Howard's Feather

Two and one-half years ago, when the Scripps-Howard Telegram bought the New York World, Publisher Roy Wilson Howard hitched his wagon to a vanishing star. He said he wanted the World-Telegram to be what the World had been under the late great Joseph Pulitzer: New York's great, crusading, liberal newspaper. Last week there was cause for jubilation in Publisher Howard's orientally splendiferous sanctum. The paper's first great crusade, the New York mayoralty election, had been an unqualified success. Fusionist LaGuardia had been swept into office by a huge majority (see p. 16). Tammany's control of the municipal government had been smashed for the first time since the World helped John Purroy Mitchel smash it 20 years ago.

Another circumstance doubled Publisher Howard's jubilation. The day of Fusion's victory was the 15th anniversary of the darkest hour of Publisher Howard's newspaper career when, as the bright-eyed, electric little president of the United Press, he got blamed for one of journalism's historic blunders: announcement of the "False Armistice."

Scripps-Howard's high command was scarcely to be blamed for regarding Fusion's victory as their own. Certainly the World-Telegram had done more to help LaGuardia than any other New York paper. Its interest in the election had started when Publisher Howard inaugurated the "Write In McKee" campaign that brought the onetime President of the Board of Aldermen 264,000 votes in last year's by-election after Tammany's Mayor Jimmy Walker was hounded into exile. That campaign ripened the acquaintance between Mr. Howard and Mr. McKee into friendship. Last summer Publisher Howard is said to have advised McKee to take the Fusion nomination, warned him fairly that, if he did not, and someone else did whom the World-Telegram approved, Mr. McKee would get no further support. When McKee turned down the Fusionists and later came forward as the "Recovery" Party's candidate, Publisher Howard kept his promise. He hammered McKee even harder than he hammered Tammany's pathetic O'Brien.

The World-Telegram's campaign to elect LaGuardia started in earnest the day he got the nomination. Every possible bit of political color and prejudice was thrown into the news reports. Everything except the municipal election promptly subsided on the editorial page. The thundering oratory of Cartoonist Rollin Kirby's daily drawings had only one subject during the last four weeks of the campaign.

The World-Telegram's prior title to Fusion's victory was clarified by the performances of other dailies supporting LaGuardia. New York's two most respected dailies, the morning Times and Herald Tribune, had too often in the past assailed LaGuardia's record in Congress, his volatile and opportunistic insurgency, to whoop wholeheartedly for him as Mayor. Their proFusion attitude was expressed in anti-Tammany tirades and lamentations over the indecision and, they charged, duplicity of "independent" Candidate McKee, behind whom they discerned the alarming figure of Boss Flynn of The Bronx. The Evening Post was for LaGuardia but even in its new tabloid form, its campaign had four cylinders to the World-Telegram's twelve. Not a single Manhattan paper championed O'Brien but his statement that "We don't need the Press" turned out to be an unintended compliment for the World-Telegram. Its chief rival for evening circulation in Manhattan, the sedate Sun, like the News, Mirror, American and Journal, supported McKee. Whether or not this was because LaGuardia once denounced the Sun's Publisher William Thompson Dewart in Congress for trying to evade customs duties, the fact remained that the O'Brien press-less ticket did better on the whole than the Sun's McKee ticket.

In its two and one-half years, after the natural post-merger shakedown, the World-Telegram has held its commanding circulation lead over the Sun:

March 1931 October 1933 Sun 305,410 295,830 World-Telegram 480,000 414,796

But the Sun remains, as it has been for years, far & away the biggest moneymaker in the New York afternoon field. As his wagon shot past the Sun editorially last week, Publisher Howard could take heart about catching the Sun financially.

* On Nov. 7, 1918, Publisher Howard was calling on Admiral Henry Braid Wilson in Brest when Admiral Wilson got a telegram from a U. S. naval attache in Paris stating that armistice had been signed. Thinking, because Brest was the cablehead for much transatlantic transmission, that he might get the message to the U. S. ahead of Paris correspondents, Publisher Howard rushed to the cable office in Admiral Wilson's car, with one of the Admiral's aides to help get his message through the cable censor. Subsequent events showed that the naval attache who had telegraphed Admiral Wilson had received his information from a telephone call to the U. S. Embassy in Paris. The telephone call was never traced.

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