The Telephone Booth Indian

by A. J. Liebling

II—The Pax Howardiensis

  Early the morning after last Election Day, a message went out on the wires of the United Press, the ScrippsHoward news service, to editors of the nineteen ScrippsHoward papers scattered over the United States, saying, “Kill Talburt Cartoon Out at Third—|R. W. H.” The cartoon, drawn by Harold Talburt, an artist employed by a ScrippsHoward feature syndicate, showed Franklin D. Roosevelt in baseball togs sliding for a base marked, with the usual ScrippsHoward subtlety, “Third Term.” The third baseman, marked “American People,” was, presumably upon ScrippsHoward advice, tagging him out. The precautionary message was a typical tribute from Roy Wilson Howard to the alertness and intelligence of his editors. He wasn't taking any chances. A few weeks after this, Howard paid a friendly call on Mr. Roosevelt at the White House. Ever since the first Wednesday of last November, a sign above the desk of the President's secretary, Stephen T. Early, has proclaimed, “We ain't mad with nobody.” It is unlikely that any other critic of the President as acrid as Howard took the sign literally so soon.

  As Howard left the President's office after the interview, reporters from the press room in the White House gathered around him on the chance of picking up a few quotations. The publisher waved the newsmen away with a twanging “Nothing to say, boys.” As he headed for the door, somebody called out, “Mr. Howard, did you call to report another armistice?” “Who said that?” Howard asked. Nobody answered, and the publisher hurried on with his short, quick stride. The anonymous voice had recalled the most gigantic gaffe in newspaper history, the falsearmistice report Howard sent over from France on November 7, 1918. The fellow who had asked the question may have reflected on the possibility that the falsearmistice episode was the clearest proof in Howard's career of his ability to survive experiences that would have proved mortally discouraging to other men.

  The report that set the country to celebrating the end of the first World War on the afternoon of November 7 was received by the United Press in New York and said, in the customary newspaper cablese: “URGENT ARMISTICE ALLIES GERMANY SIGNED ELEVEN SMORNING HOSTILITIES CEASED TWO SAFTERNOON SEDAN TAKEN SMORNING BY AMERICANS.” It was signed “HOWARD SIMMS.” Howard, then president of the United Press, was supposed by his subordinates here to be in Paris. William Philip Simms, now foreign editor of the United Press, was then the organization's manager in Paris, and it was a rule that all United Press messages from France had to bear his signature. When Howard sent the cable, he was not in Paris but in Brest, where he had just finished having a chatty lunch with ViceAdmiral Henry B. Wilson, commander of the American naval forces in France. According to Howard's subsequent account of the affair, he had concluded that the World War was about washed up and had obtained permission to return to America on a transport scheduled to sail from Brest on November 8. Armistice was in the air. The German government had appointed a delegation to meet with representatives of the Allied powers and receive terms. The two delegations were due to come together sometime on November 7, but Howard did not know the exact hour. When he met Admiral Wilson, the naval officer told him that he had just had a telephone call from a friend in the United States Embassy in Paris. The friend had told Wilson that the armistice had been signed. Howard promptly wired this interesting item from Brest, which was the cablehead of the transatlantic cable. The Brest censors were in the streets celebrating the armistice rumor, which had spread rapidly from the officers of Admiral Wilson's staff to American sailors and from them to the inhabitants. The telegraph operator assumed the censors had passed Howard's dispatch and simply transmitted it. Howard had added Simms's signature ultra vires as Simms's boss, and because of Simms's name the United Press office in New York assumed that the message came from Paris via Brest, instead of directly from Brest. Simms, if consulted, might have advised his superior to doublecheck his information, a naive procedure habitual among journalists of lower voltage.

  Newspapers in the United States passed the news along to the public under headlines like the New York Journal's “GERMANY GIVES UP, WAR ENDS AT TWO P.M.” and the Evening Post's “REPORT ARMISTICE SIGNED; CITY IN WILD DEMONSTRATION.” Factory whistles blew; church bells rang, and office workers began throwing paper out of windows. It cost New York eighty thousand dollars to clear the debris of the celebration off the streets. The State Department issued a statement in the afternoon denying that the war was over, but the public refused to be balked. The Associated Press, older and more conservative rival of Howard's pushing organization, denied the report from the first, but newspaper editors suspected that it was covering up its own lack of enterprise. An angry crowd tried to wreck the office of the Associated Press at 51 Chambers Street, shouting that it was a nest of German spies. Outside the headquarters of the United Press in the Pulitzer Building, an airraid siren, vintage of 1918, shrieked at oneminute intervals.

  During the twentyfour hours that followed the publication of Howard's report, other, lesser American correspondents in France were desperately chivied by their editors, who plaintively cabled, “CAN YOU CONFIRM WAR END?” A Times man at the headquarters of the American Second Army received twentyseven messages from Carr Van Anda, his managing editor. The correspondent kept asking Major General Robert L. Bullard, the army commander, if the war had ceased, and Bullard kept insisting it hadn't. Each denial, when cabled to America, apparently made Van Anda more suspicious. The Times headlines on November 8 furnish a concise chronicle of the previous day: “FALSE PEACE REPORT ROUSES ALL AMERICA,” “CITY GOES WILD WITH JOY,” “SUPPOSED ARMISTICE DELIRIOUSLY CELEBRATED HERE AND IN OTHER CITIES,” “CROWDS PARADE STREETS,” “JUBILANT THRONGS REJECT ALL DENIALS AND TEAR UP NEWSPAPERS CONTAINING THEM,” “JUDGES CLOSE THE COURTS,” “MAYOR ADDRESSES CROWDS AT CITY HALL,” “SALOONS CLOSED AT NIGHT TO CHECK DISORDER,” and “UNITED PRESS MEN SENT FALSE CABLE.”

  The afternoon newspapers on November 8, particularly those that had been taken in the day before, attacked the United Press. A Brooklyn Eagle editorial, typical of the milder approaches to the subject, began, “The United Press, its news dupes, and the French censors must get out of this muddle as best they can.” The Post deplored the heavy loss of working hours incurred when shipyard workers knocked off to celebrate. The Sun said, “The responsibility is serious in the extreme.” The Globe wondered, “Will the public dare to rejoice over the real news when the armistice comes or will the celebrations be an anticlimax?” During the following week, United Press news disappeared almost completely from the pages of American papers.

  All through the falsearmistice excitement, William W. Hawkins, Howard's phlegmatic secondincommand, who was in charge at the New York United Press office, fought to defend the Howard message. Hawkins had collaborated with Howard from the first year of the United Press's existence and was two years later to succeed him as president of the organization. Five or six hours after the State Department's denial of the story, Hawkins, at his office in the Pulitzer Building, said that the United Press would stand by the report until it was disproved. The State Department said that German and Allied delegates to a conference on armistice terms had not even met at the time the report was released. Hawkins replied that it was lucky Howard had got his story past a momentarily relaxed censorship. Twentyfour hours after the false report, the United Press sent out another dispatch just received from its president, saying, “URGENT BREST ADMIRAL WILSON WHO ANNOUNCED BREST NEWSPAPER ARMISTICE BEEN SIGNED LATER NOTIFIED UNCONFIRMABLE MEANWHILE BREST RIOTOUSLY CELEBRATING. HOWARD SIMMS.” Subsequently it sent out a message from Admiral Wilson admitting that the report had originated in his office. Years afterward, when the Tribune had been taken in by a fake report of a fleet of gambling palaces off the Atlantic coast, Howard, playing golf on a Westchester course, shouted to a Tribune man named Montague, who was playing near by, “Where did you get that scoop?” “Admiral Wilson told us,” Montague answered. Howard was struck dumb for five or six seconds.

  The signing of the real armistice on November 11 saved Howard and the United Press from a
ny prolonged humiliation. Americans were too pleased with the real thing to stay angry over the false. Howard ordinarily thinks of the incident lightheartedly In 1928, on the first anniversary of his acquisition of the New York Telegram, a purchase which marked ScrippsHoward's entry into the New York newspaper field, the editorial staff held a beefsteak dinner at Cavanagh's Restaurant. The publisher acted as master of ceremonies. Francis Albertanti, a sports writer, heckled Howard freely. At last, Howard happily yelled, “Shut up! I once stopped a war and I can stop you!”

  The false armistice and its aftermath did nothing to estrange Howard from Edward Wyllis Scripps, the odd old man who owned fiftyone per cent of the stock in the Scripps newspapers and the United Press and had been Howard's employer for thirteen years. The way Howard bounced back after the nightmare of November 7 increased Scripps's respect for him. Scripps, in his spare time, used to dictate for his own amusement notes he called “disquisitions” on anything that came into his mind. He had already dictated one on Howard in 1917. Howard, then thirtyfour years old, had been president of the United Press for five years. “Right from the start, Howard's selfrespect and selfconfidence was so great as to make it impossible for it to increase,” Scripps had said. “Doubtless to himself his present situation in life, his successes and his prosperity, all seem to be perfectly natural, and to be no more nor less than he expected.” Describing the young man at the time of their first meeting, Scripps dictated, “His manner was forceful and the reverse of modest. Gall was written all over his face. It was in every tone and every word he voiced.”

  Scripps never tried to build a large metropolitan newspaper. He remained true all his life to a formula of establishing liberal, shoestring newspapers in towns so much alike in their outlook that the publications could have practically interchangeable parts. The national policies of the papers were determined at annual conventions of Scripps editors held at French Lick, Indiana, where Scripps would berate them all on general principles. The editors could determine their own local policies, provided they favored labor. In the eighties, Scripps, as a young man, had tried to run a newspaper in St. Louis and had found Joseph Pulitzer's PostDispatch too well intrenched in the liberal field in that city He had thereupon decided that he was destined to be a newspaper Woolworth rather than a Tiffany. Except for St. Louis and Chicago, where he launched a smallscale experiment with an intentionally adless newspaper just before the World War, Scripps tried no city larger than Cleveland. There, in 1878, he founded the enormously profitable Press with an initial investment of $12,500. Howard, while he worked under Scripps, was a liberal too. He was frantically adaptable.

  The town of Gano, in southwestern Ohio, where Howard was born in 1883, is so small that it does not appear in an ordinary library atlas. Howard usually refers to himself as a Hoosier because his family moved to Indianapolis seven years after he was born. William Howard, his father, was for several years a railroad brakeman and later became a conductor. Railroad pay was low in the last century, and the Howards had a harder time than most railroad families, even though Roy was an only child. William Howard was tubercular, and a good part of his income went for medical care. When a friend a few years ago made fun of Howard for tipping a Paris taxi driver only fifty centimes, the publisher declared solemnly, “If my father had had a thousand dollars saved up, he could have gone out to Colorado and been cured.” Howard sometimes speaks appreciatively of the railroad labor brotherhoods, because, he says, his father's pay and working conditions were terrible in those old nonunion days. Roy went to Manual Training High School in Indianapolis, and became the school correspondent for the Indianapolis News. William Howard died during his son's senior year, and after the boy graduated he went to work as a reporter on the city staff of the News at eight dollars a week. He soon transferred to the Star, the opposition paper, where he became sports editor at twenty a week. Supporting his widowed mother, the boy, small, tense, determined to get on, adopted his now wellknown uniform of gaudy shirts and patentleather shoes as an outward disclaimer of his inward forebodings.

  On the Indianapolis News, Howard met several men who became more or less fixtures in his life. Among them was the late Ray Long, a slightly older Hoosier, who was already city editor of that paper. Long, about Howard's size, was shallow, quick, energetic, and hedonistic. Howard always admired him as a pattern of worldliness and savoirvivre. For twentyfive years, from 1910, when Long left Indianapolis to be a magazine editor, until 1935, when he committed suicide, he and Howard were inseparable companions after working hours. During that period Long edited Red Book, Cosmopolitan, and other magazines. Another friend Howard made in Indianapolis was a reporter named Lowell Mellett, a Hoosier born in the Elwood that Wendell L. Willkie subsequently made famous. Mellett, present director of the Office of Government Reports in Washington, is one of Franklin D. Roosevelt's principal advisers on public relations. Men who worked with Howard in Indianapolis remember most his eagerness and the neat manner in which he always draped his jacket on a hanger before sitting down at his typewriter. An older man on the News named Charles Stewart, who liked Howard, presently got a job as telegraph editor of the St. Louis PostDispatch and took the cub with him as assistant. Howard's mother rented a house in St. Louis, and Stewart boarded with the Howards. When Ray Long became managing editor of Scripps's Cincinnati Post a couple of years later, he sent for Howard to be news editor, and mother and son moved to Cincinnati. Mellett also joined the Post staff. Scripps's Midwestern papers were then known as the ScrippsMcRae League; the McRae was Milton McRae, a junior partner who owned a relatively trifling amount of stock. Howard, who had been reading O. Henry, was eager to move on to New York and become a New Yorker. Long managed to have him appointed New York correspondent for the ScrippsMcRae League, and Howard took the train for the big city. When he became proprietor of the New York Telegram twentyone years later, he put notices on the bulletin board in the city room that said, “Remember! New York is Bagdad on the subway.” O. O. McIntyre, when he eventually began writing his column, seemed to Howard the only authentic interpreter of the New York scene.

  The twenty-three-year-old Howard who came to New York with an assured thirtyeightdollaraweek job, a beginning most of his colleagues would have envied, had already acquired a species of bantamweight dignity. “When you're my size,” he sometimes says, “you can't afford to be a comedian.” Newspapering, despite urgent prodding from schools of journalism, has always lagged behind the learned professions on the march to seemliness. Lawyers wrestled and played practical jokes on each other in Lincoln's time, but newspapermen continued to rough each other up for many decades thereafter. Howard, small, obstreperous, and glossy, had had to put up with an unusual amount of mauling during his Indianapolis and St. Louis days. One contemporary remembers seeing him tossed across the city room of the Star by a fatheaded giant giving a demonstration of jujitsu. Another time a colleague on the PostDispatch playfully touched a lighted match to the nape of the cub's neck. Howard, unfortunately, had that morning drenched his hair with a tonic that contained alcohol. A blue flame flickered over him, and for a moment he resembled a crepe Suzette flambee. He never entered into the spirit of these high jinks, and finally his special brand of dignity came to be respected.

  The Hoosier boulevardier was just beginning to settle into his role as the Babylonian correspondent of the ScrippsMcRae League when Scripps, in 1907, acquired the Publishers' Press Association, a decrepit newsgathering service which he made the nucleus of a new agency he called the United Press. The Publishers' Press, which had its headquarters in New York, cost Scripps about $180,000. The Associated Press has always been a cooperative enterprise which will issue no new franchise on its telegraphic news service in a city where there are member papers unless the members consent. Since at that time there was no other largescale telegraphic agency in the country, a nonmember paper was at a tremendous disadvantage. Scripps said that the U.P. would buck the A.P. and sell news to anybody who would pay for it. He considered it
his greatest contribution to a free journalism, and it proved to be one of his most profitable accomplishments. Shortly before his death he wrote, “Perhaps the greatest reason, however, for my objecting to becoming an integral part of the Press Association [the A.P.] in the crisis was that I knew at least ninety per cent of my fellows in American journalism were capitalists and conservatives. In those, my youthful days of pride, I swelled up with vanity at the thought that I was to be the savior of the free press in America. Of course, I have learned since that it requires more than one man to guarantee such freedom.” Howard decided, soundly enough, that he would have more future as an executive with the new organization than as the solitary correspondent in Gomorrah of a group of Ohio newspapers.

  The first president of the United Press was John Vandercook, a former Cincinnati Post official who knew Howard. Howard made his interest in the U.P. known, and Vandercook hired him as New York district manager. Mellett soon came on from Cincinnati, too, and for a while the two Indianapolis boys, both thin, shared a single bed in the apartment he and his mother rented. Hawkins came on from Louisville, where he was working on the CourierJournal. The United Press was guaranteed against loss in the first few years by dues Scripps levied on the score of papers he controlled to cover the news agency's operating costs. Scripps, following his custom, reserved fiftyone per cent of the stock for himself, giving an option on twenty per cent to Vandercook and an option on another twenty per cent to Hamilton B. Clark, the business manager. Minor executives had chances to acquire smaller blocks of stock. The executives were to pay for their stock out of the profits of the new venture, if profits developed. This was a system Scripps had developed for giving executives of his newspapers an extra incentive. Even today ScrippsHoward executives of importance usually have an agreement with the management that they call “a deal,” which means that they are rewarded with stock in the corporation employing them, if the corporation shows a profit. When an executive leaves one ScrippsHoward corporation for another, or for the outside world, he is compelled to surrender his stock at a price fixed by an “appraisal board” of other ScrippsHoward brass hats. His successor then has a chance to acquire the same stock. Vandercook, a newspaperman of great ability, died suddenly just as the United Press profits began to come in. Howard, already conspicuous for his push, begged for a chance at Vandercook's job. Gilson Gardner, Scripps's secretary, has described Howard as “busy as a wasp trying to get through a windowpane.” Clark backed the youngster. Scripps was at Miramar, his California ranch. He spent most of his time there because he didn't like other rich men and couldn't abide poor people, he once told one of his associates. The old man had never seen Howard, but Scripps's wife and Howard's mother had been chums as girls, and Scripps had heard a good deal about him. “I was surprised at being urged to let Howard be tried out,” Scripps later wrote. But he gave him the job. “My fancy was tickled with the idea,” the old man continued; “my propensity to try experiments demonstrated itself again. However, Howard made good. Howard continued to make good. The United Press…began to grow into a property that had an actual value.” Soon Howard got a chance to buy Vandercook's twentypercent share of the company's stock, and did so. Clark resigned to found a Philadelphia paper, and Howard also picked up his twenty per cent. In 1909, Howard made a trip abroad to report to Scripps on the foreignnewsgathering arrangements. Some time before, he had met a young freelance newspaperwoman named Margaret Rohe in New York. Miss Rohe, tiring of letters, had gone to London in the cast of an American show called The Chorus Lady, in which she had a small speaking part. Howard met her again in London and married her. Howard's mother took a second husband a few years after her son's marriage and moved to the Pacific coast, where she died in 1931.