"Radiance Upon Millions"

In July 1926, in Canton, Ohio, Don R. Mellett, young editor of James M. Cox's Canton News, was shot down in his back yard one evening as he was putting his car away. It was vengeance from the underworld, against which Mellett had been crusading in his newspaper. The journalistic world rang with the news. The U. S. press was not content that two of Editor Mellett's murderers should be given life sentences and two condemned to 20 years in prison. At the suggestion of a journalist, Editor & Publisher, trade weekly of the Press, started a campaign for a Don Mellett Memorial Fund. Journalists were asked to contribute; laymen were invited not to.

More than $2,000 was assembled and the income from this fund was used to establish an annual lectureship. Last year J. Alfred Spender, retired editor of London's oldtime Westminster Gazette, went to New York University and spoke. It was decided to hold the lecture each year in a different part of the country. The subject of the lectures is "some form of dynamic journalism."

Last week the second lecture was de livered. The place was the University of Missouri. The speaker was Editor Marlen Edwin Pew of Editor & Publisher.

Editor Pew had a report to make on Canton: "I can tell you tonight, because I have seen it with my own eyes within a fortnight, that Canton is still, this minute, cursed by a tenderloin -- a loathsome well-identified district of vice and crime where the scarlet woman plies her trade, where the illicit traffic continues and where dope may or may not be sold. I am told that the Federal authorities (not local police) have latterly fairly well stopped the narcotic traffic. The mayor of Canton is C. C. Curtis, elected by the people since the death of Mellett, although he had previously been removed from the mayor's office by the Governor of Ohio as a result of an expose in the Canton News of graft and corruption at City Hall; his brother, E. E. Curtis, who was Director of Public Safety during the former regime of Mayor Curtis, organized the Canton underworld and exacted a toll of graft from all of its vicious activities and, when exposed by the News, was arrested, convicted and sentenced to the penitentiary. I ask you to ponder the fact that Mayor Curtis is back on the job today at City Hall, the people's choice, as a result of a campaign of such demagogery as would give any intelligent or patriotic citizen mental cramps."

But Editor Pew was not downhearted: ''In summation I surely cannot say that I believe Don Mellett's martyrdom was in vain, though the sacrifice was terrible and though the tangible results seem vague. The very fact that we are here thinking and talking of these things means some thing. Culture turns on a slow wheel. . . . It is as incredible that Don Mellett's self-sacrifice, dying that others might live, will fail to cast its radiance upon striving millions as that the morning Summer sun shall fail to awaken the sleeping earth, open the petals of the nodding flowers and scatter the miasmic mists of darkness. This is the measure of our faith."