Wilmington Tight-rope

Most potent force in Delaware is the House of du Pont. Seat of the du Ponts is Wilmington, where they own the only daily newspapers in town. Lately the du Ponts' Morning News and Journal-Every Evening (circ. 55,000) needed an executive editor. Du Pont headquarters got in touch with the person who knows most about available editors--Editor Marlen Pew of Editor & Publisher. Editor Pew had just the man, his old friend William Latta Mapel, a big, brawny, bespectacled fellow ten years out of University of Missouri School of Journalism. For five years "Bill" Mapel had been director of journalism at Washington & Lee University. He was president of the American Association of Teachers of Journalism. So devoted was he to Editor Pew that he named his 3-year-old son Marlen.

When "Bill" Mapel set to work for the du Ponts six weeks ago he was promised absolute editorial authority. One of the officers of the publishing company even put it in writing. Last week Editor Mapel met the first test of his independence when the biggest kind of local story for Wilmington broke into his lap. It concerned, of all people, Bill Mapel's bosses, the du Ponts, who were appearing before the Senate committee investigating the munitions industry (see p. 19).

To do justice to his readers, his employers and his own conscience, Mr. Mapel had a task which few newspaper editors would have coveted. He started with a straight Associated Press dispatch from Washington leading the du Ponts to the witness stand. The evening edition that day carried a story written by one of its own men. It was studiously colorless, except for identifying the du Ponts as makers of "the high explosives that to a great extent enabled the Allied armies to win that great conflict."

The second day's morning headline on the front page:

DU PONT PREFERS PEACE TO WAR, SAYS PRESIDENT

Beneath that ran a three-column defense of du Pont operations. Its source was plainly labeled: "A prepared statement to stockholders and employes."

Third day's news was all about the diplomatic protests from foreign powers over the publicity which their munitions dealings had been getting. Then the du Fonts were called to the stand, and Editor Mapel was on the tightrope. Unflinchingly he slapped on the front page the headline:

DU PONTS EARNED $1,245,000,000 DURING WAR DAYS

Two columns of AP copy followed, included the testimony of Pierre du Pont: "If the war had ended in 1916 we might have been in a bad position." In that evening's edition the Journal carried more than three and a half columns on the hearing, and a front page picture of the four du Ponts sitting in the committee room.

On the day that most other newspapers were headlining the du Pont's abortive contracts for rearming Germany, the Wilmington News put it thus:

GERMANY ARMING DESPITE TREATY, DU PONT REVEALS

When the week was over, Editor Mapel's handling of the dynamite in the situation boiled down to this: He had suppressed nothing; and he had discreetly refused to become worked up over the du Pont story. Only once did he find it worth more than a single-column headline. Supposedly he could have ripped into his employers, featured the inconsistencies in their testimony, harped editorially on the "awfulness" of the munitions business, and still have had no fear of losing his job. But he did not find it a fit subject for an editorial compared to such issues as Manhattan theatre ticket prices, fishing in the Delaware River, dangerous curves on Maryland's Eastern Shore highways.

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