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Moe FonerMoe Foner
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Session:         Page of 592

it's like. Then Jane came up and met Maureen Hedgepeth there, who was one of the strikers. I got Murray Finley to bring up the strikers for two weeks.

Q:

Murray Finley was the president of --

Foner:

The president of the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers. When I told Maureen Hedgepeth -- I took her to an interview with the Post with Jimmy Wechsler -- that Jane was coming, she said, “Oh, my gosh. That's terrible.”

I said, “Why?”

She said, “When Jane was offered Norma Rae, she came down to meet with us. We told her that Norma Rae was a loose woman and it would reflect poorly on us, ‘So we think you shouldn't take the picture.’ So she didn't take the picture.” And she said, “I'm going to have to see her, and she'll be very angry.”

Q:

This is Finley speaking?

Foner:

No, no. I'm talking to Maureen Hedgepeth, and I'm on my way down to her interview with Wechsler, and on the way back, I tell her that, “You're going to meet a friend.”

She said, “Oh, that's a disaster. I don't want to meet her.”

And when Jane comes in and sees her, we have a photograph of them hugging each other, and Jane says, “What are you worried about? Sally Fields got Norma Rae and I got China Syndrome. So we both made it.”

Well, anyway, you ask a simple question and get a complicated --

Q:

Well, one last question on this subject of publications because then we have to go back to home care. But many labor publications operate on the theory that they present the point of view of leadership without questions or without reflecting any possible criticism on the grounds that to do otherwise would be to be doing the bosses' work. What's been your attitude in supervising labor publications about showing some diversity of opinion within the union, within the membership on key questions?

Foner:

Well, I've encouraged, and the people who put out the magazine have been doing it for a long time now, encouraged debate and difference of opinion, particularly through letters to the editor. I was the person who insisted that letters to the editor be page two, and





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