Common Ground

by J. Anthony Lukas

  Despite his ardent support for the Irish, Taylor managed to avoid the shrill partisanship of Pulitzer and Hearst. Fair play was the Globe’s watchword, encapsulated in Taylor’s celebrated axioms which have been handed down through the years like stone tablets: “Try never to print a piece of news that would injure an innocent person”; “Always treat a man fairly in the Globe so you may meet him again and look him straight in the eye.” He wasn’t above pandering to the workingman’s taste for mayhem: one week began with “An Awful Crime” and ended “More Bloody Work.” But the grosser excesses of tabloid sensationalism were too sanguinary for his taste. He once suggested that Joseph Pulitzer would have “no appetite for breakfast if he did not find blood running down by the [New York World’s] column rules.”

  His was a sunnier disposition, summed up by a paragraph which became the Globe’s credo and still hangs on a bronze plaque in the newspaper’s lobby:

  My aim has been to make the Globe a cheerful, attractive and useful newspaper that would enter the home as a kindly, helpful friend of the family. My temperament has always led me to dwell on the virtues of men and institutions rather than upon their faults and limitations. My disposition has always been to help build up rather than to join in tearing down. My ideal for the Globe has always been that it should help men, women and children to get some of the sunshine of life, to be better and happier because of the Globe.

  For nearly two decades, this geniality paid off, helping the Globe become the region’s dominant newspaper. Its symbol was now a beaming, rotund gentleman in a top hat with a broad sash around his middle proclaiming: “The Largest Circulation in New England.” The Globe Man, as he became known, appeared daily on the front page and often elsewhere in the paper, shaking hands with friend and foe alike. Fat and prosperous, cheerful and complacent, the Globe grew increasingly disinclined to offend any segment of its hard-won readership. Taylor’s sympathy for the Irish did not signify a lasting commitment to the underdog. Oswald Garrison Villard of The Nation described him as “a simple, sweet-natured person, undiscriminating, conventional, ignorant that there were such things as deep economic currents and terrible economic injustices.” As the years went by, the Globe’s fairness descended into timidity, its benevolence into sanctimony.

  A crescendo of circumspection was reached in 1896 as Western radicals were assailing the gold standard, much beloved of Eastern conservatives. When William Jennings Bryan rode the “free silver” stampede to the Democratic presidential nomination, he posed a dilemma for New Englanders that was particularly excruciating for the Globe, which had long stamped its approval on any full-blooded Democrat.

  A perplexed Taylor cabled James Morgan, his editorial director, at the convention: “What do we say now?”

  “Don’t say anything,” Morgan wired back.

  All that fall the editors kept their opinions to themselves, a high-minded impartiality that soon became a habit. Not for three-quarters of a century did the Globe again endorse a political candidate.

  Increasingly, Taylor and Morgan shunned unequivocal stands on any issue. The Globe began signing its main editorials “Uncle Dudley,” after a popular tag line of the day, “Take it from your Uncle Dudley.” Rambling, philosophical disquisitions, “Uncle Dudleys” expounded lofty principles, embroidered with classical esoterica.

  A retreat to the high ground proved especially convenient as Boston politics were appropriated by pugnacious Irishmen. The Globe’s Yankee executives were repelled by Honey Fitz and James Michael Curley, but the voters who elected such demagogues were the heart of the paper’s constituency, and for years the Globe went out of its way not to offend them. When a City Hall reporter exposed some of Curley’s shenanigans in The Nation, the publisher sternly admonished him, “You’ll lose all your following.”

  The Globe played it just as safe on the biggest story of the twenties, the Sacco-Vanzetti case. Its reporter, the former war correspondent Frank Sibley, concluded that the pair was innocent, but the Globe kept him on a tight leash; on execution day he was covering a flower show. Another reporter, Gardner Jackson, unable to find an outlet for his indignation at the Globe, quit to edit the official bulletin of the Defense Committee. Editorially, the paper was even more skittish. Uncle Dudley’s only comment came the day the jury was impaneled, when he proclaimed that juries “work amazingly well. Human nature has a way of rising to unavoidable responsibilities.” It remained for The Atlantic Monthly to publish Felix Frankfurter’s trenchant analysis of the evidence, and for the conservative Herald to crystallize doubts about the verdict in a withering editorial that won the Pulitzer Prize. Through seven years of international debate, the Globe remained a timorous bystander.

  The Great Depression only intensified the paper’s caution. By then, Charles Taylor had given way to his son, William O., a pallid figure who had majored in biblical history at Harvard and who could produce a scrap of scripture for every occasion. In 1932—when the Globe came within $30,000 of going into the red—he blithely invoked Romans 8:18, “For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us.”

  But salvation was a long way off. By 1930, the Globe had to remove its pudgy symbol of preeminence, for no longer could it claim Boston’s largest circulation, much less New England’s. Both distinctions now belonged to the resurgent Post. Gaudy and flamboyant, it once gave away a motorcar a day, and won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing confidence man Charles Ponzi. Ultra-Democratic and super-Catholic, it unashamedly took up cudgels for the dispossessed as the Globe hadn’t dared to do in sixty years. Mixing campaigns for free streetcar transfers and lower gas rates with stories of sexual aberration and outrageous felony, it rapidly replaced the Globe as Boston’s working-class Irish newspaper.

  The Hearst papers plied essentially the same trade, but somehow their enticements never matched the Post’s. For years, they gained much of their circulation by printing the daily Treasury number (known in Boston as the “nigger number”), an essential for those who played the policy game.

  While the Globe’s old readership was eroded by the Post and Hearst, Boston’s upper-class constituency was preempted by the Christian Science Monitor, Transcript, and Herald.

  The voice of the Christian Science mother church—and free, therefore, from other papers’ truckling to the Catholic Archdiocese—the Monitor consistently produced the city’s best municipal reporting. But, never truly a Boston newspaper, it was read more assiduously in Washington and Los Angeles than it was in its own backyard. Its prissy abstention from crime, disease, death, alcohol, and tobacco denied it a popular audience.

  While the Monitor never quite found its niche in the city, the Transcript was, if anything, too secure in its. Every evening just at teatime it was placed—never thrown—on the doorsteps of proper Bostonians. For a century it had been scrupulously edited for “our kind of people,” offering departments like “The Churchmen Afield,” and “Ripples,” a yachting column which once expressed “the inability of the sailboat man to understand why anyone in his right mind should want to own a motorboat.” Releases from the Anti-Vivisection Society were published verbatim, invariably concluding: “Tea Was served. John Orth rendered several selections on the piano.” Well into the thirties, the Transcript cherished the old traditions, publishing a football extra a half hour after the Harvard game ended, dismissing its managing editor for permitting the term “sexual intercourse” to creep into a story. But its blood was running perilously thin. By 1936, the paper’s circulation was down to 31,000, barely enough to fill Harvard’s stadium.

  By then, the majority of the Anglo-Saxon audience had shifted to the meatier Herald. The voice of State Street’s financial community and the Republican Party, it was owned by the First National Bank and the United States Shoe Machinery Corporation. Once linked to the anti-Catholic American Protective Association, the Herald was still anathema in Irish neighborhoods. But to old Yankees, its prize-winning editoria
l page was the champion of fiscal responsibility and civic progress. Its more rambunctious evening companion, the Traveler, still sold well in the city, but the morning Herald increasingly found its readers in comfortable suburbs like Wellesley and Dover (while the Herald was delivered to the front door, the Globe often came through the back with the Irish help, becoming known in some circles as “the maid’s paper”).

  Journalistic diversity is said to encourage aggressive reporting and bold advocacy. Yet in a city so fragmented by class, race, and ethnicity, competition often produced quite the opposite. With thirteen newspapers contending for Boston’s market—five in the morning, four in the evening, and four on Sunday—there were only two ways to play the game: either batten on one class or ethnic bloc, pandering to its every preconception, or strike the lowest common denominator, placating all, offending none.

  Squeezed between the patrician and the proletarian, the Globe struggled to keep a foot in each camp. “We’re putting out a paper for the bottom half of the upper class, the middle class and the top half of the lower class,” an editor of that era once explained. “We try to give everyone a chance to be heard in our pages. When I make up page one, I try to find a story for everybody: a crime story for Joe Blow, a woman’s feature, something for the businessman, something for the kids.”

  The papers’ commercial strategies revealed the same stratification. With its vast working-class audience, the Post monopolized national advertising—the cigarette, beer, and soap-flakes contracts from the big New York agencies. The Transcript and Herald took the fashionable retail trade. The Globe, on its broad middle course, cultivated classified advertising, a morsel for every want and need.

  Demography and technology ultimately conspired to reduce this journalistic smorgasbord. As Boston’s gentry decamped for the countryside, their traditional provisioners went out of business altogether or followed them to the new suburban shopping malls, so undermining the Transcript’s advertising that, in April 1941, it decorously expired. Then, as radio and television drew national advertising from the Post, its owners sold the paper to John Fox, a South Boston Irishman turned Wall Street wheeler-dealer, who wielded it as a bludgeon in his personal crusade against Communism. Through the mid-fifties, the paper beat a relentless tattoo (“Red Hordes Storm Dienbienphu,” “Man Beaten by Red Gang”), relishing any opportunity to find an old Yankee enmeshed in the conspiracy (“Miss Anne P. Hale, 46, a social registerite, whose ancestors helped found the Massachusetts Bay Colony, was suspended tonight by the [Wayland] School Committee because of illegal Communist activities”). Fox himself contributed a series on the “Christ-like devotion” of Senator Joseph McCarthy.

  In an Irish Catholic city then rabidly pro-McCarthy, it took courage for any newspaper to breast the tide. The Globe was more temperate than the Post but, aware that it shared the Senator’s constituency, it did nothing to protest his behavior. James Morgan, still the Globe’s guiding spirit, concluded that a stand against McCarthy would lose the paper 100,000 readers. In private, he justified its silence by invoking a curious apologia called “The Globe Principle,” first devised three decades earlier to explain the Globe’s reticence on E. Mitchell Palmer’s anti-Communist raids: “The Globe policy is to uphold principles and not to tie itself up with personalities, necessarily transient. In fighting men, it would make too many enemies for the measures it advocates…. The Globe perseveres in a good-humored patience with each successive challenger of the American Way, in its faith that ‘they, too, will pass away.’ ” (The Globe was more courageous when its own staffers ran afoul of the hysteria. Charlie Whipple, who covered McCarthy for the paper, had been a Communist at Harvard in the thirties. When State Senator John Powers threatened to subpoena Whipple, the Globe sent its political correspondent up Beacon Hill to warn Powers that it would not tolerate such harassment. The subpoena was quietly shelved.)

  By transforming the Post into a strident broadsheet, John Fox may have won it some readers, but he alienated others. When he broke with the newspaper’s Democratic heritage to support Eisenhower, the newsroom phones rang all night with outraged subscribers. Creditors’ lawsuits brought the paper to its knees. In 1956, the 125-year-old war horse succumbed to mortal wounds.

  With the journalistic spectrum thus shorn of its extremes and the Monitor and Hearst papers fading into insignificance, Boston’s press wars were left with two principal contestants. Each brandishing the relics of ancient battles, each furnished in the full regalia of morning, evening, and Sunday editions, the Globe and Herald eyed each other uneasily from opposite ends of Washington Street.

  Seeking to avert a costly war of attrition, the Herald pursued a shotgun marriage. Robert Choate, the Herald’s publisher, was a splenetic autocrat, model for the tyrannical Amos Force in The Last Hurrah. Having relentlessly urged merger on his Globe counterpart, William Taylor, he renewed his campaign after Taylor was succeeded by his son, Davis. When Davis went ahead with plans for a new Globe plant, capable of outprinting the Herald’s aging presses, Choate called on the John Hancock Insurance Company and the State Street Trust Company in a vain effort to block their loans for the building. Finally, in January 1956, he invited Davis Taylor to lunch at the Somerset Club on Beacon Hill. Choate was accompanied by Carl Gilbert, president of the Gillette Company and a Herald director; Taylor brought his cousin John, the Globe’s treasurer. The four men lunched in a private second-floor dining room, its walls lined with pale green silk. Over broiled scrod, Choate explained why further competition would do neither paper any good. “If you build, we’ll build,” he warned. “If you go to ninety-six pages in your first section, we’ll go to ninety-six pages. It’s like the arms race. For God’s sake, let’s stop it now. Let’s put the two papers together.”

  Davis politely demurred—the Taylors cherished the Globe’s independence. As they finished lunch, Choate said coldly: “You fellows are stubborn. Worse than that, you’re arrogant. You better listen to us or we’ll teach you a lesson. I’m going to get Channel 5, and with my television revenues I’ll put you out of business.”

  For the time being, the Taylors didn’t take Choate’s threat very seriously. The Herald had been seeking Boston’s third VHF channel since 1947, but on January 4, 1956—only three weeks before the lunch—a Federal Communications Commission hearing examiner had tentatively awarded the channel to Greater Boston Television, headed by Arthur Garrity’s law partner, Richard Maguire. The ruling had been appealed to the full FCC, but the Taylors were confident the Herald wouldn’t prevail, for the same reason the Globe hadn’t applied in the first place: the commission’s “diversification policy,” which discouraged undue concentration of newspaper and television properties.

  But “Beanie” Choate never gave up. All through 1956, he used every device in the lobbyist’s repertoire to sway the FCC, including repeated calls on White House and congressional Republicans, and a critical lunch with Commission Chairman George McConnaughey. Shortly before Christmas the campaign paid off. In a preliminary vote, the commission instructed its staff to draft an opinion awarding Channel 5 to the Herald. Ruefully recalling Choate’s parting words at the Somerset, Davis and his cousin John went to Washington for a frantic effort to reverse the decision. Within three days they visited every commission member as well as Massachusetts Senators John Kennedy and Leverett Saltonstall; New Hampshire Senator Styles Bridges; and Secretary of Commerce Sinclair Weeks. To each they delivered the same message: they had no interest in Channel 5 themselves, but they were determined to prevent the Herald from obtaining a weapon which could put the Globe out of business. The Taylors garnered little encouragement. House Minority Leader Joe Martin summed up the situation when he told them, “I’m afraid you fellas have just been outpoliticked.”

  They may have been outswapped as well. Joe Kennedy was determined to bring his son the 1957 Pulitzer Prize for Profiles in Courage, thus bestowing an extra dash of prestige on Jack’s presidential campaign. But the biography judges didn’t cooperate, n
ominating Alpheus Mason’s Harlan Fiske Stone: Pillar of the Law, and seven runners-up. The senior Kennedy thereupon conferred with Arthur Krock, the New York Times Washington columnist and longtime Kennedy adviser. Together, they mapped a strategy to convert the Pulitzer Advisory Board, the thirteen editors and publishers who review the judges’ nominations. Krock has confirmed that he “worked like hell” to get the prize for Jack, intervening with board members like fellow Times man Turner Catledge and Barry Bingham of the Louisville Courier-Journal.

  But Joe Kennedy gave personal attention to the board’s lone Bostonian—Robert Choate. According to one version of subsequent events, Joe sent his faithful retainer, Municipal Court Judge Francis Xavier Morrissey, to solicit Choate’s vote. What’s in it for me? the publisher replied. What do you want? asked Morrissey. To which Choate snapped: Channel 5.

  Joe Kennedy had other reasons for proving useful to the Herald. He knew the Boston press could be bought—five years before, he had loaned John Fox $500,000 in exchange for the Post’s endorsement of Jack. Now JFK was seeking a massive reelection victory in 1958 to boost his presidential hopes and the Herald’s support could be critical. Still the city’s largest daily, it was the Republican paper whose readers Kennedy needed for such a landslide (indeed, a year later, the Herald broke tradition by endorsing Kennedy, who won by a staggering 874,608 votes).

  Moreover, Joe Kennedy had little affection for the Globe. In 1940, while Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, he had granted an interview to the Globe’s Louis Lyons. Already secretly sparring with FDR, Joe was about to stake out a carefully articulated isolationist position which he hoped would carry him to the White House in 1944. But relaxing in his suite at Boston’s Ritz-Carlton Hotel, he indiscreetly shared his unexpurgated thoughts with Lyons: “Democracy is finished in England. It may be here…. If we got in [to the war], a bureaucracy would take over right off. Everything we hold dear would be gone.” When the Globe spread the story over page one, Kennedy claimed he had been misquoted and insisted that the Globe fire Lyons. The newspaper stood firm (although once the furor cooled down, it shunted Lyons off to Harvard as director of the Nieman Fellowships for journalists). Meanwhile, Kennedy retaliated by withdrawing his liquor advertising—he then controlled all imports of Haig & Haig and Gordon’s Gin—a boycott which cost the Globe two million dollars over six years. As late as 1961, days before his son’s inauguration, Joe was still denouncing the Globe’s transgression.