The Telephone Booth Indian (26 page)

The United Press started off with the same independent Left Wing slant for which the ScrippsMcRae newspapers were known. That was because, in the beginning, most of its clients were members of the chain. In its handling of the strikes of the Danbury hatters in 1912 and the Paterson silk workers in 1912 and 1913, the U.P. was noticeably more prolabor than the Associated Press. The contrast gradually disappeared. Howard was not slow to recognize that a news service has a market unlike that of a newspaper. Scripps had once remarked that ninetyfive per cent of all newspaper readers are not rich even though ninety per cent of the publishers are “capitalists and conservatives.” When, in 1912, Howard was made president of the United Press and was in a way to become a rich man, old friends in Indianapolis considered him a great success in the East. In New York, unfortunately, there was no Scripps paper and nobody seemed to know him. As an ambitious young man of twentynine aspiring to take his place as a prominent metropolitan figure, he was pained scarcely less that few New Yorkers had ever heard of E. W. Scripps, either. He indicated a feeling that Scripps's indifference to Broadway showed a blind spot.

The first World War brought the United Press the big newspapers of South America as customers. Before the war they had been clients of Havas, the agency subsidized by the French government. Also, during the war, newspapers all over the United States felt the need of more wire service, and the United Press,
which was selling its service to five hundred clients in 1914, had seven hundred newspapers on its list in 1918. Howard's false armistice had no effect on his fortunes, which unexpectedly improved further when Scripps quarreled with his eldest son, James, publisher of the Seattle
Star
and several other Western papers. James gained control of the stock of these papers and broke with his father. James's death in 1921 came before a reconciliation was possible. A second son, John, died in 1914. James's defection in 1920 left only Robert Scripps, twentyfive years old and profoundly uninterested in the newspaper business, as an heir. The elder Scripps had to pick a practical newspaperman as a running mate for his son, and since most of the editors who had helped him build his newspapers had short life expectancies, Howard was the logical choice. Old Scripps made him chairman of the board of the ScrippsMcRae newspapers in 1920. Howard resigned as president of the United Press in order to accept the new job. McRae, the second barrel of the ScrippsMcRae name, was already out of the firm. The following year Howard's name replaced McRae's on the mastheads of all the papers in the chain, which added to Howard's prestige. The resplendent young newsservice man was nevertheless looked upon with some suspicion by the older set of Scripps's followers among newspaper publishers, Midwestern liberals who thought Howard had been corrupted by his residence in the East. Scripps gave up active direction of the Scripps enterprises in 1924, but retained a controlling financial interest.

The combination of Howard and Robert Paine Scripps, who together took over the direction of the news empire when the elder Scripps retired, was once compared by a company eulogist to “the two blades of a pair of shears.” It was an accurate metaphor only if the writer was thinking of a tailor's shears,
which has one flat and one cutting blade. Robert Scripps was the flat blade. Originally planning to be a nature poet, he had been drafted into the newspaper business because his father believed in keeping his properties in the family. Robert Scripps used to say, “I hate to make decisions. Roy loves to make them. So I let him.” E. W. Scripps died aboard his yacht,
Ohio
, off the coast of Liberia on March 12, 1926, at the age of seventytwo. He left his newspapers, valued at a total of forty million dollars, to his son and three grandsons in a trust which would be dissolved upon the death of the last surviving grandson. Eleven months later, Howard acquired the New York
Telegram
for the ScrippsHoward chain. At last, by stretching a point, he could call himself a New York publisher. It was a little like the gesture of a turfstruck movie actor who buys a lame old horse for the sake of wearing an owner's badge. Ever since he had come to this city, Howard had wanted a New York paper, but E. W. Scripps had forbidden him to buy one. The
Telegram
was literally a museum piece. Frank Munsey had willed it along with the
Sun
to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which had sold both to William T. Dewart. Dewart kept the
Sun
, which he still owns, and sold the
Telegram
to Howard for $1,800,000. The
Telegram
was housed in a ratinfested old barracks at Washington and Dey streets, where its personnel was strictly forbidden to smoke lest the Fire Department condemn the building. The paper, founded in 1876 by James Gordon Bennett as a raffish afternoon running mate to his morning
Herald
, had a circulation of 195,000, which depended chiefly on the racing news and Tammany political gossip that it published. It had been adopted by Tammany as a kind of house organ and got considerable political advertising. Howard was so impatient to own a New York newspaper that he closed the deal before he persuaded Robert Paine Scripps to string along with him. Young Scripps acceded to the
fait accompli.

Howard, having restlessly kibitzed the New York newspaper business for twentyone years while working for the United Press and ScrippsHoward, had a number of ideas about what a metropolitan newspaper should be. He completely revamped the character of the
Telegram
, although he retained several members of the staff, and started out to show New York a supercharged version of, say, the Evansville
Press
, with trimmings from
Smart Set.
The publisher believed that news stories in New York papers were too long. Shorter, crisper stories would be more widely read, he told his editors. The space saved on news stories could be devoted to feature articles with the accent on fine writing. The first effect of Howard's doctrine was a reduction almost to the vanishing point of news matter in the paper. The second was a mass invasion of New York by fine writers, recommended by ScrippsHoward editors in twentyfive cities, including Albuquerque, New Mexico; Youngstown, Ohio; and Covington, Kentucky. They wrote in a style which has been classified by historians of English literature as Oklahoma Byzantine. Since they were unacquainted with the gags that press agents had sold to previous generations of feature writers, the
Telegram
's pages began to look like a retrospective show of publicity wheezes. Some of the young men were encouraged to shine in the high aesthetic line, while others wrote, for the first page of the second section, intheknow biographies of sterling Wall Street characters, most of whom subsequently jumped bail. Howard's first managing editor was a man named Sturdevant, who once had been happy as the editor of the Youngstown
Telegram.
Sturdevant was followed in office by Ted Thackrey, present executive editor of the
Post
, who was then fresh from Cleveland. Lee B. Wood, who had made a name in Oklahoma City, eventually displaced Thackrey. None of them could do anything to make Howard's venture profitable, and the
Telegram
finally declined to
the point of losing a million dollars a year. It was steadily losing readers, too, many of them people who had developed hallucinations from reading its prose and were dragged from subway trains slapping at adjectives they said they saw crawling over them. This did not shake Howard's confidence in himself. He can take a beating and come back with the undiminished aplomb of an actress blaming her last flop on an unsuitable vehicle.

He made his first spectacular move toward establishing the new
Telegram
by hiring Heywood Broun in the spring of 1928. Broun was at liberty because, after a long wrangle with the late Ralph Pulitzer, publisher of the
World
, over his columns on the SaccoVanzetti case, he had written an article for the
Nation
which Pulitzer considered “disloyal.” The first sentence of that article was “There ought to be a place in New York City for a liberal newspaper.” Howard gave Broun a twoyear contract at twentyfive thousand dollars a year. By hiring him, Howard got a name for broadmindedness and at the same time gave a large number of people one reason for reading the
Telegram.
Broun was the bestknown columnist in the country, with the exceptions of O. O. McIntyre and Arthur Brisbane. The glory reflected on the employer of a public figure pleased Howard, and he began to be seen in speakeasies with Broun, wearing a grin, like the minstrel men who used to sing, “I've Got a White Man Working for Me Now.”

Edward Wyllis Scripps, founder of the Scripps newspaper empire, was content to create the secondor thirdbest newspaper in each of a couple of dozen cities. When Roy Wilson Howard, chairman of the board of the ScrippsHoward newspapers,
bought the Pittsburgh
Press
in 1923 for $6,200,000,
Editor and Publisher
, the trade magazine of the newspaper industry, observed that this purchase of a readymade daily marked a change in a Scripps policy almost fifty years old. Howard bought the paper and announced its acquisition while old E. W. Scripps, who had retired from active supervision of the chain, was on his yacht
Ohio
somewhere in the South Seas. Robert Paine Scripps, his son, was with him. The younger Scripps had succeeded his father as titular head of the ScrippsHoward newspapers, but Howard was generally permitted to do about as he pleased. Colonel Oliver S. Hershman, who had published the
Press
for twentythree years, wanted to retire but drove a hard bargain for his paper. Howard and a retinue of other ScrippsHoward executives, including William W. Hawkins, his administrative alter ego, checked into a Pittsburgh hotel, secretly, in order to mask their movements from possible competitive bidders, about a week before the deal was closed, all the executives registering under the names of their secretaries. They bargained with Colonel Hershman and his lawyers almost continuously for a week, and finally reached a point where Howard's offer was within twentyfive thousand dollars of Hershman's asking price. Hershman flipped a coin to decide who would pay the difference, borrowing a quarter from Howard for this ceremony. Howard called and lost.

As Howard's control of the ScrippsHoward interests became more nearly complete, he continued this policy of buying going papers. In making an acquisition of this sort, he sometimes had to go to a bank for money. Old Scripps had a horror of borrowing from a bank, a practice which he feared might affect a paper's editorial independence. Howard feels that his own integrity is superior to such considerations. The
Press
has paid heavy dividends on the ScrippsHoward investment. A couple of other
Howard purchases, like the Denver
Rocky Mountain News
and the Denver
Times
, which he bought and merged in 1926, and the Buffalo
Times
, which he got in 1929 and discontinued in 1939, turned out to be heavy losers. There were twentyfive ScrippsHoward newspapers when E. W. Scripps died in March 1926. Howard added four to the chain within the next year. Since then the number has declined to the present nineteen. In the same period the total number of dailies in the United States has dropped from 2333 to 1998. Howard's fourth addition to the chain after E. W. Scripps's death was its first New York newspaper, the
Telegram
, acquired in 1927. He paid something less than two million dollars for this property. When, in 1931, he made a bid for the New York
World
with a view to merging it with the
Telegram
, the gesture seemed slightly presumptuous. It was as if the Knott hotel chain had offered to take over the WaldorfAstoria.

The
World, Evening World
, and
Sunday World
were properties of the Press Publishing Company, of which almost all the stock was held by the estate of Joseph Pulitzer. Pulitzer's will forbade the sale of the Press Publishing Company stock “under any circumstances whatever.” He had written, “I particularly enjoin upon my sons and my descendants the duty of preserving, perfecting, and perpetuating the
World
newspaper (to the maintenance and upbuilding of which I have sacrificed my health and strength).” Ralph, Joseph, Jr., and Herbert Pulitzer were directors of the Press Publishing Company, as well as trustees of their father's estate, but the will had assigned a sixtenths interest in the newspapers to Herbert, the youngest son, so in a pinch he could outvote his brothers. The papers earned a handsome income for sixteen years after the senior Pulitzer's death in 1911, and the profits were distributed among his sons and the other
beneficiaries of the estate. By 1931, these included fifteen Pulitzer grandchildren. Pulitzer, perhaps in the belief that the papers would make money
every
year, had neglected to provide for a reserve fund. Money flowed from the newspapers into the estate, but there was no way of getting it back from the estate again. When, after a succession of business mistakes, the Press Publishing Company lost the relatively small sum of $474,000 in 1928, Herbert Pulitzer and his brother Ralph, who was editor of the
World
, became alarmed. Joseph Pulitzer, Jr., was giving all his energy to another Pulitzer paper, the St. Louis
PostDispatch.
Ralph retired as editor of the
World
in 1930, and Herbert took charge. When the company's balance sheet for 1929 showed a somewhat larger deficit, Herbert began looking for exits. At the
World
papers' lowest ebb, the
World
had a circulation of 320,000, the
Evening World
had 285,000, the
Sunday World
had 500,000, and their joint annual revenues were in excess of twelve million dollars. However, Herbert Pulitzer was neither a gambler nor a newspaper enthusiast. Howard was behind seven million dollars in his operation of the
Telegram
and in the position of a poker player so far in the hole that his best chance of pulling out was to double the stakes. He had a dream of acquiring the competing
Evening World
, the
Sunday World
, and the
World
, and of then scrapping the last two and absorbing the first into the
Telegram.