The Telephone Booth Indian (27 page)

Howard had met Ralph Pulitzer aboard the
Paris
on a transatlantic crossing in the summer of 1928. The publishers had talked half jokingly of swapping the
World
for the
Telegram
and then merging the
Telegram
and
Evening World.
A year later, in New York, Herbert Pulitzer had promised Howard not so jokingly that if the brothers ever wanted to sell out they would tell him before anybody else. Pulitzer kept his word in January 1931,
and on January 31 a contract of sale with Howard was signed. Howard promised nothing more definite than that he would continue the
World
papers “in spirit.” It is not certain that Herbert Pulitzer gave a hoot. The deal became public only on February 24, when, as trustees of the Pulitzer estate, the brothers asked permission of the Surrogate's Court to go through with the sale. On such short notice it was almost impossible for other potential buyers to prepare competitive offers for the property, but the 2867 employees of the
World
papers, their jobs threatened, banded together to make a cooperative offer for it. They held a mass meeting at the Astor, a few pledging their savings and all promising to turn back a portion of each week's salary to the paper if the cooperative plan went through. At a hearing before Surrogate Foley, Howard argued that any delay would have a bad effect on the
World
staff's morale and that the paper's goodwill asset would depreciate. Wearing a waspwaisted, doublebreasted brown suit, the publisher appeared at his most incisive. Upholding the Pulitzers' right to sell, the surrogate blandly ruled that, notwithstanding Joseph Pulitzer's own lucid words, “the dominant purpose of Mr. Pulitzer must have been the maintenance of a fair income for his children and the ultimate reception of the unimpaired corpus by the remaindermen, permanence of the trust and ultimate enjoyment by his grandchildren, as intended.” This, naturally, would have been obvious to any surrogate. Foley added that he had no right to instruct the Pulitzers whether or not to accept the Howard offer, because in selling the Press Publishing Company they were acting not as trustees but as directors of the Press Publishing Company selling its assets. This would have been equally obvious to any good legal mind. Howard's offer was a definite three million dollars and the possibility of an additional two million. The money was to be paid a half million down, a half million in ninety days, and two million
in eight payments of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, to begin in 1934. The final two millions were to be paid out of the profits of the new paper, the
WorldTelegram
, if and when it earned any profits.

“No one possessed of a drop of the milk of human kindness could view with disinterest the situation of the many employees of the
World
who face at least temporary unemployment,” Howard said in a prepared statement after the transaction was closed. He had Lee Wood, managing editor of the
Telegram
, set up a registration office in the ramshackle Telegram Building on Dey Street for survivors of the
World
publications.

In the first issue of the new
WorldTelegram
, Heywood Broun, the
Telegram
's columnist graduate of the
World
, wrote, “It is my sincere belief that the ScrippsHoward chain is qualified by its record and its potentialities to carry on the Pulitzer tradition of liberal journalism.” His optimism was based on his own relations with the
Telegram
before the merger. For several years, Broun, like a star pitcher with a lastplace baseball club, had been allowed a flattering latitude of opinion in his column. The
Telegram
circulation had risen only infinitesimally in four years of hard pulling with Howard as coxswain, but it was probably true, as the publisher said, that a new set of readers had replaced the old ones who had bought the
Telegram
for the racing news and Tammany items. The new
Telegram
readers were people willing to pay three cents to see what Broun had to say.

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 letters 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.