B matter sounds dull, yet it is one secret of the Times’ greatness. When momentous events break, there is usually something in what is called the “Deepfreeze,” ready to be thawed and run. Often it needn’t even be thawed. There are over a thousand advance obits on hand, and those of the President and Vice President are kept in type on the composing-room floor, ready for the make-up man’s mallet. When the Supreme Court ruled against school segregation in 1954 it was background copy, pecked out on lazy evenings, that provided one of those monumental examples of complete Times coverage, with fifty-five columns of charts and side stories on every aspect of the decision.
It wasn’t meant for subway poring. Like all such issues it was for the record, to be filed by librarians in rag-paper editions and listed in the Times index. The only man who seriously expected readers to wade through every edition was Ochs, who vetoed a News of the Week in Review during his reign on the ground that it would encourage readers to be slackers. He was being unjust. No man, devoting all his waking hours to the paper, could finish every story. Each day a million words—twice as many as in Gone With the Wind—come into the newsroom from the local staff, and by cable, transocean wireless telephone, and thirteen news services. This vast total is reduced by five copy desks to 150,000 words. Three tote boards, similar to those used by race tracks, keep track of the avalanche until it reaches the great battery of web presses. There, hard by a sign reading “Don’t Waste Newsprint,” it is metamorphosed into issues which, on a Sunday, may weigh five pounds and run over five hundred pages. Even summarizing it is a staggering task, as announcers for WQXR, the Times radio station, discovered during a newspaper strike in the late 1950s. Several went hoarse and required throat sprays.
Among the most heroic examples of the Times dedication to the record was its publication of the secret Yalta text. One March morning in 1955 Reston called New York and said he had it.
“But,” he added, “I must have it back tomorrow. It can’t go to New York,” On his desk lay an 834-page document bound in two thick volumes—a historic beat but a somewhat dismaying one. The paper was unconfounded. For twenty hours twelve telegraph lines relayed copy from K Street, eighty-four linotypes hummed and clacked, and the next day the document was spread across thirty-two pages of the Times. When the cross-indexers in the third-floor morgue finished scissoring it up, it went into 2400 folders. Inch for column inch, that morning’s paper was as bright as the works of Bede, but nobody could call it frivolous, and Carr Van Anda, who thought of his men as “the keepers of St. Peter’s daily ledger,” would have hefted it with pleasure.
Those who regard the public as a low beast may wonder how the Times can make any money carrying its interminable speeches, treaties, and papal encyclicals. Actually it does show a profit. There are many reasons for the Times’ affluence, including shrewd investments in Canadian paper mills, but the biggest is that some people—not all, not even a majority, but enough—want to know what’s really happening in the world. Telling them is good journalism and good business. Other publishers thought young Ochs was being droll when he started printing his daily “Arrival of Buyers.” He was being smart. Merchants might chuckle over “The Yellow Kid,” but if they wanted to stay solvent they had to buy the Times.
That principle remains the backbone of the paper. Today it prints over thirty percent of the advertising that is carried in New York newspapers. At 10:30 each evening queues form at newsstands all over New York, waiting for the first edition. They may not give a hang about the distinguished foreign correspondence, but they do want to be among the first to see the new classified ads in the back.
Among that Stygian mass of classified linage are boxes of statistics, each vital to some trade or interest. If you’re an insurance underwriter, you want to know where yesterday’s fires were. If you’re in the hardware business, you turn to Naval Stores. Even if you’re none of these, but are just fed up with talk about the local weather, there’s a list of temperatures elsewhere, and to a surprising number of people that is the most important record in the paper.
To some people the thoroughness of the Times will always be an enigma. Anastas Mikoyan shook his head over it. Pravda, he said, does the same thing in four pages. It doesn’t, of course. No other paper does. All tell you some of the news, but only the Times tries to give you the works. To the sophisticated reader, or the engineer interested in the specifications of the old Third Avenue El—or the scion curious to know whether his grandmother was on Ward McAllister’s original list of the Four Hundred (it was less than three hundred, the files reveal)—the front of the Times will remain as indispensable as the charts and tables elsewhere are to others. Essentially the paper is one huge potpourri of fact, with something for everybody. All its myriad departments have in common are the requisites that they be respectable and significant.
Even these requirements are elastic. Ochs said of his Hall-Mills murder coverage that it would have been smut in a tabloid, but “if the Times publishes it, it’s sociology.” Times readers being what they are, the most unlikely feature may have educational value. Ochs fought crossword puzzles with a ferocity suggesting they were barely above the level of girlie magazines. The Times started running them in World War II, and readers, who will go to great lengths for solutions, learn a lot from them. One morning an eight-letter word was defined as “Leader of the Leathernecks.” By noon the Marine Corps office on Broadway was swamped by hundreds of calls, asking help. The duty sergeant, who had assumed that everybody knew his boss was General Shepherd, was patient with them, though what he said privately wasn’t fit to print.
Crossword puzzles may have smacked of harlotry to some fundamentalist readers, but true votaries know that custom cannot stale the paper’s infinite piety. It is said that Queen Victoria never looked for a chair before sitting; she knew one would be there. Times men lock up their forms with the same regal confidence. Their professional world is secure, if a bit insular. In a skit marking the installation of a Times man as president of the National Press Club, the outgoing president played the part of the Times managing editor. He wore a tuxedo. When a performer asked whether the paper’s managing editor always did that, he replied distantly, “Doesn’t everyone?”
At Mike Berger’s audience with Pope Pius XII Mike spoke more solemnly for the Times tradition of journalistic eminence. The Pontiff thanked him for stories he had written on Catholic missionaries and then blessed him. Mike’s response was instinctive. He said, “God bless you, too, sir.”
A Slight Case of McCarthyism
There are no coal mines in Fairmont, West Virginia, but bituminous fields surround the city, and every day long lines of coal cars move ponderously along the B&O tracks by the Monongahela River, throwing clouds of soot up the hill, staining the garish business district a deeper and deeper gray. The businessmen don’t much mind: the miners support them, and slate falls, drift-mining, and C.I.O. politics have long been the pivots of street-corner conversation—provided one excepts the early 1950s, when they were dropped for the more compelling issues of Communism and godlessness.
There were no avowed Communists in Fairmont, either, as the most ardent Legionnaire would quickly admit. “We don’t allow them here,” he would tell you with that deep, easy laugh boosters translated into a town slogan, “Fairmont is Friendly.” But as the laughter died the Legionnaire would draw you aside and explain, with many winks, nudges, and knowing nods, that Fairmont did have its problem citizens, or, to use his word, its “crackpots.” “Same as any other place,” he would add defensively. But Fairmont was doing something about its crackpots. Fairmont, he would say, jerking his thumb toward the west end of town—“Fairmont knows when it’s had enough.”
Westward, past a mile of sore-eyed frame houses pitched awkwardly on steep sloping hills, lay Fairmont State College, too remote to give the city a collegiate atmosphere, too close to be unobserved. Since its founding in 1865, the school had alternately been Fairmont’s pride and its sorrow—its pride, as
the state’s first private normal school; its sorrow, as a state teachers’ college which legislatures of the eighteen-seventies refused to support; its pride, under Joe Rosier; its sorrow, under George Hand.
Rosier, until his retirement in 1945, was considerably more to the community than a college president. He was an ardent Methodist, a conspicuous Rotarian, and a political ally of Fairmont’s first citizen, seventy-seven-year-old Senator Matthew Mansfield Neely, the dean of West Virginia politics. When Neely temporarily exchanged his senatorial seat for the gubernatorial chair in 1941, he chose Rosier to complete his term in Washington, a signal honor, surely, for a mere educator. No one was happy to see Senator Joe quit Fairmont State two years after his return to College Hill, unless it was Hand, who shocked Fairmont, upon his appointment, by retiring Rosier’s closest cronies. But even so, the town reflected, there was little cause for worry. Neely, as governor, had been provident enough to name a Fairmont woman to the State Board of Education, and everyone knew Thelma Loudin would keep a sharp eye on Hand.
In the beginning, the handsome new president and the dark, regal board member were on excellent terms. They were members of the same church—these things were important in Fairmont—and from her observation post as organist at Central Methodist, Mrs. Loudin heard splendid reports of Hand’s attendance at First Methodist. Hand was a model of rectitude, industrious in behalf of civic causes, and the town was settling down when he and Mrs. Loudin began to quarrel over administrative detail. Fairmont again turned a critical eye westward, noted that Hand had brought a suspicious number of outsiders to the faculty, and grimly Awalted the fireworks. They came during the Christmas season of 1951, and they were so spectacular all Marion County will probably remember the name of Mundel when Rosier Stadium is black with soot.
***
Dr. Luella Raab Mundel, a frail, bespectacled, somewhat nervous Iowan in her late thirties, came to Fairmont in September 1949 as chairman of the department of art, bringing with her a Ph.D. from Iowa State University and a sheaf of teaching references from other institutions. Dr. Hand passed these along to H. K. Baer, the neat, busy secretary of the Board of Education, and the appointment was approved at a meeting which Mrs. Loudin attended. The new teacher’s salary was $3,700 a year. Her position was subject to three years of probation, although no one told her that. Neither was she told that all Fairmont faculty contracts are subject to annual review by the board. She assumed, quite wrongly as it turned out, that her previous experience entitled her to the prospect of tenure.
Her colleagues knew her, during that first autumn, as abrupt, independent, and, in private conversation, somewhat embittered over the memory of a three-year-old divorce. She shocked one devout teacher, who told of seeing a vision, by replying tartly, “Some people who hallucinate just hear voices.” On another occasion, while arguing for an across-the-board raise at a faculty meeting, she said casually, “I guess I’m a Socialist.” Her conduct before her classes was thought wholly competent, however, and on the first anniversary of her hiring, the board, upon Dr. Hand’s recommendation, voted her a $200 raise. Until then she had been something of a recluse, but now she began to emerge into faculty life. She made friends in the community, designed color schemes for the new $400,000 library, and became more hospitable to invitations. In the spring of 1950, she had declined Dr. Hand’s suggestion that she attend an American Legion “Americanism seminar” in downtown Fairmont—she thought politics dull, and hadn’t even bothered to vote in 1948—but when the seminar was repeated the following March and her new friends advanced the same suggestion, she accepted.
The meeting was held in the Fairmont Hotel. The hundred or so Fairmonters attending were addressed by several imported ex-Communists. Question periods followed the individual talks, and during these Dr. Mundel was conspicuously active. She rose to ask one man his proof that Owen Lattimore was a Communist, to demand of another how he could tell a Communist when he saw one, and to express her resentment at the implication that college faculties were heavily stocked with Reds. She said she thought the identification of liberals with Communism particularly unfortunate, since that was precisely what the Communists wanted.
At one point during the evening, portly Harold D. Jones, the college librarian, directed Dr. Mundel’s attention across the aisle, to her left, identifying a woman sitting there as Mrs. Thelma Brand Loudin.
Later Mrs. Loudin vigorously denied that she was at the seminar, but two months later, at the annual budget meeting of the Board of Education in Charleston, she suggested Dr. Mundel’s name be dropped from the faculty roll. Dr. Hand asked why. “Well,” he was told, “let’s say she’s a poor security risk.”
Dr. Hand asked, and was granted, an opportunity to investigate this charge. That evening, meeting Mrs. Loudin in Charleston’s Daniel Boone Hotel, he learned she felt she could not vote for the Fairmont State budget as long as it bore the name of Luella Mundel.
Informed of all this, the art chairman suggested the president check with the FBI. He did: the FBI reported nothing against her. Meanwhile, Mrs. Loudin had called upon him to explain that by “poor security risk” she really meant “poor teacher.” To evaluate this new charge, he interviewed faculty members and art students. Ten of Dr. Mundel’s colleagues split eight to two in her favor. The nine art majors all liked her.
At the same time, the college president learned that a subordinate of Dr. Mundel’s, an artist who had preceded her in the department but had been prevented from assuming the chairmanship by a lack of advanced degrees, was telling friends he had been “guaranteed” his boss would be fired. The day after the initiation of the campus investigation, this man had sent Mrs. Loudin a letter, attacking his superior. Subsequently, Mrs. Loudin turned the letter over to the Fairmont West Virginian, in whose columns it was published.
On June 30, the art chairman’s contract expired. Dr. Hand assured her the board couldn’t help seeing things her way, and she continued into the summer session on a temporary basis. Nevertheless, she began to worry. Her weight dropped to ninety-five pounds, she could not sleep, and she found people obviously were avoiding her. At the end of six weeks of summer teaching, she asked to be relieved.
Meanwhile the board had met to consider Dr. Hand’s report. He told of his inquiries and recommended that she be retained, that her pay be raised, and that her subordinate be dismissed for unethical conduct against her. Mrs. Loudin informed him that she did not think “an atheist” should be permitted to teach on a college faculty, and he was asked to leave the room while the vote was cast. He was reversed on all counts. Five days later, on Bastille Day, Dr. Mundel read in the Fairmont Times a board announcement of her dismissal “for the good of the college.”
That afternoon Fairmont State’s psychology professor, a wry, aging collegian named Spaulding Rogers, called on Mrs. Loudin in behalf of the local chapter of the American Association of University Professors. He was, he said, a one-man fact-finding committee, and the fact he wanted to find was—what was Mrs. Loudin’s attitude toward faculty participation in a pro-Mundel petition? Such a petition existed, he explained, and several of his colleagues contemplated signing it. They were, however, wary of the board’s reaction. Could Mrs. Loudin guess what it might be? Mrs. Loudin could. She observed that anyone who questioned the board “would do well to move along and move while the moving was good.”
Dr. Rogers, who shortly thereafter sold his farm in Fairmont and moved to Hollins College, Virginia, made notes of Mrs. Loudin’s comments, but at the end of the interview she and her husband, a Fairmont department store manager, relieved him of these and destroyed them. Afterward he did, however, remember that she made this comment: “I am a theist, Dr. Rogers, and would expect to stand judgment if I condoned its opposite.”
At about the same time, Mrs. Katherine Roberts, a county grammar school teacher who had taken art courses at the college, called on Mrs. Loudin and said she thought Dr. Mundel was being treated shabbily. She was informed that the dismissed art t
eacher was a member of a faculty clique which had become dangerous because of “certain opinions” its members held. Mrs. Loudin asked the visitor to tell her with whom she had discussed the matter. “I refused,” Mrs. Roberts later recalled. “She said, ‘It doesn’t matter, we have the names’—and she started to name names.”
July melted into August; Dr. Mundel was out of a job; she looked for another. But none of the half-dozen teaching agencies she wrote offered the slightest hope, and she reached the conclusion that unless she could clear her name in Fairmont, her chances elsewhere would be slim. She appealed to the board for a hearing. Her request was supported by a petition signed by about a hundred and twenty-five Fairmont students, by the leaders of the local AAUP and the American Civil Liberties Union chapters, and by the two organizations accrediting Fairmont State, the North Central Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools and the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education.
The board met on September 5, grilled Dr. Hand on his failure to suppress Dr. Mundel’s supporters at the college, and decided not to grant her a hearing.
On September 27 she filed suit for $100,000, charging Mrs. Loudin with slander. Her attorneys were whimsical old Tusca Morris, of Fairmont, and Horace S. Meldahl, West Virginia correspondent for the American Civil Liberties Union. Mrs. Loudin was represented by Senator Neely and the Senator’s son, Alfred.
The case came to bar before Judge J. Harper Meredith on the bitter day of December 19, 1951.
***
The Marion County courthouse, a Corinthian mass of gray Cleveland sandstone crowned by a domed clock-tower and a copper statue of Justice, dominates downtown Fairmont. It was built at the turn of the century after a savage row between city dwellers and county taxpayers, who resented the cost, and the first case to be tried in the barnlike second-floor courtroom was heard in late November 1900. The defendant was the board of regents of West Virginia University. The plaintiff was Matthew Mansfield Neely.
Controversy And Other Essays in Journalism (1950–1975) Page 31