Crusader at Work

Fight for progress and reform, never tolerate injustice or corruption, always fight demagogues of all parties . . . always remain devoted to the public welfare . . . never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty.

--From the "Platform," the St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Most newspapers have some such resounding principles either engraved on their buildings or printed in their pages. But at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (circ. 391,890), the "Platform" is not only embedded in the walls and run every day on the editorial page; it is so deeply implanted in the minds of every staffer that it has made the P-D the leading crusading newspaper in the U.S. By standing on the Platform he drafted for his heirs, the P-D's late great founder, Joseph Pulitzer, brought on 17 libel suits in the first three years of the paper's life (but paid only $50 in damages), and John A. Cockerill, his managing editor, shot dead a gun-toting critic who invaded the city room and called the staff a "gang of blackmailers" (the police ruled self-defense).

"Boiled down." says Joseph Pulitzer II, son and namesake of the founder and publisher-president of the PD, "the Platform simply means printing an honest newspaper." This week the paper celebrated its 75th anniversary in typical P-D style by looking far beyond the boundaries of Missouri. Instead of citywide fanfare, dinners and speechmaking, it put out a fat anniversary supplement, The Second American Revolution, with 33 articles on the American scene by everybody from former President Harry Truman, Attorney General Herbert Brownell Jr. and Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter to Poet W. H. Auden, Playwright Robert Sherwood and Cartoonist Al Capp. Included was a message from President Eisenhower, congratulating the P-D for its "most striking . . . resolve 'never to be satisfied with merely printing the news.' "

Five-Time Winner. Dissatisfaction with "merely printing the news" has brought the P-D and its staffers eleven Pulitzer Prizes. Even though the prizes were started in 1917 under the will of the P-D's founder, few newspapermen ever complain that favoritism is involved, since the paper's determined crusading makes it a more logical candidate for the prizes than other papers (Publisher Pulitzer stays out of the discussion when the P-D is a candidate). P-D men have won prizes for everything from forcing a corrupt federal judge to resign and the exposure of the Teapot Dome scandals by the late Paul Y. Anderson to a series on the Depression '30s by the late Charles G. Ross, who became President Truman's press secretary after leaving the PD. The paper itself has won five "meritorious public service" Pulitzers: for exposing wholesale padding of vote registration lists in St. Louis elections (1937), its campaign to rid the city of smoke (1941), an investigation of the Centralia mine disaster (1948), rooting out newspapermen on the Illinois state payroll (1950), and exposing corruption in the Bureau of Internal Revenue (1952).

Coverage of the Centralia mine disaster, in which in 111 miners were killed, was typical of how the P-D works. In 1947, after the last body was pulled from the mine, scores of newsmen from other papers went home. Not the PD. It doubled its staff on the assignment, in due time established what it suspected: that the State Department of Mines was shaking down mine owners and overlooking dangerous working conditions. As a result, Illinois mine-safety laws were tightened.

On the other hand, on a fast-breaking story; the city staff can mobilize as fast as a Manhattan tabloid covering a shooting in a Park Avenue love nest. Recently the P-D got a head start on the Greenlease kidnaping, when John Kinsella, its veteran police reporter, noticed an unusual stir of activity around headquarters. He rightly guessed that the kidnapers had been found, and thus put the P-D in position to turn loose a 13-man staff on the story before any other paper had it.

O.K. Mr. Bovard. If Founder Pulitzer created the paper's vigorous spirit, it was the paper's longtime (1908-38) Managing Editor O. K. (for Oliver Kirby) Bovard who translated the spirit into a day-to-day newspaper. A whip-cracking taskmaster, he was known in the trade as a "one-man school of journalism" or the "greatest managing editor of all time." On the day he became city editor, Bovard was congratulated by one of his friends on the staff who made the mistake of addressing Bovard by his nickname, "Jack." Answered the new city editor frostily: "From now on, Harry, it's Mr. Bovard." (From that day on, he was addressed only as "Mr. Bovard.") Austere and coldly impersonal, he stood behind his staff as solidly as he expected them to stand behind their work. When a St. Louisan called to complain about a reporter's story, Bovard cut him off with: "I have never had the pleasure of meeting you. I do know [my reporter]."

Bovard always thought of the P-D first, expected his reporters to do the same. Once, a staffer covering a woman's club meeting telephoned the office and told the managing editor that the platform had collapsed, but that Mrs. Bovard, who was at the meeting, was unhurt. "Never mind that," snapped Bovard. "Have you got the story for the Post-Dispatch?" On the day he resigned, Bovard told Reporter Sam Shelton, who is now assistant to the publisher: "There are only two things I regret upon my retirement . . . One of them is the unsolved Neu murder case, and the other is [the Union Electric Co. of Missouri] across the street." The P-D never did solve the Neu murder, but two months later its exposures touched off the prosecution that sent Union Electric's president and two vice-presidents to prison for bribing public officials.

A Heart Is a Home. Bovard's style of journalism was carried on with the same driving, unsentimental tenacity by burly, hard-boiled Managing Editor Ben Reese, who retired in 1951, and now by a milder-mannered crusader, Raymond L. Crowley, 58, a staffer for 31 years and, like both Reese and Bovard, a longtime city editor. Over the P-D's 1,650-man staff is the paper's, unchallenged boss, Joseph Pulitzer II, 68, who, like his late father, has long suffered from failing eyesight; he keeps a battery of secretaries reading the paper to him line-by-line every day (including ads). Whether in his office, at his estate in Bar Harbor, Me., or aboard his yacht Victoria, "J.P." deluges his staff with distinctive yellow-paper memos, has even edited his own obituary" for the paper's files, to say: "[Joseph Pulitzer II's] heart was more at home in the editorial sanctum than in the countinghouse."

In the tradition set by Bovard, P-D staffers, whose salaries are as high as any newspaper in the U.S., keep aloof from outside organizations, rarely accept invitations to pressagents' parties, return gifts that are sent to them, pay their way wherever they go. The PD, which in 1951 bought the ailing Star-Times (circ. 179,803) and now is the only evening paper in St. Louis, seldom loses a staffer to any other newspaper. When the flow of news is heavy the news department rules, decides how much space it will need, leaves the rest for ads. The P-D needs plenty of news space since it always fills its columns with national and international news, local stories, exposes and dispatches from its seven-man Washington bureau, headed by able Raymond ("Pete") Brandt.

Locally, the P-D's editorials have power as well as a sharp bite, often are bolstered by the talents of Daniel R. ("Fitz") Fitzpatrick, probably the most widely reprinted editorial cartoonist in the U.S. (TIME, June 22). But nationally, the P-D's unpredictable behavior makes its editorials much less a power than its crusading news columns. Readers, who now think of the paper as the unwavering voice of New and Fair Dealism, forget that in 1936 the P-D supported Landon against Roosevelt. And when F.D.R. gave 50 destroyers to Britain in the early days of World War II, the P-D screamed that he had become "America's first dictator," ran its editorial in full-page ads across the country. Nevertheless, in 1940 and 1944 it supported F.D.R. again. After backing Dewey in 1948, it reversed its field last year and supported Stevenson, has been a persistent critic of the Republican Administration ever since. However, despite its editorial broken-field running, there is no turning back or sidestepping in the P-D's journalistic traditions, which are a solidly entrenched family matter. Its continuity is assured. Vice President and associate editor of the P-D is Joseph Pulitzer III, 40, Harvard ('36). And after him, there is four-year-old Joseph Pulitzer IV, already earmarked for his family's newspaper. Says "J.P." III: "The P-D tradition is much bigger than any individual."

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