The Telephone Booth Indian (29 page)

In the years between his purchase of the
World
and the beginning of the second World War, Howard succeeded in becoming a fairly wellknown New York figure, although he never got to be a celebrity
du premier plan
, like Jimmy Walker or Walter Winchell or Dutch Schultz. He is certainly the only publisher of a New York newspaper except William Randolph Hearst whose photograph would be recognized by the average newspaper reader. Captain Patterson, Ogden Reid, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, and William Dewart are men without faces as far as the public is concerned. Returning to his hotel from one of the sessions of the Democratic convention in Chicago last summer, Howard and a few of his employees, unable to get a taxi, climbed aboard a crowded streetcar. A large, sweaty fellow in work clothes looked
down at the small, iridescent publisher and snarled, “Say, you look like that soandso Roy Howard.” Howard seemed thoroughly pleased. In the early years of his career as a publisher, he often accepted appointments to public bodies; he was once, for instance, on the board of judges in a Camelcigarette essay contest. Now, while he is more conservative, he is still receptive to the right kind of appointment. It was the belief of several political writers during the last campaign that he would have liked to be Willkie's Secretary of State. He does not allow his name to appear in the society columns of his own papers, because, he says, “Shucks, I'm not society,” but he is constantly interviewed by other papers climbing in and out of planes, and he used to be a minor staple for shipnews reporters. Mrs. Howard, a tranquil, friendly woman, does not appear at all the gatherings he attends. The schedule would be too rigorous for almost any woman. The Howards have two children, a son and daughter. The son, Jack, was graduated from Yale in 1932 and is now president of ScrippsHoward Radio, Incorporated, which operates two broadcasting stations in Memphis. Jane, the daughter, is married to Lieutenant Albert Perkins of the United States navy.

Howard has paid less and less attention to his outoftown newspapers in recent years. The national headquarters of the chain are in New York, instead of in Cleveland, where they were in E. W. Scripps's day, and editorial conventions are now held in Washington more often than in French Lick, the traditional site. Oldtimers say that the programs at these gettogethers are quite uniform. One of the officers makes a speech denouncing the Reds; another complains about taxes, and a third delivers a rousing plea for more concentrated, punchy writing. After that, everybody plays poker.

The chain's papers have become increasingly orthodox, and they no longer reveal any of the Scripps crotchets about the dangers
of monopoly or the right of labor to organize. When ScrippsHoward bought and merged the Denver
Times
and the
Rocky Mountain News
in 1926, Howard announced that the chain had come to Denver “to correct a sinister journalistic situation” which was caused by the domination of the Tammen and Bonfils
Post.
Three years later he told the Denver Chamber of Commerce he was in town primarily to sell advertising. When the chain acquired the Memphis
Commercial Appeal
, a rich, conservative newspaper, a few years ago, it retained the
Appeal's
makeup, typography, and syndicate features, as well as its traditional editorial policy and, as a consequence, its advertisers. The ScrippsHoward San Francisco
News
has supported a referendum proposition to make the franchises of a traction company perpetual. So it goes, more or less, with other ScrippsHoward papers.

One of the publisher's amusements is hunting. “Roy loves to shoot a moose,” William W. Hawkins, the second man in the ScrippsHoward organization, says. Howard democratically plucks the birds he shoots on Bernard M. Baruch's estate in South Carolina and takes pride in the way he dresses a rabbit. Even as a hunter, he is financially conservative. He went to New Brunswick with a group of his associates a couple of years ago, and their guide showed them fine sport. The other huntsmen gathered in the ScrippsHoward offices the day after their return to decide what to send the guide as a mark of appreciation. They had just about settled on a rifle when Howard entered the conclave. “Now, wait a minute, boys,” he said. “Let's not be so splendiferous. Let's call in one of our artists from N.E.A. and have him draw a picture of a moose's head crying big tears. Then we'll all sign it and send it to Jean so he can hang it in his cabin.” The guide got the picture.

Howard's present political course was determined in 1937,
the year Franklin D. Roosevelt began his second term in the White House. That year the publisher broke with his old friend Lowell Mellett, the editor of the ScrippsHoward Washington
Daily News
, who had been something of a final link with the Scripps days. Mellett saw the New Deal as an expression of the old Scripps progressivism. In the early twenties he had written a series of articles denouncing what he called “government by the courts,” and limitation of the power of the Supreme Court had become almost a Scripps copyright theme. When, in 1937, Howard wanted the
News
, like the other papers of the chain, to campaign against Roosevelt's scheme to reorganize the Court, Mellett resigned, giving up an income of twentyfive thousand dollars a year to take a government job at eight thousand dollars. That same year Howard broke irrevocably with Broun. The precipitating cause was a document in the form of a letter “to a famous newspaper publisher,” which Broun contributed to the
New Republic.
Broun, addressing his purportedly fictitious publisher as Butch Dorrit, wrote:

Do you honestly think that the great American public is all steamed up about your income tax? Take off the false whiskers. There's nothing immoral or unethical in your espousing the conservative side all along the line, but doesn't that pretense of progressivism sometimes cleave to your gullet? All your arguments are based upon the premise that you're a great success. You've scrapped some great papers and what have you got to show for them? What's left is an eightcolumn cut of the Quints asking permission to go to the bathroom.

This last sentence was a reference to the fullpage layouts of pictures of the Dionne Quintuplets with which the
WorldTelegram
had been embellishing itself about once a week. The Newspaper Enterprise Association, a ScrippsHoward feature syndicate known as the N.E.A., had triumphantly obtained exclusive American rights to newspaper photographs of the sisters. Perhaps more cutting was Broun's allusion to Howard's tax affairs. Broun's contract still had two years to run, but after this incident he and Howard did not make even a pretense of mutual tolerance. “I wouldn't pour water on Broun's leg if he was on fire,” the publisher once said to some
WorldTelegram
men. The Bureau of Internal Revenue, in an attempt to illustrate loopholes in the tax law, had named Howard and several of his associates, along with other wealthy men, at a hearing by the Congressional Joint Committee on Tax Evasion and Avoidance, as creators of personal holding companies. The Treasury subsequently maintained that the choice of names was accidental, but some observers thought the accident well planned. The testimony, they figured, was aimed to forestall a ScrippsHoward newspaper campaign for downward revision of the surplusprofits tax. A newspaper owner who was already taking full advantage of a wide gap in the law would make an awkward figure as crusader for further tax reductions.

Old Scripps had anticipated an economic revolution within a hundred years and had been accustomed to say that it was up to people of wealth to make the change painless. Howard once said, “I wonder if the old man would have been such a liberal if he had had a pistol up against his belly the way I have.” Howard was referring to the American Newspaper Guild. Broun was one of the founders and the first national president of this union of newspaper editorial and businessoffice workers. The coming of the Guild to the ScrippsHoward papers brought a general rise in minimum wages and the establishment of severance pay in proportion to length of service. The Guild also protected the fortyhour week
established by NRA. These changes cost the newspaper chain about a million dollars a year. Restrained editorial support, in the old days, of unions in other industries had cost precisely nothing, and Scripps himself might have balked at paying this much in cash for his franchise in the friendoflabor business.

In 1934, when Broun's original contract with the
WorldTelegram
expired, the Guild, which had not yet arrived at the
WorldTelegram
, had still seemed innocuous. It had not yet joined even the American Federation of Labor, from which it later seceded to affiliate itself with the CIO. Westbrook Pegler, who had been placed on the famous “firstpage secondsection,” or “split page,” with Broun toward the end of 1933, had not yet established himself as more than a side dish, and the older columnist remained the
WorldTelegram
's chief claim to prestige. During the honeymoon months of the first Roosevelt administration, Broun even began to look a little like a prophet. There was a popular enthusiasm for the sort of governmental innovations that would have been called radical a couple of years earlier. Business in general showed signs of improvement, and William Randolph Hearst, foreseeing a period of commercial expansion, began a campaign to hire away his competitor's editorial assets. Broun was getting about five hundred dollars a week, but Hearst's King Features Syndicate offered him a contract at twelve hundred dollars and a cash bonus of twentyfive thousand dollars if he would sign it. Howard offered Broun a contract at seven hundred dollars a week, which, with the columnist's share of his rather modest syndicate sales, would bring his annual income to forty thousand dollars. The idea of working for Hearst was not pleasant to Broun, so he took the Howard offer even though it was lower.

When the Guild joined the American Federation of Labor in
1936 and started its campaign to get the
WorldTelegram
to sign a contract with it, Howard told the Guildsmen that the public would have no confidence in reports of labor disputes by writers who belonged to unions. Broun argued that the public had no confidence in journalists who had to reflect the views of antilabor publishers. Howard always treated as coincidental, extraneous, and without importance the fact that in general the level of salaries on the
WorldTelegram
was far below that on the
Daily News
, whose management welcomed union organization. Around that time a favorite anecdote in the
WorldTelegram
city room was about a depressed and impoverished reporter who in 1934 scooped the entire country by obtaining facsimiles of the signatures on the Lindberghkidnaping ransom notes. Lee B. Wood, the
WorldTelegram
's executive editor, told the reporter that in recognition of his coup the paper had decided to reward him with a due bill on a chain clothing store entitling him to a thirtydollar suit of clothes. The reporter went to the store, got a suit, and, when he looked in the glass, acquired enough confidence to try to find another job. He landed one at two and a half times his
WorldTelegram
salary.

Howard issued a long statement to the
WorldTelegram
staff in 1936 saying that he would never negotiate with the Guild, although he would welcome a company union. The following year, however, he signed a contract with the Guild, which had become powerful enough to make him eat his words. Even without the Guild, Howard, at fiftyeight, might today be a wellestablished conservative, but the fight probably speeded up his natural metabolic changes.

In 1928, Howard, overruling the Scrippstrained editors like Mellett, had his papers back Hoover for the presidency when most liberals supported the Democratic ticket of Alfred E. Smith
and Joseph T. Robinson. Howard argued that Hoover was a great progressive in disguise. The depression did not make Howard change his mind. Moreover, since it enabled him to absorb the competing
Evening World
and to pick up a few shreds of the morning
World
's prestige at bargain rates, he had no cause to be heartbroken, and in his enthusiasm he was probably inclined to believe the bankers when they predicted that prosperity might return almost any week end. He said, however, he felt that the voters would demand a change of administration and that he wanted a safe one. He went to the Democratic national convention in Chicago in 1932 to collaborate with John F. Curry of Tammany and John McCooey, the Democratic leader of Brooklyn, in a stopRoosevelt drive. Tammany was angry at Roosevelt because while he was Governor of New York State he had forced Mayor Jimmy Walker out of office. Howard, whose editorial writers had howled for Walker's removal, evidently now felt that he was nearer to Tammany than to Roosevelt. The
WorldTelegram
announced that it favored the nomination of Al Smith. A widely accepted theory held that Howard figured Smith would block Roosevelt, after which, with the convention in a deadlock, the publisher could effect the nomination, as a compromise, of Newton D. Baker, Secretary of War under Woodrow Wilson and then, incidentally, general counsel for the ScrippsHoward newspapers. This apparently boyish attempt to name a President of the United States amused James A. Farley, who was managing Roosevelt's campaign. “Howard thought he could take off a few afternoons from his newspaper duties to nominate a presidential candidate,” Farley wrote in his memoirs. “The game is somewhat more complicated.”

After the Republicans had renominated Hoover, the ScrippsHoward editorial convention at French Lick endorsed him. The
publisher showed no warmth for Roosevelt until the summer after the inauguration, when “New Deal” had become a password to popularity. He then threw himself on the President's neck with all the shyness of a hostess in a navy cafe. “Roy is a fellow who likes to climb aboard a band wagon,” one politician said awhile ago, “and then gets mad if the fellows who were on first won't let him drive and play the bass drum at the same time.”

Howard's infatuation with the President ended with the “breathingspell” letters they exchanged in the summer of 1935. Alarmed by the administration's tax program and quietly relieved by the Supreme Court decision which terminated the NRA, Howard proposed to Stephen Early, the President's secretary, that Mr. Roosevelt grant him an exclusive interview. The President was to furnish prepared answers to a questionnaire previously submitted by Howard. The affair was to be on the grand scale. There would be photographers, newsreel cameramen, and probably a broadcast, and the purport of the President's answers would be that recovery had already been achieved and that reform was something business might thenceforth cease to worry about. The President demurred, but agreed to answer a letter from Howard and permit publication of the letter with his reply. The publisher wrote that largescale industry, harassed by taxation which it considered “revengeful,” felt there should be “a breathing spell and a recess from further experimentation until the country can recover its losses.” The President answered, “The 'breathing spell' of which you speak is here—very decidedly so.” He also said, “The tax program of which you speak is based upon a broad and just social and economic purpose—this law affects only people who have incomes over fifty thousand dollars a year.” Howard published Roosevelt's reply, but his editorials soon indicated that he thought the President had trifled
with his affections. “I was never so thick with the President as people said,” he now remarks modestly, and adds, rather defiantly, “and I'm not so thin with him now as some people would like to have you think.”