issues facing writers, as well as a variety of programs dealing with writers/consumers' services, alternative channels for publishing, review and distribution of books, publishing contracts, paperback rights, book burnings, and censorship, among others.

     In my subsequent report to the WIW membership, I wrote:

     If those of us who attended the Congress learned nothing else from our conversations with writers from San Francisco to New York and Minneapolis to Houston, we learned that all of us are essentially facing the same problems.  Thus, the defense of a writer or a writers' rights issue in St. Louis will eventually translate into a defense of all writers nationwide.

     In the midst of the weekend Congress, I had also developed a healthy appreciation and respect for the organizers of the new national writers' union, whom I had the opportunity to meet and speak with.  All of my questions about the union's structure and organization still weren't answered, but I recognized that the people behind the evolving union movement were making sincere attempts to make the union as broadly based as possible.

     Yet, although I was listed in a promotional pamphlet among dozens of supporters of the new National Writers Union, I still felt that I had no choice but to temper my new enthusiasm as I tried to walk the tightrope between the union's local organizers in Washington, who were trusted friends of mine—especially writers Barbara Raskin, Ethelbert Miller, Jeff Stein, and John Dinges—and the anti‑union members of WIW's board and membership to whom I was accountable as WIW president.

     Consequently, in the wake of the Congress, I felt that I had been placed in a political vise.  But I sensed that, in the end, the inevitable conflict between the new writers' union and the established WIW trade association would be good for everyone who wrote for a living—even though I was probably going to get crushed in the process.

     Almost on cue, after the American Writers Congress and the creation of the National Writers Union, WIW board meetings at the National Press Club became incredibly contentious and notorious.  Writers from New York and as far away as San Francisco came to witness the verbal slugfests between and among those members of the board who wanted WIW to become a national leader in the fight for writers' rights and those who wanted WIW to remain a benign local writers' club. 

     With few exceptions, everyone on the board, including me, showed up for every meeting loaded for bear.  The carnage was absolutely breathtaking for onlookers who had the stomach to stay and watch.  They had ringside seats to a bare‑knuckled brawl for the heart and soul of the organization.

     In the midst of all this combat, conservative board members made an issue of my association with the left-wing Institute for Policy Studies and claimed that I was attempting to turn our trade association into a union.  That was nonsense, but, unfortunately for me, a lot of people believed it.

     Towards the end of my term, after losing my slight majority on the board, I sensed that I was finished as WIW president, announcing that I would not seek reelection.  I then threw my support behind the association's former executive director, WIW vice president Judith Saks, a gentle but committed woman who would have made a wonderful president.  However, soon after, Saks, who had just given birth to her first child, declined to run, deciding instead to concentrate on her family and career.

     Later, after the positive public reaction to my May 4 testimony in support of the Freedom of Information Act—along with those of Coretta Scott King, authors Seymour Hersh and Kurt Vonnegut, and citizen‑activists Joan Claybrook and Lois Gibbs—before a joint hearing of senators and congressmen on Capitol Hill, I changed my mind and decided to run again, touting a long list of accomplishments.  No previous WIW president had ever sought—or wanted—a second term for this volunteer job.

     In my prepared statement, announcing my bid for reelection, I wrote:

     WIW is now the largest and most respected local organization of free‑lance writers in the United States.  Because of our size and our strength—as well as our location—we have a responsibility to provide our membership with more than just workshops, newsletters, and health insurance.  We should be something more than just a clearinghouse for information.  No doubt, these services are important—in fact, they're the backbone of our organization.  But we now have the responsibility to stand with other writers' groups at the forefront of this battle, and to defend and protect writers from the abuses which we are starting to read and hear about daily.

     Also, I made a pledge to keep WIW, the trade association, and the WIW Legal and Education Fund, our 501(c)(3) group, autonomous.  However, I added that I wanted to explore the possibility of inviting the local writers' union to become a third, independent branch of WIW.

     The reaction to my announced reelection bid and plans for the future was swift and severe.  A popular founding member of WIW and the soon‑to‑be owner of a small, Washington‑based publishing house, whom I always liked and respected, was recruited to run against me.  A strategy of mass mailings and phone calls to WIW members became the centerpiece of his campaign, which was managed by the conservative members of the sitting board of directors.

     After hearing from other WIW members what was going on, Doug Ireland of the American Writers Congress wrote a fund‑raising letter on my behalf to his personal friends in New York and Washington, declaring:

     Dan is the target of a smear campaign of red‑baiting based primarily on Dan's association with the Institute for Policy Studies and his steadfast support of the work of the Congress.  A coalition of conservatives, Cold War liberals, and anti‑political types are attempting to paint Dan as a tool of the IPS 'disinformation' apparat.  The opposition to Dan is well‑heeled and plans a number of mailings and other outreach activities prior to the voting.

     To my complete surprise, these tactics had an immediate impact.  Suddenly on defense after this final assault on my tenure as WIW president, I failed to put together an effective counteroffensive.  So, after a year of nimble tap dancing and careful tightrope walking, I was caught completely flatfooted.

     On June 16, 1982, two days before the sealed mail ballots were even counted, I had already accepted defeat, stating in my final written report to the WIW board of directors:  "Writers' rights activists don't die.  They just start writing again."

ENDNOTE

[1]  Others testifying before the Senate subcommittee included author Barbara Tuchman; author E.L. Doctorow, the vice president of Poets Editors and Novelists (PEN); author John Brooks, the president of the Authors Guild, and Irwin Karp, its general council; Townsend Hopes and Alexander Hoffman, president and chairman, respectively, of the Association of American Publishers; Maxwell Lillienstein, general counsel of the American Booksellers Association; and William Jovanovich, the chairman of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, a New York publishing house.