"Today"

Sitting in a sort of warehouse, in a cleft between stacks of books and papers, an aging, well-fleshed man with a baldish cranium and lips that purse above a button chin, has lately been saying over and over again: "Coolidge will be reelected. ... It is a certainty that Coolidge will be reelected. . . . Coolidge has had only ONE election. . . . He will be re-elected etc."

Sometimes he varies the thought. "Prosperity," he declares, "is going to continue. . . . This country will continue to be prosperous. . Don't SELL this COUNTRY short. If you do, you will lose. . . . Calvin Coolidge will be re-elected in 1928. . . ."

Election day is far off. Not even the Hot-Stove League at Chubb's Corners has begun to determine the country's next political potluck. Yet this man doggedly continues his long-range prophesy.

President Coolidge ought to be grateful, for the seeming warehouse is really a newspaper office, and the baldish prophet is no obscure, senile wiseacre; he is Arthur Brisbane, able journalist. A machine invented by Thomas Alva Edison listens attentively to Mr. Brisbane's remarks; a respectful secretary transcribes his master's voice into typewritten copy; and the New York American, the Chicago Herald-Examiner, the San Francisco Examiner and many another newspaper owned by Publisher Hearst, to say nothing of some 200 non-Hearst dailies and 800 country weeklies which buy syndicated Brisbane, all publish what Mr. Brisbane has said. His column is headed, with simple finality, "Today," a column that vies with the weather and market reports for the size of its audience, probably beating both. It is said to be read by a third of the total U. S. population. Obviously this is an exaggeration, but half that many would be some 20 million readers, "Today" and every day.

President Coolidge may not know the history of that column, "Today," wherein his name has appeared to such splendid advantage of recent weeks. Everyone knows that Arthur Brisbane tells more things to more people than any other man in the U. S., but President Coolidge lived long in iNew England, where the Hearst-Brisbane influence has only lately penetrated. He may wonder how this one man came to his position and out of what yesterday came ubiquitous "Today."

Arthur Brisbane, rich man's son,* "picked up" an education traveling abroad after going to Buffalo public schools. In 1883, at 19, he elected to work for Charles A. Dana on the New York Sun instead of becoming a Harvard man. Before he could vote he had succeeded famed T. P. O'Connor as Dana's London correspondent. He returned, aged 23, to manage the Evening Sun. He edited various editions of the World for Joseph Pulitzer and then (though he had stoutly protested he would never do such a thing) he sold his services to Mr. Hearst, whose property his time has been ever since. His reason was that he "wanted a free hand at a newspaper." Mr. Hearst gave him the Evening Journal to run at $8,000 a year, agreeing to add $1,000 salary each 10,000 circulation that Mr. Brisbane could swell the paper. Spain grew noxious and Mr. Brisbane, hunting up some enormous type, printed one of the first scare-headlines that made newspapers the noisy things they are today. "WAR SURE!" shrieked the Evening Journal. . . . In eight Brisbanal weeks the circulation grew from 40,000 to 640,000. Mr. Brisbane says modestly: "The war made the Journal--or so it is said. But still, it was not the Journal's private war. . . ." He became the highest paid Hearstling. Mr. Brisbane wrote some of the editorials while scouting around for some one else to do them. He wrote one for Washington's birthday, which an elevatorman was reading aloud to a friend when Mr. Brisbane walked into the lift. The editorial dwelt on the size of Washington's hands and feet and pleased the elevatorman and his friend so visibly that Mr. Hearst proposed to Mr. Brisbane that he write a two-column editorial daily. This would be too much for him, thought the busy editor, but Mr. Hearst said: "I'll set the editorials in big type and fill two columns anyway." Later, they found Artist Hal Coffman to draw sensational cartoons illustrating the elementary problems of Vice and Virtue, Wisdom and Folly, etc., that Mr. Brisbane propounded. Also, Mr. Brisbane took to using capitals for emphasis. The Journal was dedicated to "People Who Think" but Mr. Brisbane felt that the text should be "suited to the tired brain or the lack of brain." Thus, he would harp on his favorite theme in this fashion: "What is education? It is just what the word implies, something that 'leads out.' It LEADS MEN OUT of old ways into new ways. ..." Soon Mr. Brisbane got so that he could dash off editorials in no time. Jealous stories go around, that what he wrote became so stereotyped that he could give a key sentence to his secretary, mention a certain formula by number and go home for the day. But it is not so. True, secretaries, five of them, are at his beck and heels; quite a change from the days when he was to be seen in railroad trains between Manhattan and Hempstead, L. I., with a lapful of papers and a busy frown. But the secretaries only supply him with material. He does all the thinking for his thoughtful public's "tired brain or lack of brain." The secretaries follow him with his Ediphone everywhere, in train, motor or home. When he has a thought he speaks it into the tube. If he makes a speech the secretaries jot faithfully and that, too, may appear as an editorial. To his office every afternoon, the newspapers come at 4 p. m. and he goes out at 4:45, having read the news and dictated a "Today" for his millions of readers. It is about 1,000 words long and is just brief restatements of comment on events of the moment. Sometimes he takes a copy of his work to revise on the way to the station, sending it back by one of the secretaries. Once, when he wanted a vacation, he dictated 40 two-column Journal editorials in a day. But "Today," of course, he dictates wherever he happens to be--riding through Kansas wheat on his way to see Mr. Hearst in California, or in the Manhattan "warehouse." It is very simple. "His office is under his hat." His command of simple declarative English, his short-cut reasoning powers, are quite unique, if not particularly thorough. He has a convenient and, in a sense, encyclopaedic, store of famed men's last words, hobbies, epigrams and elementary historical facts, which he knows how to use impressively. He says, "A drop of salt water is the whole story of the Pacific Ocean." Similarly, Arthur Brisbane to "thinking millions" is the day in microcosm. Once, in a disgusted moment, Mr. Brisbane said very seriously to a friend: "To Hell with Fame and Power! I intend to be rich! That's all there is to this life!" He has become rich, worth perhaps ten millions. His real estate operations in Manhattan, New Jersey and Florida are on the largest scale. His newspaper work, bringing him some $500 a day, is now actually dwarfed by his other prosperity. Yet prosperity is no selfish passion with him. Besides Prosperity and President Coolidge and the Bull Market in Wall Street, he has been ringing changes during the past month on the following subjects, new and old: Prohibition--He is against it in principle; very sarcastic, in effect, about its being intended to apply only to the poorer classes--the Hearst "people." The Catholic Church--He treads on the church-state war in Mexico as if it were a crate of eggs, seeking only to crystallize developments, clarify issues. (He, himself, is no Catholic.) Japan -- Mr. Hearst's outcry against the Japanese "menace" made him popular in California. Mr. Brisbane has standing instructions, or convictions, that it is well to sustain this outcry on every possible occasion. It is the moral pointed in many paragraphs on airplanes, for instance, urging and urging that air fleets be built for national defense. Sometimes he even says: "Heaven help this nation. . ." Science--He is an Evolutionist; delights in reminding mankind that it is 90% beast. Scientific announcements often lead him 1) To show mankind its small place in the great universe; 2) To exalt mankind's mental potentialities; 3) To rhapsodize briefly in words amounting to "Ain't nature grand!" -- Morals--The resurrection of the Hall-Mills murder case in New Jersey; a woman arrested for improper costume; a child sacrificed in Spain--such incidents give him starting points for terse lay sermons, or ironic reflections not too finely pointed for "thinking" people, on lax criminal prosecutions, inverted justice, experimental fashions, child labor. Mothers--Few birthdays of great men go by without his praising their mothers, all mothers, as greater still. The People--A remark by Lady Astor gave him chances to twit her for preferring originality, to flatter "typical" people. Education--This is always a strong theme. He distrusts colleges, preaches a la Pelman Institute: "Better yourself." He once struck off: "The body cannot live on the beefsteak you ate at school. The mind cannot live on the study or reading that you did as a SCHOOL BOY or a college boy." Life once published a two-page cartoon--by Oliver Herford--at a time when Mr. Hearst was accused of buying a paper with brewers' backing "in the shadow of the nation's capitol"--representing Mr. Hearst as a combination dachshund-octopus in sleek tailcoat, chin on the ground, scaly belly humped for crawling, with the hands stretching over the country to grasp seats of government. Mr. Brisbane was pictured as a small bug whispering in the larger creature's ear. It was a monstrous, haunting picture; a terrific pillory. Despite the fact that newspapermen maintain he has sold more than his time to Publisher Hearst, this cartoon was in no sense just to able Mr. Brisbane of "Today."

*Much-traveled, philosophical Albert Brisbane (1809-90), who contributed generously ,to Brook Farm Institute of Agriculture and Education (West Roxbury, Mass.), communal retreat of New England transcendentalists including George Ripley, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Charles A. Dana, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Amos Bronson Alcott, Theodore Parker, William Henry Channing, Margaret Fuller, Orestes A. Brownson, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody.