War in St. Louis

The late, great Joseph Pulitzer, founder of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, suffered all his life from weak eyes, was stone-blind when he died in 1911. But Joseph Pulitzer could see through skulduggery, no matter how dark its hue, could sight a dirty deal a mile away. He made the Post-Dispatch one of the most valiant crusaders of an era rich in righteous journalism.

Like his father, young Joseph Pulitzer has weak eyes. At 55 he can barely read his Post-Dispatch headlines by holding them an inch away, has secretaries who read to him, is resigned to the prospect of complete blindness before his life ends. Young Joseph resembles his father in more ways than one, and particularly wants to resemble Old Joseph as a crusading publisher. For his chief editorial writer he has ruddy, Irish Ralph Coghlan, who would like to be known as a hard-hitting successor to Managing Editor Oliver Kirby ("O.K.") Bovard, who retired two years ago.

As a liberal, progressive paper, the Post-Dispatch approved most New Deal reforms, found few national causes for crusades until last spring. Then Editor Coghlan began to suspect that Franklin Roosevelt was trying to get the U. S. into war. The Post-Dispatch leaped on the barricades, waved an isolationist banner, launched a crusade.

"To the Brink." After the President's warlike speech at the University of Virginia last June, promising all possible aid to crumbling France and beleaguered Britain, the Post-Dispatch cried in an editorial titled How We Are Being Led to the Brink: "President Roosevelt cannot be trusted to keep this country neutral. . . ."

Meanwhile, the St. Louis Star-Times, ardently for Roosevelt and all his works, looked on with increasing wrath. When To the Brink appeared, the Star-Times lashed out with a caustic editorial of its own on page 1. Missouri's New Deal Representative Thomas Carey Hennings Jr. read the Star-Times answer into the Congressional Record, and the Post-Dispatch crusade exploded into a full-fledged editorial war.

"Act of War." Last week President Roosevelt took a step that Editor Coghlan had feared: without consulting Congress he sold 50 overage destroyers to Britain. Without even waiting for Attorney General Jackson's legal opinion to come in over the wire, Ralph Coghlan tore out the lead editorial he had written for that day's editions, substituted another.

Wrote Editor Coghlan: "Mr. Roosevelt today committed an act of war. He also became America's first dictator. . . . Undeterred by law or the most primitive form of common sense, the President is turning over to a warring power a goodly portion of the United States Navy. . . . We get in exchange leases on British possessions in this Hemisphere--but only leases. What good will these leases be if Hitler should acquire title to these islands by right of conquest? ... Of all sucker real-estate deals in history, this is the worst, and the President of the United States is the sucker. ... If Roosevelt gets away with this, we may as well say good-by to our liberties and make up our mind that henceforth we live under a dictatorship."

For the first time in its life the Post-Dispatch bought space in two eastern newspapers, the Washington Star and the New York Times, reprinted its editorial in territory the Post-Dispatch does not reach. So incensed was one 62-year-old citizen of St. Louis, Lawrence Miller, a onetime sergeant in the A. E. F. with two World War I citations for bravery, that he threw bricks through three Post-Dispatch windows, broke $500 worth of plate glass. Said he: "I broke the windows to get even. . . ."

Appeasement? The Star-Times could not take this Blitzkrieg lying down. Next day, on page 1, the Star-Times struck back at Editor Coghlan. Calling the Post-Dispatch's piece a "fanatical diatribe, bred of mingled hate and fear," an effort "to win the Pulitzer Prize for Appease ment," the Star-Times bought the same space which the Post-Dispatch had taken in the New York Times and Washington Post to meet the attack.

Recalling Thomas Jefferson's Louisiana Purchase, the Star-Times jibed: "The Post-Dispatch of that day was the Columbian Centinel of Boston, and its conduct is described in five words by Claude Bowers in Jefferson in Power: 'The Columbian Centinel went mad.' . . . [The Centinel declared] that Jefferson had given away 'nearly all the gold and silver in the United States.' And for what? 'Wild land.' Land of which 'we do not want a foot.' Jefferson, it moaned, 'had run in debt for Mississippi moonshine $15,000,000. . . . There were appeasers in 1803. . . ."

Added the Star-Times in a soberer vein: "Unneutral? Of course it is unneutral, in a world where neutrality has become Hitler's jest and Holland's grave. . . . Loud will be the laughter of Goering and Goebbels . . . when they read . . . the Post-Dispatch's editorial, translated, as it will be, in the Voelkulcher Beobachter. . . . Roosevelt . . . acted in an hour of danger. . . . It was not an act of war, but an act to keep war away from America, now and forever!"

Embarrassed Tribune. Most editors, although they may have disapproved the secrecy in which Franklin Roosevelt had conducted his negotiations, praised the trade itself as a necessary defense measure. A few (including the Los Angeles Times, Miami Herald, Topeka Capital} condemned the sale, but in milder phrases than the Post-Dispatch.

Apparently embarrassed was Colonel Robert Rutherford McCormick's Chicago Tribune. For the last 18 years the Tribune has favored acquisition by the U. S. of naval bases in the Western Hemisphere. Last week the Tribune, in its first edition, ran a 166-line editorial, We Get the Bases, pointing to the President's deal as a triumph for the Tribune. On page 1 the Tribune printed a caustic cartoon titled Nearer and Nearer the Brink, condemning the deal as an act of war (see cut, p. 77). In later editions the cartoon disappeared, was replaced by another kidding Franklin Roosevelt's trip to Tennessee. In its third edition the Tribune slashed its long editorial to a mild, 27-line cackle of pleasure.

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