The Telephone Booth Indian

by A. J. Liebling

  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?”

  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 hi
s 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 19
36 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.”