The Telephone Booth Indian (28 page)

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 management 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.”

A series of articles which appeared in the Philadelphia
Record
and the New York
Post
last winter referred to Roy Wilson Howard, head man of the ScrippsHoward newspapers, as “the mastermind of appeasement.” This irritated Howard but scarcely astonished him. He ascribed it to the
Post
's desire to take away the
WorldTelegram
's departmentstore advertising. Howard also said that Robert S. Allen, the author of the articles, was angry at him because he had never run Allen's daily column, “Washington MerryGoRound,” in the
Worldam.

William R. Castle, UnderSecretary of State during the Hoover administration, and General Robert E. Wood, chairman of the board of Sears, Roebuck and national chairman of the America First Committee, two of the country's outstanding and least apologetic appeasers, are among the few prominent citizens with whom the publisher does not admit close acquaintance. “Why, I only met Castle once in my life, and that was about eight years ago on a beach in Hawaii,” Howard recently said. As the Senate debate on the lendlease bill was nearing its close in March, he said, “I wouldn't know General Wood if I saw him.” Nevertheless, Howard wrote a firstpage editorial on the lendlease bill in which he made verbatim use of one of the mailorder General's most narcotic arguments: “If six million men, well trained and well equipped, cannot cross twenty miles of water and conquer 1,500,000, how could they possibly cross three thousand miles and successfully invade the United States?” The first part of this proposition implied that Great Britain was safe from invasion, the second that the larger the expanse of water to be defended by a given force was, the easier the defender's task would be. Howard introduced Wood's doublebarreled paralogism with the casualness of a teacher making an allusion to accepted truth. The editorial was a retreat from Howard's allout opposition to the bill; its thesis was that since the measure was bound to pass anyway, the country should support the President. The
WorldTelegram
then eased into a campaign of opposition to convoys and reproof to detractors of Charles A. Lindbergh. While Howard has made no frontal attack on aid to Britain in principle, he has fought a continuous delaying action against every concrete proposal of aid. Of the thirtyone members of the America First national committee who first appeared on its letterheads last winter, three—General Hugh S. Johnson, John T. Flynn, and Major Al Williams—were ScrippsHoward columnists.
Howard said at the time that it was a coincidence. Feverishly isolationist senators like Burton K. Wheeler of Montana, Gerald P. Nye of North Dakota, and Robert R. Reynolds of North Carolina are treated with conspicuous respect in the ScrippsHoward press. The collective efforts of this group of senators, so faithfully cheered on by Howard, delayed the passage of the cashandcarry bill of 1939 for two months. They held up the Selective Service Training Act until the end of last summer, which caused a still longer delay in the expansion of the army, since men could not be sent to training camps in fall weather until barracks had been built for them. Howard, however, has never joined forces with the isolationists. He calls his procedure “maintaining detachment.” In a parallel manner, from 1935 through 1937, he called himself a supporter of the President but opposed many of his specific projects and said he hoped Roosevelt wouldn't get a large majority of the electoral vote in 1936 because too much power is bad for anyone. Similarly, last fall, while Howard was in agreement with Wendell L. Willkie in principle, Westbrook Pegler and General Johnson, in their ScrippsHoward columns, seemed to develop a temporary attack of nonpartisanship every time Willkie refused a Howard suggestion about campaign strategy. Whenever Willkie complained, Howard explained that the most effective support was the least obvious.

Howard's position on the country's foreign policy has possibly been influenced by a feeling that the President has never taken him seriously enough. He once related with some indignation part of a conversation with the President at the White House. He had told Roosevelt that a certain stand he had taken was a serious mistake, and the President had replied, “Horsefeathers, Roy, horsefeathers!” The publisher's attitude toward the war, like that of some of the America First leaders, is possibly affected by the
simple fact that he is a wealthy man who does not wish to be disturbed. In addition he regards himself as intuitive and a repository of confidential information. If he were a racetrack plunger, he would never look at horses or form charts. He would put his faith in his hunches and conversations with dopesters. Some of the dopesters he has listened to, like Al Williams, have a high opinion of German prowess and may have influenced him to put a bet on isolationism. Munich, in Howard's estimation, was good business sense. He has said that Neville Chamberlain has not yet been fully appreciated. Howard visited Europe in the summer of 1939 and filed a series of dispatches to his papers belittling the danger of war. Some people accused him of acting, like Senator Borah, as if the world crisis were a political gimmick rigged by Roosevelt. It usually takes Howard, on a foreign reporting tour, around four days to learn the truth about a major power, but he can fathom a nation of less than twentyfive million inhabitants in one afternoon. Before going on such a trip, Howard, who tells new acquaintances that he is “primarily a reporter,” bashfully asks his subordinates if they think it worth while for him to cable some stories. They invariably think so.

It is impossible to imagine Howard playing HarunalRashid on the Bowery, as hulking Captain Joseph Medill Patterson, publisher of the
Daily News
, sometimes does. Howard's contacts with the people are generally those he makes on Pan American clippers, at de luxe hotels, and at dinner parties. One acquaintance who made a considerable impression on him in the thirties was Baron Axel WennerGren, the Swedish industrialist, who is heavily interested in the Electrolux and Servel corporations and whose European holdings include timberlands, paper mills, and munitions factories. WennerGren was at the time a friend of Edward VIII, Mrs. Simpson, and Von Ribbentrop, then German
Ambassador to London. He had also known Hermann Goring during the German's sojourn in Sweden after the first World War. WennerGren's viewpoint, as recorded in the
WorldTelegram
and elsewhere, seemed to be that though there were labor unions in Sweden they knew their place, whereas in Germany and Italy the workers, by insisting on too much, had made necessary a totalitarian revolution, and that he feared the same thing might happen in the United States. Whenever WennerGren was coming to New York, Howard was apt to have a reporter sent to meet his ship, with advice on what opinions to look for in the statement the Baron had not yet made. The Baron believed that Germany and the United States could get along beautifully with the right people running both countries. Senator Wheeler was another whose interviews were frequently “frontoffice” assignments. Not only such officially protected game as WennerGren and Wheeler but almost all
WorldTelegram
interviewees wearing suits that cost more than one hundred dollars would begin by asking the reporter, “How is Roy?”