Muscle Journalist

Muscle journalism includes the gentle arts of kidnapping, wire tapping, burglary, bribery, plus cunning and unlimited nerve. Frank Carson gave it its name and was one of its chief practitioners. Out of it, in the '20s, came journalistic legends and one ripsnorting play, The Front Page.

Last week when Frank Carson, 60, died, Playwright Charles MacArthur (coauthor with Ben Hecht of The Front Page} declared: "He was the newspaperman's dream of a city editor--a hatchet man with a heart of gold."

In Carson's desk, at Hearst's Chicago Herald & Examiner, was an arsenal of blank search warrants, summonses, writs, a full repertory of badges for police, detectives, sheriffs, coroners, Federal agents. When a story broke Carson simply faked an appropriate document. A tough, impersonating reporter or Carson himself did the rest. The evidence was usually photostated in the office, quietly returned, the forged "writ" destroyed. A dozen sets of wiretapping apparatus supplemented his arsenal.

When notorious killer Harvey Church fled Chicago, Carson trailed him to a village in the north Wisconsin woods. There, posing as Cook County State's Attorney, he nabbed the killer, bled him dry of news, then turned him over to the Chicago police.

When Federal agents nabbed Martin Durkin (a pioneer Dillinger) and his petite moll in a Pullman drawing room, Carson arranged with the Wabash Railway for a prairie train stop, rushed reporters and photographers to the secret rendezvous by plane (another pioneer Carson stunt). By the time the Durkin train reached Chicago the Herald & Examiner was on the street with four pages of Durkin pictures. But that was only a start for his Durkin scoop. In the excited hubbub at Union Station Carson and his kidnapping "cleanup squad" spirited Mrs. Durkin off the train, through labyrinthine passages to a waiting taxi, to the Herex building. Police discovered her whereabouts as extras began to roll with her by-line story of life with the notorious automobile thief and killer. When, at dawn, her story was told, Carson calmly turned her over to the police battalions that clamored outside the Herald & Examiner.

Only once was Carson outsmarted at his own game. In 1919 he himself was kidnapped by that other master of muscle journalism, Walter Howey (now editor of Boston Hearstpapers). Carson at that time was day city editor of the Chicago Tribune, under Editor Captain Joe Patterson. Howey wanted him for the Herald & Examiner. When Carson refused to come over Howey plotted with a mutual actor friend to put knockout drops in Carson's drink at a Loop bar. Then he took the doped editor home, guided his inert hand through a Tribune resignation and a Herald & Examiner contract. Carson honored the contract.

To Carson muscle journalism and yellow journalism were very different things. Said he once to an office boy with reportorial ambitions: "The truth, itself, is usually plenty colorful; if you get all the facts, you won't need the embroidery of the imagination. Yellow journalism is exaggeration, misstatements, either direct or by implication. It stinks."

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