Chapter Heading

The Age-Herald, oldest daily newspaper in Birmingham, Ala., was sold last week. The buyer was E. D. DeWitt of Manhattan who used to manage the late Grocer-Publisher Frank A. Munsey's New York Herald. Mr. DeWitt told Birmingham two things: 1) that he had paid the Age-Herald's previous owners a "handsome profit" on their original investment; 2) that he was not going to change the staff or policies that had kept the Age-Herald "in step with the best thought of the community." These were good businesslike statements by a man entering a booming city to operate a property already thriving on a monopoly in its field.

When the Age-Herald was founded in 1870, Birmingham consisted of a cotton field crossed by two railroads. The first pages of the Age-Herald-- described the first activities of the first promoters and engineers in the coal-and-iron-studded mountains that were to make Birmingham the first industrial city of the South. The Age-Herald gave its encouragement to the early iron-and-steelmongers who tried and failed, and tried again and again to make good metal from the sulphurous mountain ore and sell it profitably. It helped educate Birmingham out of its suicidal policy of selling cheap pig iron to northern manufacturers. The U. S. Steel Corp. put George Gordon Crawford in as 38-year-old president of the Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Co. with the cheery news that he was like "a man who, having a millstone hung about his neck, has been thrown into a rushing current and told to swim upstream."

Birmingham's growing pains were fierce ones. She had lots of labor and lots of ore, but both of low quality. She had nine railroads but these, after most of her other difficulties were solved, were long in the throes of rate wars. And after the railroads were quieted and regulated, two wide new vistas opened, calling Birmingham to fresh effort--the vistas of enormous power from nearby Muscle Shoals and of egress to the Gulf of Mexico down the Warrior River.

Muscle Shoals, a Federal project, still hangs fire, but the Alabama Legislature at its last session authorized ten millions of state money for a state-controlled terminal at the port of Mobile, whither the Warrior flows. This action clearly certified the future of super-industry in Alabama and endorsed the condition Birmingham has in mind when, like pushful Chicago, Detroit and Los Angeles, it calls itself "Greater Birmingham." After years of "becoming," Birmingham was at last to be "great."

But for the last four years, observant Alabamans have said that Birmingham's new "greatness" began in 1922 when Publisher Frederick I. Thompson, who publishes all the newspapers in Mobile (the News-Item, evening; the Register, morning) as well as the Journal at Alabama's capital, Montgomery, bought the Age-Herald. It is said that he made the purchase to get backing for Mobile's $10,000,000 project in the Birmingham coal and steel district, that he sold it once his purpose was accomplished.

Publisher Thompson had two partners when he bought the Age-Herald; Braxton Bragg Comer, the first citizen of Alabama, 79 this year, who governed Alabama from 1907 to 1911, and his son, Donald Comer.

It was a perfect combination. The Hon. Mr. Comer had been everything an Alabaman should have been--Civil War cadet, large-scale farmer, large investor in manufactories, wholesale merchant, citizen with public spirit enough to enter politics and fight for reforms himself. Railway rates had been the issue of his political career. Water-transportation for inland Alabama industry was the end to which he now gave his name and money, until the end was won. Not for a "handsome profit" Alabamans said, had the Hon. Mr. Comer and Publisher Thompson used the Age-Herald, but as an instrument to develop their state which, when developed, may well be served by step-keeping public servants, journalistic and other wise, from foreign states.

--The Age-Herald, circulation now 39,256 is Birmingham's only morning paper. There are an evening News (79,803) and a Scripps-Howard Post (52,484).