Panders

Greater love hath no man for his favorite newspaper than this: that he lay down his extra penny for it, instead of grumbling, when the price is jumped. Last year the New York World determined to have a reading public composed only of great lovers. It jumped its price from two cents to three. And last week the World came down again to two cents. It made gestures appropriate to show that it was in no way cheapening itself. It adopted a policy, new for the World, of advertising itself with full pages in other newspapers. It put its best foot far forward, extolling what is unquestionably "the best written feature page in American journalism," the World's famed "opp.ed." (opposite editorial) page, where Franklin Pierce Adams like a bandar-log and Heywood Broun like St. Simeon Stylites ruminate at the foot and the head, respectively, of their columns; where are also plump Drama Critic Alexander Woollcott, Book Critic Harry Hansen, Music Critic Samuel Chotzinoff.

And the World, ever militant, chose this circulogical moment to conduct one of its characteristic crusades. It hurled its lead at the publishers and venders of "a flood of fake nude 'art' magazines," which was, to judge by World headlines, contaminating the entire city. Municipal officials were hogtied, it appeared, by equivocal court decisions on the public display of sexy literature. Producer Earl Carroll had been acquitted of his naked posters. Harper's had not been fined for publishing confessions of a whore. Since the Carroll acquittal undressed ladies had posed and posed for commercial photog- raphers--just a small group of them--and fly-by-night panderers had bought and bought the pictures, publishing them with greasy titles in cheap pamphlets that changed names from month to month. The public, including school children, who clipped out the lust-inciting ladies, and passed them around in school, patronized this pornographic press, until its non-circulation had, according to the World, reached 150,000. Venders of fake dope and narcotic cures, fake aphrodisiacs, gland extracts, revolvers and artists' equipment had gladly advertised.

City officials acted at once, backed by strong public opinion. City officials thanked the World for arousing the helpful opinion, as did ministers, spinsters, reformers. The World's circulation went up that week very rapidly and its editors could congratulate themselves that, in gratifying a whim of the business department they had performed a typical World re-form for the city. More than ever was the World the self-styled "D'Artagnan of journalism," for it was that lusty Gascon who, in search of employment, picked quarrels to make friends.

Atavism

Last week a loud noise was heard in the Rocky Mountains. It was a new newspaper in Denver, the Morning Post. It had been started to drown out the Rocky Mountain News at the Rocky Mountain breakfast table in retaliation for an attack by the News' new owners upon the old-time Denver Post in the evening field.

Last Thanksgiving, Roy W. Howard, head of the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain, breezed into Denver fresh from the East, where he had just bought the Knoxville Sentinel and the Memphis News-Scimitar, and bought the Rocky Mountain News and a microscopic Denver Times (TIME, Nov. 29). Denver already had a Scripps paper, the Express, knocking along since 1905. Mr. Howard pitched the Times in with the Express to make an Evening News. In these transactions he relinquished Denver's morning Associated Press rights. Publisher Fred G. Bonfils of the Post quickly snapped up these rights and announced the new Morning Post in terms which showed clearly that he recognized a strong newcomer in what the Post likes to regard as its private territory.*

The Post represented Mr. Howard's action in dropping the A. P. rights, a simple business expediency, as malicious: "This greatest city of the West, this largest city between the Missouri River and the Pacific Ocean, east and west, and from the North Pole to the City of Mexico [sic] north and south in this longitude, has been belittled, humiliated and wantonly and willfully disgraced by the selfishly bringing about of the abandonment of the morning Associated Press service in Denver."

Was this uncharacteristic of Denver journalism? Not at all. Only last autumn, during the gubernatorial campaign, the Scripps-Howard paper called the Post "... a blackmailing, blackguarding, nauseaus [sic]; sheet which stinks to high heaven and which is the shame of newspapermen the world over." It had applied to Publisher Bonfils himself epithets which would scarcely gain credence in the &"Gents'" compartment of a railroad car--"lottery," "shame," "disgrace," ";bandit," "brigand," "lawless," "prostitution," "rapacity," "bunco," "scaly monstrosity," "mountebank," "hybrid ogre." Nor had there been any libel suit. Colorful talk is simply still the mode in Denver, as witness pandemoniac self-descriptions of the Post, the echoes of which, were the Rockies only a little higher, would have bounced off and been heard in Nome, Antofagasta, Timbuctoo and Reykjavik: " . . gladiator invincible, fearless, determined, with a giant's strength, a philosopher's mentality. . . . The champion of every good, and pure, and noble, and holy, and righteous cause; and the faithful and unceasing defender of righteousness, justice, decency, law and order . . . the opponent of every wrong and evil thing, of every form of crime, oppression, greed, selfishness and lawlessness." And this more earthy advice to readers: "Kick like a bay steer if you don't get what you're entitled to!"

What manner of thing is Denver journalism?

Spurs and six-guns of long-dead badmen are still to be kicked up from the sand and cactus of the Colorado plains. Buffalo skulls and stage-coach axles still bleach and rust in forgotten gulches of the Rocky Mountain foothills. But the West is "civilized," has been for some time, and with it Colorado. The funicular up Pike's Peak is 35 years old and for 21 years there has been a searchlight on the summit. The $2,500,000 State Capitol was finished way back in 1895. Denver still smelts lead for bullets and other useful articles, but for at least two decades tame agriculture, led by stub-horned cattle and sugar made from cowbeets, has been twice as important to Denver as mining.

Yet Denver harbors more than a ghost of the rip-roaring West that was. The vocabulary has altered little. The barroom brawls that once fascinated a robust populace are not extinct. They have merely been transferred, noise, color and violence intact, to the newspapers. How that transfer came about, and how the latest, loudest, most violent brawl of all is progressing, is a story that begins in a small Chicago printshop at the time of the World's Fair.

The young but already portly bartender of Denver's brand new Windsor Hotel was there to see the printer about a folio of World's Fair views he wanted to peddle on the crowded Midway. A swarthy young hellion happened in to see the same printer. This youth was a professional gambler who had played the Mississippi River boats for all they were worth and only lately slipped out of Kansas City, Kan., after the highly profitable operation of a Little Louisiana Lottery. The two men introduced themselves and went off for lunch together. Great exploits were in the air. Neither of the adventurers had a partner. During lunch they eyed each other like a pair of strange coyotes, but instead of flying for throatholds, they decided to hunt shoulder to shoulder.

The bartender gave his name as H. H. Tammen. He had started life as a waif, he said, who had found shelter in a Philadelphia saloon, where he became cuspidor and errand boy at the age of seven. It was warm in the saloon, there was free food and from the beer-spotted newspapers left by customers he had learned how to read. He was, he guessed, clever as a kid, for he had risen swiftly to heights of bartending. Before he was 21 he had reigned over a prodigious expanse of dazzling brass and mahogany in the Palmer House, right there in Chicago. Ask anyone. Then the Windsor out in Denver had sent for him and he was doing pretty good out there, selling cigar boxes full of shiny mineral specimens on the side. Denver was a red hot town for someone with some money to make a lot more in. A growing town, a wideopen town, an ignorant town. Now if only--

The gambler, whose olive mien was a little too sleek to inspire trust at once, was enchanted by this garrulous bartender, whose words and wit were of an unusual facility. He liked the combination of heartiness and sly insinuation, and furthermore Tammen was one of those creatures so awe-inspiring to high-livers, a bartender who despised drink. The gambler took a chance and told his own history.

He was--and his voice shook with pride when he said it-- a Corsican. His grandfather, his own father's father, had been a cousin of Napoleon Bonaparte! His surname, once Buonfiglio-- "good son" in feud-loving Corsica --had become gallicized into Bonfils. He had attended West Point but left hurriedly. Corsicans, cousins of Napoleon, resent discipline. He had come West, flash and dapper, intent on a killing; and now he was already a legend. He was the Fred G. Bonfils who had lately cleaned out of Kansas City with $800,000 and no holes in his skin. That was who he was, Fred G. Bonfils; $800,000; Napoleon's cousin. Money! Power! Ambition! He could and would show the money to Bartender Tammen in the bank vault. Soon Tammen was back in Denver with some of the Corsican's boodle to see what he could do. His first few projects collapsed. Then the old Denver Post, a fly-by-night sheet, offered itself for sale at $12,500. Bartender Tammen talked $25,000 more out of his Corsican friend and became a publisher.

The Post of the Yellow '90s was little flimsier than its Denver contemporaries, excepting the historic Rocky Mountain News. The latter's name alone was sufficient to carry it through the jamboree that followed Mr. Tammen's advent, and until 1913 it was in the able hands of Sen. Thomas M. Patterson. But all other Denver papers soon wilted. As soon as the Post began to pay, which was very soon, Gambler Bonfils appeared upon the scene to collaborate with Bartender Tammen in one of the most prodigious campaigns for circulation in the history of journalism. They imported from Publisher Hearst, then at his yellowest, some of the country's leading scarehead artists. They told them that their serv- ices for Publisher Hearst had been the height of probity compared to what they must do now. They must hell-rake kitchens and what passed in Denver then for boudoirs, for scandal and gossip of the most personal sort. Their gleanings they must then dress with language and emphases known only to habitues of a raucous young country's fleshpots. The stories were either published-- blasting reputations--or brandished with a menace that brought forth, if not actual blackmail, the most servile acquiescence in the publishers' larger schemes.

Bonfils had cunning, romantic descent, lust for power; he is strikingly handsome, though haggard after an illness, even today; his temper and resourcefulness in quarrel were speedily renowned. Yet it was never Bonfils, except as an exotic danger, who utterly captured the imagination of lonely sheep herders, grim miners, lusty ranchers and eager townsmen. It was Tammen. Bonfils had brains and intensity. H. H. Tammen had brains and charm. It was his creed that, if a man was going to be a faker, he must be a magnificent one. He kept his desk drawer full of paper money in small denominations. Any panhandler, honest "broke" or sleasy rumdum who got in-- to see him--and any- one could--was sure of a handout. "Take it," Tammen would chuckle. "It's good money, all right. I made it." And no one is sure yet how H. H. Tammen, facile vender of scenic art views at the World's Fair, did make those particular pieces of money.

It was Tammen who built up for the Post its flamboyant pose as the big brother, sister, father, mother and benevolent uncle of all the inhabitants of "The League of Rocky Mountain and Plains states, Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada-- Arizona, Idaho, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Montana and North and South Da-kota" (a favorite cant of the Post's which became clearly reflected in its circulation). It was surely Tammen who caused the Post's new building to be inscribed with this equivocal invitation: "O Justice! When Expelled From All Other Habitations Make This Thy Dwelling Place." It was Tammen who, when a writer in Collier's snickered at the legend, restrained Bonfils, who came in fuming about lawyers and a libel suit, by saying, "It's too late, Fred. I've wired our congratulations."

To the Post's credit it must be said that, whenever there were no upstart heads to bash, it diverted its enormous vigor and blinding red headlines to pushing much municipal, statewide and sectional development. It was as often opposed to as behind corrupt politics. It offered $25,000 for an influenza cure. It let a clergyman command it for a day. Though Mr. Bonfils became involved in oil scandals, nothing damaging has yet been proved against him. Labor has never liked the Post. In 1920 striking carmen wrecked the plant. Through it all, Publishers Tammen and Bonfils so trimmed their ship, so excited the populace --for which purpose they also owned a huge circus (the Sells-Floto)--that not even Publisher Hearst dared step in to try and filch some of their fat circulation, their monopoly-rate advertising.

In 1913, Publisher John C. Shaffer of the pedestrian Chicago Evening Post bought the sturdy but hard-hit Rocky Mountain News. How Bonfils, like Desperate Desmond, and Tammen, like a malicious cherub, must have gloated! It was an honest, quiet, sanctimonious lamb that came to the slaughter and the coyotes of the Post devoted their next 15 years to harrying Publisher Shaffer about his field until he should be ready to trot back to Chicago and leave them the undisputed newspaper overlords of the Colorado plains.

In 1925, H. H. Tammen died, leaving Fred G. Bonfils to fight on alone, Napoleon among the jackrabbits, for unquestioned empire. And in 1926 Publisher Shaffer of the Rocky Mountain News caved in. But his departure did not leave Napoleon all triumphant upon the plains. It merely ushered in a Wellington and an opportunity for Mr. Bonfils to retrieve his relative's classic loss at Waterloo.

The Wellington that appeared in Denver last Thanksgiving was as thoroughly modernized a figure as the Napoleon he had come to fight. Roy W. Howard is no ponderous exemplar of "The Invincibility of Character," but a well-tailored, brisk, sapient, middle-states cityman who has spent the last few years in Manhattan as chief executive of the string of newspapers on which he served an apprenticeship. When he went the rounds of the Denver business district it was to tell the citizens what he proposed to do, not to Bonfils, but for Denver.

The citizens flocked to hear him, for so hypnotized are they by their local pressmaster that Bonfils is a greater topic of conversation among them than Prohibition, national politics or the preference of gentlemen for blondes. But Wellington Howard's most direct reference to Napoleon Bonfils was the epigram "We are coming with neither a tin cup nor a lead pipe." He refuted the Post's loud outcry upon "foreign interests" by saying the Scripps concern was no more foreign to Denver than the Chicago railroaders and packers or the Manhattan mining capitalists, through whose offices Denver had grown rich. Moreover, in command of the Scripps papers in Denver he was putting young Edward T. Leech, a onetime cub reporter on the News, whelped and schooled in Denver, post-graduated from the Birmingham, Ala., Post, where he had enjoyed a distinction unique among Scripps editors, that of being also his own publisher with a hand free of all save the most general supervision from headquarters. This freedom would be enjoyed by Editor Leech in Denver.-- Whatever they were, the new Denver Newses would be indigenous products, and one of the first things they would do would be to offer advertising space far below the figure to which Bonfils, open- space and white-space pirate, had jacked up advertising in the Post.

Reports indicated that for a week, at least, the Rocky Mountain News held its own against the Napoleonic Morning Post, publishing papers twice as large and with double the advertising. But Napoleon Bonfils was only just swinging into action. "The biggest newspaper fight of the century," as disinterested journalists of other cities called it, was but seven days old. And regardless of the outcome lovers of romance could feel that, for miles around Denver at any rate, there was still something left upon the face of the earth, if only ata- vistic noise, invective and hyperbole, to make the original settlers of that wild and woolly countryside revolve within their cerements.

Hearstlings

Gasps of astonishment may well have attended the reading last week of a soaring "lead" furnished to many a bleating newspaper by International News Service.

"Doris Duke, a slender 15-year-old princess--if an untitled American girl can be called so because she has inherited $53,000,000--is to pay the expenses of the Hall-Mills case, the cost of which has caused a greater squabble, almost, than the recent trial at Somerville itself."

Rapidly, readers glanced at the accompanying picture of gap-toothed, smiling Miss Duke; perused further:

"Not that Doris will miss the money. The will of her father, the late James B. Duke, 'tobacco king,' just disclosed, makes her the beneficiary of a great estate." "

"Padding," objected the perusers. "He (or she, more likely she) already said the girl has $53,000,000."

"A wonderful 'cellar of vintages,' filled with beverages so rare and costly that they would challenge the envy of the greatest connoisseurs of the world, and a bathroom more resplendent than any owned by the old Roman emperors, are among the items of her sumptuous legacy." "

Nice," said perusers. "But, woman, what about paying for the Halls-Mills business?"

"She is going to pay the cost of the Hall-Mills case, not because she has any personal desire to solve the financial problem of Somerset county resulting from that litigation, but because she owes certain taxes to the county because of her inheritance, and the county is going to devote the money realized from the inheritance tax to defray the expenses of the case."

So that was it. William Randolph Hearst, owner of International News Service, had sponsored one of the most "unethical", newspaper stories in his long career. He, of course, had not written it himself, but it was perfectly in accord with his tradition, and in direct conflict with newspaper ethics. "Get a lead! Go as far as you dare! Pep! Snap!" Well-paid Hearstlings and editors are promptly ousted if they do not get it.

What if a few details in the lead were manifestly not so, even after the revelation? That, for instance, she, now 15, has not yet "in- herited" the estate, which is to be held by her mother in trust until Doris is 35? Or that some of the estate goes outright to her mother, as coheir? The serious thing was that the main lead, keeping within the law, held interest through three paragraphs only by a deliberate misstatement. Taxes paid to a county or state are not earmarked for any particular disbursement.

On the $86,300,000 estate (since grown to $89,700,000) left by To- baccoman Duke, state inheritance tax alone was $2,581,366.57. Of this, Somerset County, N. J., is entitled to 5%, which is more than $125,000. Surrogate (Supervisor of Wills) Calvin McMurtrey of Somerset County is expected to get $89,000 in fees. In Somerset County is the 20,000-acre Duke estate, which has 35 miles of paved roads and many fine landscapes adorned with "beautiful statues." There are also Duke homes in Charlotte, N. C., Newport, R. I. and one in Manhattan, on Fifth Avenue, which is thought by many to be, in its simple magnificence, the finest house in the city.

Administration of bequests and taxes has reduced the estate to $53,400,000. Payments included a Federal inheritance tax of $6,560, 000, and $10,000,000 bequest to Duke University (Durham, N. C.), to which Tobaccoman Duke gave $40,000,000 (TIME, Dec. 15, 1924) while he was yet alive.

*Denver daily circulations before the merger:

Post 145,000

Rocky Aft. News 32,000

Times 26,000

Express 14,500

*Editorial supervision of all Scripps-Howard newspapers is from an office in Cleveland, in charge of able George B. Parker.