Pledge Brown

Into the Manhattan offices of Review of Reviews last month stepped a short, dark-haired youngish man who introduced himself to Associate Editor David Page as Pledge Brown, a onetime newshawk on the Ketchikan (Alaska) Chronicle. Producing a letter from Editor Henry Goddard Leach of the Forum thanking him for an article on the New Deal's Matanuska Valley colony in Alaska (TIME, July 1, 1935 et ante), Pledge Brown asked if he might not do a similar piece from a new angle for Review of Reviews. Editor Page asked when he could finish it. Pledge Brown answered that he was so full of his subject that he could write it in an hour if he could borrow a typewriter. Editor Page "gave him a desk and some copy paper and some cigarets. He went into a brief trance and then started typing at a furious rate. In about 45 minutes . . . he was done. . . and gave me ten or a dozen sheets of typescript. These I read quickly, finding to my surprise that he had done a remarkably good job. . . . By this time the office had closed and I invited him out for a quick drink, during which he discoursed most entertainingly on his life and letters. I left him feeling that I had met a refreshingly original gent, and that he would be a good man to keep in mind."

Next morning, on rereading Brown's article, Editor Page decided "it was too good to be true." He telephoned the Forum, which reported that both The Literary Digest and the Philadelphia Public Ledger had recommended Brown's work. As a final check Editor Page insisted on comparing his article with the Forum's. They were almost identical.

Editor Page was more amused than angry. The Forum, however, having paid $75 for the piece, which it had not yet printed, was boiling. When investigation showed that the yarn was highly inaccurate, had appeared in print week before in the Sunday Worker, Editor Leach bleated to the National Publishers Association. That organization's warning broadside uncovered the news that Brown had worked his swindle on two other magazines: Scribner's, for $125; North American Review, for $75. Neither had yet published the story. In each case Brown got his money quickly by saying he had to catch a train back to Alaska at once.

The Forum queried the Ketchikan Chronicle, got the following reply: ". . . Brown never saw Matanuska. He never worked for the Chronicle. He spent two or three weeks in Ketchikan, most of which time he was in jail. He has a record of petty thefts. He owes bills in Ketchikan. . . . I have written dozens of letters giving substantially the same information."

Last fortnight Pledge Brown turned up again when a telephone operator at Manhattan's Hotel President complained that he had stolen her typewriter. Jailing him on her charges backed by the Forum and Scribner's, police found 22-c-, a complimentary letter from each magazine in his pocket.

If Forum's Editor Leach, Review of Reviews' Editor Page and their confreres of Scribner's, the Sunday Worker and North American Review had been alert followers of U. S. Governmental doings, they would never have been taken in by Pledge Brown at all. Last May Alaska's Delegate to Congress Anthony Joseph Dimond filled more than four pages of the Congressional Record with an expose of Brown's career. After leaving Alaska, where he was arrested for stealing a woman's purse, this extraordinary opportunist, whose full name, according to Delegate Dimond, is Wilbur Pledge Brown, worked his way across the U. S., partly by passing bad checks and thieving, but mostly by selling his stock article on Matanuska Valley to "at least a dozen newspapers." In November it was printed in the Topeka (Kansas) Capital. Topeka's Capper's Weekly also swallowed it. In December the Kansas City Journal-Post published it. By April Pledge Brown had reached Washington, where the rich and cautious Sunday Star was glad to buy his threadbare yarn.

Cracked Delegate Dimond: "If you should happen to see him [Wilbur Pledge Brown] walking down the street with Ananias on one side and Sapphira on the other you might be certain that he was in the bosom of his family."

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