The Telephone Booth Indian

by A. J. Liebling

  The WorldTelegram, which made its first appearance on the day after the merger, resembled a colored houseman wearing some of his dead massa's old clothes. Rollin Kirby, Denys Wortman, and Will B. Johnstone, the cartoonists, were retained from the World, along with Harry Hansen's book column and J. Otis Swift's nature notes. On the whole, it was an amorphous publication that looked like the result of physically telescoping two totally different newspapers. It bulked large because Howard had taken over the Evening World advertising contracts. Since the advertising rates had been based on a circulation of less than three hundred thousand and that of the merged paper hovered for a while around a half million, the WorldTelegram lost money on every advertisement printed. When Howard later raised the rates in proportion to the new circulation, many advertisers quit. They have had to be wooed back over a stretch of years, a factor which some critics contend has had a perceptible influence on the newspaper's policy. Within a few months after the merger, the WorldTelegram had returned to the appearance and editorial formula of the ScrippsHoward Telegram, except for the three new cartoonists, and Swift, and Hansen. A number of World reporters and sports writers hired at the time of the merger were not with the new paper long. That summer, the WorldTelegram moved into a new building at 125 Barclay Street. At about the same time, Howard, finally the important and fullfledged New Yorker he had long looked forward to becoming, with a major local paper of his own, gave up his suburban home, which was on Pelhamdale Avenue in Pelham, and moved into the heart of town. The Pelham house had seventeen rooms and five baths; the one he took on the East Side, near Central Park, has sixteen rooms, six baths, and an elevator. The elevator is not quite high enough for a tall man to stand upright in. The diminutive publisher enjoys seeing his tall executives, such as Lee Wood, stoop when they ride in it.

  When Howard had bought the World, he had told the press that the transaction meant not “the death of the World but its rebirth.” However, the WorldTelegram made no serious effort to carry on the World tradition. The foreign staff of the World, which even in the paper's last years included such correspondents as John Balderston and William Bolitho, went out of existence. The WorldTelegram rarely sent members of its own staff farther out of New York than, say, Hopewell, New Jersey, mostly relying on the ScrippsHoward United Press and outoftown ScrippsHoward newspapers to cover it on more distant assignments. The Scottsboro, Alabama, trials, for example, were described for the WorldTelegram by a reporter on the chain's Birmingham Post. The great droughts, the West Coast shipping strike, and the trial of Al Capone got the same modest attention. The feature writers gave the paper a facade of knowingness. The feature men's most important work appeared on the first page of the second section, known in shoptalk as the “split page.” Every week one of them wrote a series of articles on such topics as Powers models, soldiers of fortune, voodoo rites, and prison reform. Howard decreed that there should also be a feature story about a woman, with accompanying photographs, on the third page of the first section every day. He said that people were interested in women. The WorldTelegram consequently published daily a story about a woman who made powder compacts out of flattened tomato cans or was making good in some Broadway show, which usually closed by the end of the same week. The only requirement was that the subject should be as goodlooking as a muskrat, and this was frequently waived. Appearing on the split page along with the polychromatic prose of the feature men were Broun's column and Alice Hughes's shopping notes. It was on the split page that Howard eventually developed one of his major contributions to newspaper strategy, the practice of letting columnists more or less express a paper's editorial policy while the editorial writer en titre, whom comparatively few people read anyway, remains free to hedge at the publisher's discretion. In the beginning, however, the page resembled the continuous entertainment at a pretentious Coney Island restaurant.

  There had been slight rifts at the Telegram between Howard and Broun in the first years of the depression. The publisher, for example, had asked Broun not to devote so many of his daily columns to Shoot the Works, a cooperative musical revue the writer had put on with unemployed actors. Commercial producers, who paid for their advertising, were complaining. In the summer of 1930, Howard, in a Telegram editorial, had chided Broun for running for Congress on the Socialist ticket. The Telegram had backed Norman Thomas for mayor in 1929, but in 1930 Howard seemed to imply in his reproof to Broun that a few decent people were beginning to read his paper. Neither of these quarrels lasted long, since Shoot the Works soon ran out of audiences and Broun failed by a wide margin to get elected. The strain between the two men increased after Howard merged the World with the Telegram. Howard's paper was no longer an outsider trying to attract attention but an insider trying to hold on to everything it had suddenly fallen heir to. Broun, instead of being a magnet to draw readers from the competing Evening World, was now merely an employee who might say something to offend the advertisers. He could not possibly draw readers from the conservative Sun, and the Evening Post, as run by the CurtisMartin Newspapers, was crumbling to powder without outside assistance. Liberal readers in New York had to take the WorldTelegram because they had no alternative.

  Most successful New York newspapers began their runs from the liberal position that the WorldTelegram now held almost by default. James Gordon Bennett, when he founded the Herald in 1835, was labeled a scurrilous radical. Joseph Pulitzer cast himself in the same role in 1883, when he began to edit the World. Hearst made his first impression here as an imitation radical. The Daily News, the most profitable newspaper of our period, has from the first been on the whole the city's most forthright champion of social legislation. Howard abandoned his strategic ground as casually as he had attained it. The WorldTelegram differed from the Herald, the World, and the Journal in one important historical respect. It turned conservative without making big money.

  The sole form of liberalism that Howard thought it safe to emphasize in New York was something called Fusion, which is somehow usually popular with large taxpayers. Fusion furnished Howard with his one opportunity to feel like a kingmaker. The king he indisputably helped make was Fiorello H. LaGuardia, who was elected Mayor in 1933, the WorldTelegram furnishing his only outspoken newspaper support. The tone of numerous Howardinspired editorials in the same paper has since suggested that the Mayor is not sufficiently grateful. Likewise, Howard has given LaGuardia numerous pointers, which are generally conveyed to him through the WorldTelegram's City Hall reporter. To these LaGuardia has paid little attention. Whenever the publisher sends an emissary to tell him how to run the city, the Mayor lectures the City Hall man on editorial policy. LaGuardia asks for the heads of reporters with the same assurance that Howard asks for those of city commissioners. The two little men obtain equally negative results and are in a fairly constant state of reciprocal exasperation.

  The WorldTelegram split page rose to journalistic eminence side by side with the United Feature Syndicate, a ScrippsHoward subsidiary organized in 1921 principally for the purpose of marketing weekly articles by David Lloyd George. As the first World War receded in public memory and Lloyd George in prominence, the articles became more difficult to place. A United Press man named Monte Bourjaily was delegated to take charge of the syndicate. He hired Benito Mussolini, Camille Chautemps, and a now nearly forgotten German statesman named Wilhelm Marx to write monthly letters about European politics and offered the fourfold service to nonScripps Sunday newspapers. The syndicate feature sold moderately well. Upon the accession of Pius XI, Bourjaily obtained the American newspaper rights to an authorized biography of the new Pope by an Italian cardinal. This feature sold extremely well, and the cardinal used his share of the payments to rebuild a church. United Feature later bought the American newspaper rights to Charles Dickens' The Life of Our Lord, an unpublished manuscript that his heirs made available for publication in 1931. The Life of Our Lord earned a quarter million dollars for the ScrippsHoward syndicate. Bourjaily next bought the rights to Napoleon's le
tters to MarieLouise, until then never published. This feature did not go well, apparently because few newspaper readers knew who MarieLouise was. A competing syndicate scored handsomely by dressing up Napoleon's letters to Josephine with illustrations and selling them to more newspapers than bought the letters to MarieLouise, although the letters to Josephine had been in the public domain for a century.

  Bourjaily also tried to sell Broun's column to newspapers outside the ScrippsHoward chain, but never with great success, because, from fifty miles outside the city limits, Broun in those days assumed the aspect of a gindrinking Communist with loose morals. United Feature entered the syndicated columnist field in a serious way in December 1933, with the launching of Westbrook Pegler. This writer had some years earlier worked for Howard, almost totally unremarked, as a reporter, a war correspondent, and finally as a sports editor of the United Press. He had then switched to the Chicago Tribune syndicate as a sports columnist, and his work had been sold to a number of other papers, including the Post in New York. In 1933, Colonel Frank Knox, publisher of the Chicago Daily News, who wanted Pegler's stuff for his own paper, suggested to Howard that the News and the WorldTelegram combine to engage Pegler as an essayist on general subjects. Howard agreed, and Pegler was signed up at a salary of thirty thousand dollars a year and half of all syndicate sales in excess of sixty thousand dollars. Pegler, as a sports writer, had been philosophical rather than technical, presenting the wrestling and boxing businesses as a sort of parable of Realpolitik, which had only a slight literal relation to anything that would interest a sports fan. As an essayist, Pegler was assigned a spot on the split page with Broun.

  Pegler wrote several practice columns to prime himself for his new job, and showed them to Howard. They included one approving the lynching by a mob in San Jose, California, of two men charged with kidnaping. The publisher thought that this was about right for a new columnist who wanted to attract attention. The lynching column was the third to appear under Pegler's byline in his new column. It drew a great deal of indignant notice, which was just what Howard had wanted. One of the hottest reactions was Broun's. He asked, in his neighboring column, “Is this to be the measure of justice in California? Men with blood and burnt flesh on their hands are to be set free. Mooney must remain in jail. Freedom for the guilty. Punishment for the innocent.” It was generally conceded that a rave review of a lynching represented a fresh point of view.

  Howard's own writing is undistinguished. In Pegler, he evidently grew to feel, he had found his voice. Pegler was to Howard what Jenny Lind had been to Barnum. Some years ago a volume of Pegler's columns was published under the title of The Dissenting Opinions of Mister Westbrook Pegler. By a rare phenomenon, he almost always dissents from the side where the money isn't. In the last presidential campaign, for example, Pegler fearlessly dissented from the majority of his fellow citizens by plumping for Wendell Willkie. It was a happy coincidence that eightyone per cent of the newspaper publishers who buy columns were on the same side. Dorothy Thompson, whose candidate won, lost about fifty per cent of her syndication during the campaign. Pegler is a courageous defender of minorities—for example, the people who pay large income taxes. Just the same, he has devoted around twenty columns to attacking the American Newspaper Guild, which Howard loathes. Pegler's idea of a demagogue, to judge by his columns on Senator Wagner, is a senator who favors labor laws. One of the columnist's favorite irritants is a character known as “the bosshater.” On the other hand, Pegler may dislike sycophants but he never writes any columns against them. He has written thousands of words about laborunion officials who employ violence or have criminal records, but he has never touched on the incidence of criminality among company guards or strikebreakers. During the last campaign he wrote several columns about the godlike virtues of Hoosiers, without mentioning specifically either the Republican candidate or Howard. In January, shortly after Willkie split with Howard over the question of giving aid to England, Pegler wrote a column denouncing Willkie as a fake Hoosier. This was the case of dissent from himself.

  Howard, in addition to sensing the ideological kinship between himself and Pegler, found in Pegler one who sympathized with his belief that ignorance is an endearing quality. This is the basis of the Artemus Ward school of humor. There is nothing, except perhaps Mrs. Roosevelt, on which the columnist can grow more bitterly satirical than the subject of college professors, who, he implies, are parasites on society and had better keep their noses out of public business. He calls psychoanalysts “Viennese head feelers,” and once wrote a column voicing his suspicion that Einstein was a fraud since he, Pegler, couldn't follow Einstein's reasoning. His top effort in this line was a column last summer fearlessly deploring false sympathy for Paris. Paris, Pegler wrote, was a city famous only for naked women.

  Howard's second important addition to the splitpage menagerie was another United Feature discovery, Brigadier General Hugh S. Johnson, a Reserve officer who had been administrator of NRA for the first sixteen months of its existence. General Johnson, who had finally broken with the President, brought away from Washington a conviction that Mr. Roosevelt had fallen among evil advisers, along with a vocabulary culled from among the ruins of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The enterprising Bourjaily read a speech that General Johnson had made before a group of businessmen and went to see him at the Hotel St. Regis, where he was then living. Bourjaily told Johnson that the speech, properly cut up and pasted together again, would have made five syndicate columns and that it was uneconomical to give the stuff away. The General was pleased to learn he could sell what he had to say. He signed a contract with United Feature which gave him an advance and fifty per cent of the money received from the syndication of his articles. As a columnist, the General warmed up slowly, with the thesis that the President was a possibly honest fellow who had been kidnaped by Stalinist janissaries. This was too mild to appeal to most publishers, and it was not until the General got down to painting Mr. Roosevelt as a hewitch hurrying the nation to a massacre that the column became a really popular number in the syndicate salesmen's line. By the time the Supreme Court fight was at its hottest, Johnson's share of the syndicate sales had risen to forty thousand dollars a year. The King Features Syndicate hired Johnson away from United Feature early this spring for a flat guarantee of fifty thousand dollars a year, but the column is still appearing in the WorldTelegram and in Howard's Washington News, without, however, any mention of the fact that the General is now working for Hearst.

  The most incongruous member of the splitpage collection is Mrs. Roosevelt, still another Bourjaily literary find. Mrs. Roosevelt had, when her husband became President, accepted the editorship of a new Bernarr MacFadden magazine called Babies, Just Babies. The proceeds from her contract had gone to a couple of her favorite charities, but, all in all, the venture had not been happy. Bourjaily suggested that she write a column in the form of a daily letter to a woman friend relating the events of her day. He then signed her to a tenyear contract. The feature, at the last report, was grossing about eighty thousand dollars a year, of which forty thousand dollars is retained by United Feature and forty thousand dollars goes to Mrs. Roosevelt, who turns it over to a number of charities. Mrs. Roosevelt is not only a business asset for Howard but also, in his frequently expressed opinion, a proof of the WorldTelegram's impartiality. “If I were such a hell of a Tory as people say,” he protests, “I wouldn't have Eleanor there, would I? But I don't think she ought to write about politics.”

  When the split page began to attract notice, Broun's column, “It Seems to Me,” appeared in the upper righthand corner of the page, that position being considered the most prominent. Later, Broun was shifted to the left side of the page, and Pegler, the new arrival, received the place of honor at the right. As Howard accumulated columnists, he began to pack them into layers, like Chinese in an opium den. They were all stacked together in a tier on the left side of the page, and their relative levels indicated the importance the manageme
nt attached to their output. Pegler, for economic and symbolic reasons, has been from the beginning of this arrangement what racing men would call the top horse. He brings in the most money, about one hundred and fifty thousand dollars yearly. Broun, who once wrote, “The underdogs of the world will someday whip their weight in wildcats,” at first ran directly under Pegler. Broun complained that his pieces were often shortened, sometimes by the excision of sentences or clauses that he considered vital to continuity, and was told that this was done not from malice but because it was necessary to make the tier of columns come out even at the foot of the page. Johnson had the third position from the top, and Mrs. Roosevelt, possibly because she was an avowed Democrat or because Howard felt a lady should have a lower berth, occupied the nethermost position. As differences between Broun and the publisher developed, the heavyweight columnist's specific gravity appeared to pull him toward the bottom. When the day came that Howard moved Johnson above Broun, a memorandum informed all ScrippsHoward editors, “General Johnson is a columnist of increasing importance, as indicated by the change in his relative position on the page.”

  IV—Once Again She Lorst 'Er Nime