The Rothman Scandal

by Stephen Birmingham

  But he was most comfortable taking to task individuals and institutions that were far away, beyond the law’s long reach. By the spring of 1912, Ho Rothman, who read the “real” newspapers regularly, was becoming increasingly annoyed by the boastful publicity coming out of England concerning a new luxury liner that Britain’s White Star line was planning to launch in mid-April. Everything about the undertaking seemed to him to be grossly overblown. In addition to being the world’s most luxurious, the passenger ship would be the world’s largest and heaviest, 882 feet in length, and weighing 46,328 tons. With what struck Ho as outrageous chutzpah, the new liner was being billed as “unsinkable.” Even the new liner’s name—the Titanic—struck Ho Rothman as preposterously grandiose.

  In a series of Explorer editorials, Ho Rothman wrote scathingly of the White Star venture, which he called “the Rich Man’s Liner,” and “White Star’s Folly.” He noted that the British company had high-handedly provided only enough lifeboats to accommodate the ship’s first class passengers. Should the unsinkable vessel ever sink, passengers in cabin class, tourist, and steerage would have to fend for themselves. The entire enterprise, he wrote, struck him as an act of arrogant defiance against God and Nature. From his own experience crossing the stormy North Atlantic, he doubted that any ship that ever sailed the seas could proclaim itself unsinkable. He wrote of how he personally had been aboard a mighty ship as it pitched and rolled, as forty-foot-high waves crashed across its decks, how its planks and beams shuddered and groaned as its hull seemed about to fly asunder beneath the impact of tons of water. He wrote of his own terror. He wrote of the threat of icebergs, whose giant, ghostly tips he had himself seen looming above the waves, and of his knowledge that, below these tips, huge and invisible hazards lurked that were impossible to estimate. He even noted that the Titanic’s departure date—midnight, April 12—was an unlucky Friday, and that when the ship entered the Channel it would be an unlucky 13, a congruence of dates that struck him as a sign of ill omen.

  He even, out of wishful thinking, perhaps, that his pessimism would prove justified, had a banner front-page headline set in type for the Explorer:

  TITANIC SINKS!

  Thousands Feared Lost

  He set this rack of type aside for possible future use.

  Meanwhile, Ho Rothman had needed to find another job in order to give himself some steady income until, with luck, his fledgling newspaper began to show a steady profit. He had taken a position at Bamberger’s department store, as a general clerk and errand boy, for seven dollars a week, and his days were now spent scurrying back and forth between his paper and the store. If other Americans were then working ten to twelve hours a day for six days a week, Ho Rothman was working eighteen to twenty hours a day, seven days a week.

  The principal items of overhead in running a newspaper were three: the cost of newsprint, the cost of electricity to run the presses, and the cost of water needed to mix the inks. In terms of the first item, Ho was in luck. He had inherited some two tons of newsprint from the late Mr. Meister. But paying for his electric and water supply was another matter. For a while, he had toyed with the idea of somehow connecting his electric supply line to a neighbor’s meter. But that seemed risky and, besides, he knew too little about electricity to carry out such an operation. Then he had another idea. If banks made mistakes, couldn’t utilities companies make mistakes as well? And, since he had bought his plant from the city, didn’t that mean that the city had been its previous legal owner? He placed a call to the service manager of the Newark Light & Power Company.

  “This is J. D. Sasser at City Hall,” Ho said in the best brusque American accent he could muster. “Why have not we received a bill for service at the three-oh-five Bergen Avenue property?”

  “One moment, sir. I’ll check.” When the manager came back on the line, he said, “We were notified, Mr. Sasser, that title to that property was assumed last month by a Mr. Rothman.”

  “Not at all,” said Ho authoritatively. “Not at all. Now please see to it that the bill gets sent to the city right away.”

  “Yes, sir!” said the manager.

  “We have a city to run, you know, and a budget to balance, my good man.”

  “Yes, sir!” said the manager.

  “Give me your badge number, for our records.”

  “Sir, we don’t wear badges.”

  “I just don’t want you to get into any trouble over this, my good man.”

  “No, sir!”

  It might be months, Ho figured, before the respective bureaucracies of the city government and the power company discovered what was going on, and then someone else would be blamed.

  The same tactic worked with the water company.

  Meanwhile, his duties at Bamberger’s turned out to be somewhat loosely defined. Some days he would be asked to sweep out the store’s offices and empty the wastebaskets before the executives arrived for work. On others, he might be asked to help the window dressers set up their displays and dress their mannequins. One day he might be assigned to the store’s sign shop, where the in-store signs and notices were printed, and the next day might find him running ad copy between the advertising department and the buyers’ offices for the buyers’ approval. As a result, he soon felt he knew as much about running a department store as he did about running a newspaper.

  The buyers, he quickly realized, even though they worked out of tiny, cluttered, windowless cubbyholes, were the real kingpins of the store’s operations. In theory, the buyers reported to a smaller number of higher-ups called merchandise managers. But, in actual practice—at least as long as the buyer’s figures appeared in the Gains column of each day’s sales sheet—the buyer was given carte blanche to do whatever he chose. The activities of the major buyers were rarely questioned, unless the figures from a buyer’s department showed a trace of red ink. Then he would be summoned by his merchandise manager and asked to account for himself.

  Young Ho also noticed that some buyers were definitely more important than others. At the top of the pecking order stood Mr. Gossage, the furniture buyer. When the great Eldridge J. Gossage strode through his department, underlings bowed and stepped out of his way, and otherwise tried to look busy. Next in rank came Mr. Rubin, the buyer for Major Appliances. The eminence of these two men was based on two factors: their merchandise was among the highest-priced in the store, and the square-footage their departments required comprised the store’s two largest selling areas—Mr. Gossage’s Furniture took up the entire seventh floor. The buyer for Furs, even though he dealt with expensive, luxury goods, ranked far below Furniture and Major Appliances on the status ladder. This was because his business was mostly seasonal, and furs were considered “impulse items.” But regardless of the time of year, customers still bought furniture and new kitchen stoves.

  Ho Rothman also couldn’t help noticing another oddity about the buyers. Physically, they called to mind the merchandise they dealt with. Mr. Gossage and Mr. Rubin were as massive and solidly put together as the overstuffed sofas and refrigerators that filled their respective departments. The fur buyer was a rabbity little man with a Persian lamb beard. The toy buyer was a jolly Santa Claus. The bespectacled book buyer looked like a librarian. The antiques buyer was an elderly bachelor. The women’s shoe buyer was a dainty, effeminate little fellow whose slender back exhibited a curvature that almost exactly echoed the arched insole of a lady’s pump. The fashion buyers were haughty, hatted, bejeweled women who carried themselves with the air of models about to pose for a cover of Mode. The faces of the cosmetics buyers were masked heavily with their products, while the faces of the buyers of the low-priced Basement Store wore a kind of prison pallor, as though they had never seen the light of day or been able to afford a decent meal. Even the window dressers were slender, willowy young men who, in conversation, often affected the exaggerated gestures and poses of the mannequins they dressed.

  Miss Rabinowitz, the umbrella buyer, was important only on rainy days,
when she was galvanized into action and seemed to commandeer the entire street floor as she repositioned her merchandise next to the store’s entrances and exits. Only when it rained was Miss Rabinowitz ever seen to smile.

  Ho observed other peculiarities about the way department stores were run. Once a year, for instance, in October, Bamberger’s staged a storewide anniversary or birthday sale. But then so did every other department store in the New York metropolitan area. Did this mean that every department store in the Tristate region had come into being in the month of October? Or did it have more to do with the slow selling season that regularly occurred between back-to-school and Christmas?

  As he carried sheets of advertising copy back and forth between the copywriters’ and the buyers’ offices, reading the copy as he went, he learned something about the advertising business that would stand him in good stead later on. He learned that much of the store’s advertising was misleading, if not downright false. He would read: “This magnificent set of dining room chairs by Heritage will go on sale tomorrow—for one day only—for the amazingly low, low price of $129.95!” He was familiar with the chairs in question, having often passed them on his rounds. Their price tag had always been $129.95.

  He had befriended a young copywriter named Chris, and he asked Chris about this. “Remember that buyer rhymes with liar,” was his friend’s reply. “The ‘z’ key on my typewriter is worn out from typing the word amazing.”

  Other things went on. In the Basement Store, during a sale of misses’ blouses that had been advertised as “One Day Only—All Sales Final—No Returns,” he had watched as the frantic misses’ blouse buyer and her assistants changed the size labels on a stack of shirtwaists. The small sizes had all sold out, it seemed, and so they were relabeling the large and extra-large sizes “small.”

  The store’s Giant Midwinter Furniture Sale was coming up. For some time, Ho had rather wistfully been eyeing, as he passed it, a Queen Anne-type chest-on-chest on the furniture floor. Someday, he thought, if he were able to afford a home of his own, he would like to have a chest-on-chest just like that one standing proudly in his front hall. (Later, when he became rich, Ho Rothman would not have put a piece like that in his maid’s room!) Its price was $59.95, far beyond his humble reach, even if he used his employee’s ten percent discount and the store’s Lay-Away Plan, and even if he had a place to put it. On the opening day of the great sale, Ho made a special trip to the chest-on-chest, to see how much it had been marked down. Sure enough, there it was with a new price tag that read: “Sale priced just $59.95—formerly $259.95!”

  He had occasion to encounter Mr. Eldridge J. Gossage that day, as the latter marched down the grand allée between his highboys and his breakfronts, looking important and pleased with himself, and Ho took the liberty of mentioning the matter of the Queen Anne chest-on-chest. Mr. Gossage looked pained, and mumbled something about comparable prices at other retailers. But, Ho wanted to know, what would happen if word of this sort of activity leaked out to the press—even to the humble newcomer, the Newark Explorer, that he himself was publishing? Would not the confidence of Bamberger’s customers be eroded if they learned that Newark’s leading department store was advertising phony sale prices? Particularly if the Explorer should decide to publish the news on its front page?

  Eldridge J. Gossage looked very angry. “Why, you little kike whippersnapper,” he said, “I’m going to see that you get exactly what you deserve!”

  And Mr. Gossage was as good as his word. From that week onward, a full-page ad for Bamberger’s furniture department appeared on the back page of Ho’s tabloid. Bamberger’s furniture department became his first regular paid advertiser.

  And Ho was quick to show his gratitude, and began what would be a lifetime practice of editorial quid pro quo. He saw to it that, whenever possible, Bamberger’s furniture got favorable mention in his paper. In a story on troglodyte witches in fifteenth-century Spain, for example, he wrote:

  The witches’ caves of Andalusia were dank, unhealthy holes—a far cry from what they might have been had they been furnished with the kind of taste and elegance shoppers are accustomed to finding at Bamberger’s excellent furniture department, where quality at amazingly low prices is the rule.…

  Whether or not Mr. Gossage noticed these editorial pats on the back, Mr. Gossage never deigned to say. But Ho was fairly sure he did.

  In 1912, radio was something very new—a novelty, a plaything, a toy. It had occurred to no one that radio could ever become a medium for transmitting news, music, sporting events, or other entertainment. It was just a gadget. Ham operators used radio sets to gossip back and forth with one another. But such was the public interest in Mr. Marconi’s invention that Bamberger’s had decided to install a small, glass-enclosed radio studio on the store’s top floor. Ostensibly, the purpose of the radio station was to transmit information between Bamberger’s and its “sister” stores—Macy’s in Manhattan, and Abraham & Straus in Brooklyn—without paying long-distance telephone rates. It was also used to broadcast news throughout the store: “Attention, Bamberger’s shoppers … right now, in our third-floor lingerie department, and for a short time only, you will find luxurious stays and camisoles, marked down to unbelievably low prices.…” But its real purpose was to lure curious customers up through the store’s upper floors, where shopping traffic was always lightest. Customers crowded around the little booth, their faces pressed against the glass, watching and listening to the operator sending and receiving messages over the miraculous new medium of the airwaves.

  On the night of April 14, 1912, Ho Rothman was asked to man the radio station while the regular operator went down to the cafeteria to have his dinner. There was not much to it. It just meant putting on a headset, setting up the microphone, and operating a simple set of keys, buttons, and switches. It was in this glass booth that Ho Rothman was sitting when, by accident as he experimented with his switches and buttons, he picked up a faint but distinct signal from the North Atlantic: “S.S. Titanic … ran into iceberg … Sinking fast.…”

  He then did something he never in his life had done before. He walked off his job—walked, ran, flew!—to his newspaper printing press where the tray of type was already set up. Within twenty minutes, he had his cover story written and, within an hour, he was running down the streets of Newark, hawking his Extra edition, shouting, “Extra! Extra! Titanic sinks!”

  Ho Rothman was always proud of the lead he wrote for that story in such record time:

  As THE EXPLORER predicted three weeks ago, the S.S. Titanic has gone down, with great loss of lives, a victim of what the Greeks call hubris, or the sin of pride. Tonight’s disaster, in which thousands have gone down to a watery end, proves that mere man, or any of the creations of man, dare not defy the mighty forces of Mother Nature, nor the cruel vengeance of a punishing ocean. The Titanic had the supreme audacity to proclaim herself “unsinkable.” For this insult to Nature, she has paid at the cost of untold human suffering and agonizing death.…

  Of course the details of the disaster that followed were wildly inaccurate—Ho simply made them up. But it didn’t matter. In the weeks that followed, all the published reports of the tragedy were confused and garbled, full of errors, misinterpretations, guesswork, and Monday-morning quarterbacking. Even to this day, many details of what happened that night at sea are open to debate and speculation, and there are many questions that may never be answered properly.

  Ho was always proud, too, of the last two lines of his story:

  The officers and directors of White Star did not listen to THE EXPLORER’S warnings then. Perhaps—too late—they will listen now.

  What mattered most was that Ho Rothman’s little weekly tabloid had been the first newspaper in the world to report the sinking of the S.S. Titanic. What had really been only a warning very quickly became a “prediction” that the disaster would happen. And, in the days that followed, seventeen-year-old H. O. Rothman found himself the most famous newspape
rman in the United States.

  15

  Actually, her day had gone better than she had thought it would, considering its somewhat rocky start. Plans for the picnic issue had been roughed out, and it had been generally decided that all the fashion pages would be shot out of doors. It was the kind of subtle touch most readers wouldn’t even notice, but it would add a certain continuity of texture and feel to the issue, as readers turned the pages. In terms of graphics, there would be conventional picnics—a picnic on the beach, a picnic on the deck of a sailboat, a tailgate picnic at a polo match—and also unconventional ones: a picnic in a greenhouse, an after-theater picnic in the back seat of a stretch limousine. In other words, the issue would have as its subtheme Getting Out of the House, Getting Away.…

  “I want it to be our prettiest issue ever,” she had said. “I want everything to be just—pretty. I want views. Views of oceans, views of mountains. What about a picnic in the warm-up hut at a ski resort?”

  Yes, it had gone well. And from her father-in-law’s office on the thirtieth floor, there had been not a word.

  At four o’clock, Bob Shaw came by, flopped on her sofa, and said, “Well, believe it or not, I’ve found out what makes bees swarm. It’s very simple, it turns out. They swarm when the hive is overcrowded. They swarm to found a new colony, and select a new queen, like Gregory said. All we got to do is find a beekeeper with an overcrowded hive, and we’ve got a potential swarm. Now where the bees will decide to swarm is another matter. Beekeepers can control this to some extent, but whether we can make the bees swarm in a model’s hair is something I don’t know yet, but I’ve got the library working on it. The bees that swarmed in Gregory’s mom’s hair were wild bees, and there’s always a lead bee that guides the others to the swarming spot. Since Gregory’s mom had been swimming in a river, there may have been some mineral in the river water that attracted that lead bee.”