"Think Stuff"

"Daily the Associated Press surveys the universe and deliberately selects from its manifold happenings such events as are significant of society today. Then it groups these events with a proper sense of proportion in order that the newspaper reader may have a correct picture of things as they are-- the one sure foundation for straight thinking."

The audience that heard this impressive statement, delivered last week in Atlantic City by Edward McKernon, superintendent of the eastern division of the Associated Press, was a band of publicity men representing the Federal Council of Churches. A very different section of the U. S. was simultaneously being given a very different picture of the Associated Press.

This other picture represented the Associated Press--which is a non-profit-making network of news bureaus established in the offices of leading U. S. newspapers, with numerous correspondents abroad--as an organism which, originally sober grey matter, has lately exhibited iridescence, volatility and other sensational characteristics.

The career of the Associated Press under its first manager, Melville E. Stone, was traced--from a small co-operative association of newspapers in 1900 to a service with 1.200 member newspapers, 80,000 reporters, 131000 miles of leased wires and a $7,000,000 annual turnover. In 1920 Mr. Stone resigned. In 1921, on the occasion of the entombment of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington Cemetery, began a "splurge of flowery writing" the like of which Mr. Stone would never have permitted. President Harding's death, Woodrow Wilson's death, the deaths of Rudolph Valentino, Floyd Collins and Luther Burbank, were cited as other points of departure for "flights of puerile fancy" by Associated Press "poets." The employment of Publicist Bruce Barton for his famed "human interest" interview with President Coolidge in the Adirondacks last summer was cited as an example of Associated Pressure. More sinister, the possible connection between this favor from the Administration and the A. P.'s obliging treatment of U. S. Department of State propaganda against Mexico, was broadly hinted. Reason for lapses in the Associated Press's "proper sense of proportion" was suggested by the statistics on the A. P.'s growing rival, the United Press, which now serves 1,100 newspapers.

Where did this bolder picture of the Associated Press appear? Where but in that kraut-liveried castigator of every U. S. folly, real and imaginary; in the American Mercury. The leading article in that magazine's April issue, by City Editor Dewey M. Owens of the Knoxville (Tenn.) Journal, must have caused pain to Kent Cooper, present A. P. manager, and his colleagues, especially since the American Mercury had published an article the month before, entitled "Think Stuff Not Wanted," which exposed an attitude of blatant flippancy toward foreign affairs in a news service called, for poisonous anonymity, the "Amalgamated" Press.

Upon no subject is the American Mercury better fitted or more logically inclined to inveigh than upon U. S. journalism. It depends for much of its copy upon newsgatherers and editors facile enough to catch the style, and cynical enough to enjoy the viewpoint, of Editor Henry Louis Mencken. Six of its 14 non-fiction articles for April were by newspaper men and women. Few months go by without Editor Mencken's discovering some fresh way to reprove the profession in which he got his start and training and of which he has been what he likes to call a "practitioner" for nearly 30 years.

Should the Associated Press elect to release an account, colorful or otherwise of the life and works of Editor Mencken, it could draw him to the attention of scores of millions of people. Therein lies its responsibility, a full sense of which Editor Mencken was moved to drive home. The American Mercury's account of the life and works of the Associated Press, on the other hand, reached only some 75,000 persons. These would be a great many if they really represented the "civilized minority" to which the magazine addressed itself at its founding three years ago. But since the forces of "revolt" in the U. S. are now an army with banners, and since Editor Mencken possesses, like most successful Americans, a flair for slapstick showmanship, it may be doubted that the American Mercury is now read for idle-minded amusement by sheepish culture-hunters less than it is read with deep attention by serious people. The half-baked phrase-snatcher on whose lips "babbitt" and "moron" are now most often heard must infuriate Mr. Mencken while he continues to get out the most provocative review in the U. S.

The American Mercury was founded in 1924 to give Editor Mencken scope for his vituperation of the U. S. scene. He and Drama Critic George Jean Nathan had become financially comfortable, not through Smart Set which they edited with more thought than thanks, but through two little aphrodisiacs, La Parisienne and Saucy Stories, founded for revenge and sold at fat profits. The revenge was upon society.

Mr. Nathan it was who originally drew Mr. Mencken away from journalism into the naughty magazine game, but Mr. Mencken it was who, ill-satisfied with preciosity, found a publisher for a new magazine in which the emphasis on fiction was to be reduced, the sociological and intellectual emphases amplified. Mr. Mencken approached Alfred A. Knopf, a facile gentleman who at 32 had opened a whole new field for U. S. book publishers by importing the best European literature and selling it in de luxe print and jackets for fancy prices. Publisher Knopf was quick to see that any large group of people who were being taught to survey their own country with scorn and amusement would form a concentrated market for his imports. Doubtless he also felt some of that superior altruism which a generous man, conscious of his own culture, experiences in helping to uplift the herd. For though Editor Mencken stoutly denies that he is a reformer, an apostle of anything, yet he has written his own definition: "There are also persons who oscillate beautifully between the Uplift and honest lives." Politics, osteopathy, Baptist-thumping, Rotary-scourging, prostitution in Missouri, absurdity in the press, failed to amuse Mr. Nathan after the first year. An amiable sybarite who would rather be known for the tang of his cocktail than the depth of his mind, he withdrew as co-editor continuing to contribute only "Clinical Notes" and theatre talk. With Alfred A. Knopf to oil the wheels, and Samuel Knopf Sr. to inspect and supervise as business manager, Editor Mencken stoked his engine with a wide variety of engaging combustibles-- articles by articulate hoboes and Senators, bishops and Negro poets, Clarence Darrow and Ernest Boyd, a barber, a Mormon. The circulation steamed steadily ahead--42,614 at the end of 1924; 62,323 in 1925; to its peak of 79,531 a year ago. Less than a third of the buyers-- about 23,000--are subscribers. The rest pay 50c per month at newsstands. "Urbane and washed," as Mr. Mencken describes them, they open at once to that "fearful and wonderful" digest, "Americana," where that portion of the population which has had the least educational advantage is made to seem ridiculous by juxtaposing its mental fumbles with the studied brilliance of sophisticates. The success of the magazine to date has been one of circulation. Now it is going to try to make money. It will seek to demonstrate to manufacturers that people who enjoy jibes at Fundamentalists, machine politics, President Coolidge and the foes of contraception, are discriminating buyers of pianos, automobiles, perfume and fine plumbing. And in a recent pamphlet designed to attract advertisers to the American Mercury, Mr. Mencken has had his shrewdest and cruelest fling of all at journalism: "The American literati of tomorrow will probably come out of advertising-offices instead of out of newspaper offices as in the past. The advertising writers, in fact, have already gone far ahead of the reporters. They choose their words more carefully; they are better workmen, if only because they have more time for good work. I predict formally that they will produce a great deal of the sound American literature of tomorrow."