World's End
City Room. A copy boy emerged from the wire room of the New York Evening World, dawdled across the floor and laconically laid on the city desk a bulletin from the City News Association ticker. City Editor Jack Rainey, who was sending away the last of his Wall Street Closing edition, hastily scanned the slip of paper, stopped stock still, read again. An assistant looked over his shoulder, then a rewrite man, then others.
"Ralph, Herbert and Joseph Pulitzer," the bulletin stated in effect, "appeared in New York Surrogate's Court to apply as trustees for permission to break the will of their father, the late Joseph Pulitzer, founder of the New York Worlds (morning, evening & Sunday) to permit the sale of the papers to the Scripps-Howard chain for $5,000,000."
To the copy desk the bulletin went for editing and headlines. Copy-readers, some in the service of the paper for decades, leaned across their desks to see for themselves. With the speed of bad news, the word flashed from the tower of the ugly, gilt-domed old Pulitzer Building to the press rooms in the basement. Startled clerks from the circulation office, grimy printers from below, made for the city room to confirm the horrid report. . . . Was this, after 48 years, to be the end of the great, crusading World? Were their jobs not, as they had confidently believed, held secure by the will of Old Joe, who had decreed that his papers must never be sold, must be carried on by his children and their children, Worlds without end? . . . Gloomily, hardly daring to look at one another, they returned to the task of getting out what might be the very last edition.
Court In Surrogate's Court, meanwhile, the Brothers Pulitzer, a morose trio, sat across the room from dapper, ebullient little Publisher Roy Wilson Howard who clearly manifested his desire to have at the business and be done with it. The Pulitzers had made a contract with Publisher Howard, contingent upon consent of the court, to sell him the papers for $3,000.000 plus another $2,000,000 to be paid out of profits, if sufficient, by 1942. Obviously Publisher Howard would scrap the morning and Sunday Worlds, merge the Evening World with his thumping Evening Telegram and gain the Worlds' Associated Press franchises.
As justification for lifting the main mart of the founder, personable young President Herbert Pulitzer testified that the cash assets of the papers, $400,000, were only enough to continue publication for another 90 days. The papers had lost $3,000,000 in five years; worse, the losses had snowballed from $442,000 in 1926 to $1.900,000 last year. The publishers had trimmed, pinched, retrenched to no avail.
Three reasons Herbert Pulitzer gave for the Worlds' failure: 1) New York has too many general newspapers (in Manhattan 10; Brooklyn 4, exclusive of financial papers, racing sheets, etc.); 2) Three papers--morning, evening, Sunday--in the hands of one publisher are uneconomical; the profits of one are eaten by another's losses; and the advertiser, regarding them as one publication, is loth to "duplicate" his appropriations; 3) the World as a liberal, "middle ground" newspaper has been choked off between the rank, weedlike under growth of the tabloids, and the shading branches of the "ultraconservative" papers, the Times and Herald Tribune and evening Sun over-head.* To one group the World lost sensation-loving readers, cheap , advertising; to the other, high class advertising and readers.
Also into the proceedings was dragged the pathetic picture of the Brothers Pulitzer peddling the proud Worlds from door to door of Manhattan's leading publishers. They had approached Adolph Ochs of the Times, Ogden Reid of the Herald Tribune, Cyrus Hermann Kotzschmar Curtis of the Evening Post and Philadelphia Public Ledger, also, it was rumored, their former Executive Editor Herbert Bayard Swope, backed by potent Democratic tycoons. No sale.
While busy little Publisher Howard chafed at delay, Surrogate Foley reserved decision on the sale application. . . .
City Room. Practically nothing else was talked about in the Worlds' offices next day. There were 2,867 employes. Only a few could possibly be absorbed by the prospective World-Telegram; and times were at their very worst. But mostly they thought of the papers which, however the merit of their news columns might fluctuate, always boasted in their morning sheet "the two most distinguished pages in American journalism"--the editorial page, whereon David Graham Phillips, Herbert Bayard Swope, Walter Lippmann and the late Frank Irving Cobb had swung crusaders' swords; and the "opp. ed." or feature page, to which sophisticates of a decade had turned for the brilliancies of Alexander Woollcott (drama), Harry Hansen (books), Heywood Broun (who went to the Telegram three years ago following a dispute with Ralph Pulitzer), Frank Sullivan (buffoonery), Franklin Pierce Adams (Colyumist F. P. A.).
Mingled in the newsroom conversation were impulses of self-preservation and sentiment, also anger at Old Joe's inept sons who had not given their employes any warning, any chance to take the papers over and keep them running. Someone suggested that the employes band together now--surely the money could be found to save the Worlds from extinction and, worse, from chain journalism. The staff rallied swiftly. Like the foreword of doom on the preceding day, the call swept through the building, dispelling for the time the depression that hung there, bringing enthusiastic response from all departments. Executives pledged thousands; reporters put themselves down for hundreds ; copy boys telephoned their mothers to ask if they might subscribe $10. City Editor Jim Barrett was made leader of a "mutualization committee." Up on the bulletin board went a copy of a resolution petitioning the Surrogate to delay his decision ten days so that the Worlds' employes might organize and enter their bid. Soon too another notice was posted:
"To the Editorial Staff: I was prouder of the staff last night than I have ever been. Reacting under a staggering blow, you went at the making of what you believed to be our final issue like a band of devotees. . . . By God, there are men on The World!
"R. E. RENAUD, "Managing Editor Pro Tern."
Alongside this was pinned yet another notice, signed by Herbert Pulitzer:
"In the event of the approval of the sale of 'The World' papers, the Press Publishing Company is prepared to make provision for the immediate future of the employees."
A grizzled printer, who had worked for the World more than 20 years, after reading what Herbert Pulitzer had to say, sat down and pecked out something on a typewriter, pinned it to the president's statement. It read:
"A judge may or may not break the will of Joseph Pulitzer, but nobody can break his spirit over The World or Evening World."
Offers. The employes met that night in the Hotel Astor. They swelled their war chest, by subscriptions from World men at home and abroad, to $650,000. Added to that were purported offers of backing by "important banking interests" and potent Democratic leaders to the extent of some $2,000,000. Dramatic were the offers of help which poured in by telephone, telegraph and cable not only from persons directly interested, but from readers who were dismayed at the prospect of the Worlds' passing. Publisher Ferenc Condor of Az Ember offered $100 on behalf of "my poor Hungarian weekly" (Founder Pulitzer was born in Hungary). The staff of the Houston Chronicle, believing "there are thousands of newspapermen all over the U. S. to whom The World has been the law and the prophets," subscribed $1,500. The Nashville Tennessean staff raised $200. In Paris, Correspondents Dosch-Fleurot, Murray Van Paasen and Revellin promised to contribute whatever portion was allotted to them. They also cabled that Sculptor Jo Davidson, "as old World contributor, asks privilege share . . . for any reasonable sum.'"' London Correspondent ' John Balderston offered $10,000. Touching was the behavior of Owen J. Kindelon, a compositor who, as member of the typographical union in 1884, had voted in favor of a measure to help Old Joseph Pulitzer raise $50,000. When he heard the World was going he hired a substitute to set up the bond tables for him in the Sun, where he now works, and went to court to.offer his help to the mutualization committee.
Perhaps the meatiest proposal came from Publisher David Stern of the Philadelphia Record, who was willing to buy or lease the World papers and allow the employes to purchase up to 49% of the stock.
Court. There was. meanwhile, many another offer less altruistic, addressed not to the employes but to the owners and the Surrogate. Chain-Publisher Paul Block, who is said to have bid $10,000,000 for the Sunday and morning Worlds last August, rushed from the Pacific Coast into court to raise Publisher Howard's best bid by $500.000. But presently he withdrew, having, he said, just learned of the Scripps-Howard contract and the effort of the Worlds' employes. This brought from Gustavus A. Rogers, attorney for the employes, the charge that Publisher Block was really representing William Randolph Hearst, and that his precipitate withdrawal was due to connivance with Publisher Howard, that the latter would transfer to Hearst the morning and Sunday Worlds, with their A. P. franchise. Said Publisher Howard: "His statement is the silliest imaginable. . . . It's a damned lie!"
From Florida, Chain Publisher Frank Ernest Gannett also proposed to top the Scripps-Howard bid, and to keep the World papers alive. And Publisher William Griffin of the New York Enquirer (a paper so obscure that few are aware it has changed from Sunday to daily) wanted to bid. Surrogate Foley made it clear he would conduct no auction, could only decide whether sale was legal and justified. Obviously touched, he listened solemnly to the plea of the employes, advised them to make their best offer to the Pulitzers directly, reserved decision again, until that night.
To all suggestions of employe purchase or operation of the World, Publisher Howard replied, with sympathy but with a finality that surprised many people: "Impossible." He knew something few outsiders knew: International Paper Co. held a contract by which the World was bound to buy $3,500,000 worth of paper each year for ten years.
City Room. At 2 a. m. a rewrite man took pencil and copy-paper into a telephone booth. The subdued hubbub that had filled the room all night died away to silence. Everyone crowded toward the city desk: writers, artists, "legmen" (seldom seen in the office), compositors and pressmen clustered ten deep about the chair of Benjamin Franklin, night city editor. They stood in silence, waiting and wondering with heavy hearts--jobs or no jobs? World or no World?
Then came the word: The World had been sold to Scripps-Howard. The hubbub grew again. Some of the men drifted away, headbent, stunned, dully meditative. Others, a little raucously, encircled City Editor Barrett with "For He's a Jolly
Good Fellow"--and passed the hat to buy him a watch. Meanwhile Reporter Lindesay Parrott, an ace newswriter of the World, tapped out the World's death notice for its last edition. An editorial was pulled out and in its place was put Editor Walter Lippmann's "Valedictory," ending with a quotation from Mr. Valiant-For-Truth in The Pilgrim's Progress: "Though with great difficulty I am got thither, yet now I do not repent me of all the trouble I had been at to arrive where I am: My sword I give to him that shall succeed me in my pilgrimage, and my courage and skill to him that can get it." On the front page was placed the farewell message of the Brothers Pulitzer, announcing that $500,000--the Scripps-Howard down payment--would be distributed among the employes and stating: "Had the World been nothing more than a commercial enterprise a sale might profitably have been undertaken years before. It has now become compulsory."
World-Telegram. Within a few hours there appeared on the sidewalks of New
York a fat, hastily contrived newspaper decorated with random earmarks of the dead Worlds. This was the evening World-Telegram. Before noon the Telegram's telephone operators had learned to chirrup: "World-Telegram." In the combined paper were Will Johnstone's and Dennis Wortman's (Metropolitan Movies) cartoons. It was announced that Cartoonist Rollin Kirby and Book Critic Harry Hansen would be retained too. Editorial Writer Walter Lippmann confirmed reports that he was going to retire. Colyumist F. P. A., who might have led a heavy following to the World-Telegram, instead "went home" to the Herald Tribune.
Most evident was Publisher Howard's effort to realize as much as possible of the "goodwill" for which he had paid so dearly. Busily he sought to avoid unpopularity such as the late Publisher Frank A. Munsey suffered for scrapping seven Manhattan dailies during his career. The first great headline under Howard's streamer WORLD BOUGHT BY THE TELEGRAM, read: PULITZERS PRESENT A $500,000 BONUS TO THEIR EMPLOYES. Alongside it ran Publisher Howard's statement, almost plaintive, almost apologetic in its assurance that "the consolidation means not the death of The New York World, but its rebirth."
The Pulitzers-Of all legends in U. S. journalism, that of Joseph Pulitzer shines brightest and most familiar. Dull indeed is the cub reporter who cannot recite the story of the gangling, weak-eyed boy of 17 who, though no "poor immigrant," shrewdly slipped overboard from his ship in Boston Harbor and swam ashore to collect for himself the bounty on his Civil War enlistment; of the taller, young ex-soldier who rode brakerods from New York to St. Louis, in whose friendly German atmosphere he made his way as a journalist; of how he married Kate Davis, daughter of a distant cousin of the late, great Jefferson Davis; of how he began building the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, but left town after his aide fatally shot a prominent lawyer; of how, pausing in New York on his way to Europe the next year (1883), he found the faltering World for sale and bought it from Jay Gould for $346,000.
The World, begun in 1860 as a 1-c- religious daily, then had 22,000 circulation. Joseph Pulitzer soon made it a menace to Bennett's great Herald, Reid's Tribune, Dana's Sun, Jones's Times. The effete, placid World staff trembled at the advent of this tall, striding dynamo. He stood 6 ft. 2 in., had a shock of black hair and a terrifying red-brown beard which he had worn since his 30's to disguise a puny chin. His Punch-like nose was a favorite subject of caricature. The blue eyes, which by temperament should have blazed, were mild as milk.
In the 1890's came young William Randolph Hearst from California to challenge the World with the morning Journal. In the ensuing fight for circulation both papers became so blatant that "nice people" did not permit them in their homes. Hearst with his bottomless purse boldly raided the World's editorial rooms and made off with, among others, Pulitzer's own protege, the bright young editor named Arthur Brisbane. The World gave rise to the epithet "yellow journalism" by introducing a colored comic "The Yellow Kid," by the late Richard Felton ("Buster Brown") Outcault. Hearst got Outcault too, and Pulitzer produced another feature--"Hogan's Alley"--colored by the now-famed Artist George Benjamin Luks (TIME, Jan. 26). With the Spanish-American War as their joint property, the two papers outdid themselves. Then, exhausted, the publishers called a truce. The World toned down considerably; the Journal, considerably less.
Meanwhile; Publisher Pulitzer's sight had failed him completely. He never saw completed the World building on Park Row, then tallest in the city. But although he rarely visited the office (only thrice between 1893 and his death aboard his yacht Liberty in 1911), his presence there was never for an instant unfelt.
It is said that Joseph Pulitzer did everything to preserve the World except develop his sons to take his place. The majority control he bequeathed not to Joseph Jr. and Ralph, who had already entered newspaper work; but to little Herbert who had just entered St. Mark's School. Joseph went out to the Post-Dispatch and conducted it well. Ralph brought to the job of World president a real intelligence but a lack of force. He was glad to step aside, sick of his job, when Herbert was ready. Neither Herbert nor Ralph ever manifested the father's consuming passion for their papers. They liked expensive social life; they never forgot that their mother was a Davis. "If Father Pulitzer was sensitive," a young World man observed last week, "he must be turning over in his grave like an electric fan." Said William Randolph Hearst in 1927 (two years before the human hurricane, Herbert Bayard Swope, left it): "I give the World just five more years."
Scripps-Howard. "To those two immortals in American newspaper history, Joseph Pulitzer and E. W. Scripps, we respectfully dedicate the first issue of the World-Telegram today." So wrote little Publisher Howard in further celebration of his purchase last week. It was fine as a gesture but all newspapermen recognized that the stature of the Immortals was unequal. And it was a fair guess that if Old Joe Pulitzer had had to choose a man to carry on his papers, sooner than to Edward Willys Scripps or his seed he would have turned to that kinetic little descendant of fighting Irishmen, Roy Wilson Howard.
Publishers Pulitzer and Scripps were both tall men, both bearded, both wilful and autocratic. Each died on his yacht (Scripps in Monrovia Bay, Africa, five years ago this month). There the similarity ends. Scripps was a book-binder's 13th child. After public schooling and farm life in Rushville. 111., he started work as his half-brother's office boy on the Detroit Tribune for $3 per week. He was 24 when in 1878 he obtained $10,000 from his half-brothers to start a newspaper in Cleveland. He called it The Penny Press and resolved always to keep himself and his work close to the plain people. This appears to have been the expression of a business conviction rather than a spiritual necessity, however. Soon after his first Press began making money, Publisher Scripps began what amounted to the invention of chain journalism. His system: find an ambitious young man, stake him as cheaply as possible (the way E. W. Scripps began), let him be part owner; the greater the young man's profits, the greater E. W. Scripps's. It was as an editorial success formula that Publisher Scripps enjoined his young men to attack Graft and Corruption, to cry out for the Common People. He never enjoined them always to put crusading ahead of the busi ness office. He never spent money to house his properties handsomely as civic institutions. They were dividend-paying news factories and looked it.
The Scripps interests became the Scripps-McRae league in 1895, 13 years after Publisher Scripps availed himself of the services of a dynamic young Michiganian named Milton A. McRae, who re tired in another 13 years. They became the Scripps-Howard papers in 1922 after a conversation in which small Roy Howard, then of the United Press, told large Pub lisher Scripps that he did not believe in those newspapers. They had, he said, lost sight of the best social interest of the times and instead of People's Champions had become chronic growlers.
If he was rugged and loud, Publisher Scripps was fair. He saw and honored Howard's point and let him, with Son Robert P. Scripps, step in to renovate the chain's policy.
The upspokenness of Roy Howard was what took him from hawking newspapers in Indianapolis to the top of the largest U. S. newspaper chain (now 25 strong). It failed to get him along on Old Joe Pulitzer's Post-Dispatch, where as an assistant telegraph operator he once demanded a $3 raise in vain. But he left Pulitzer and not many years later was confronting Old Man Scripps on the latter's ranch at Miramar. Calif. Part of the Scripps plain-people complex was plain clothes. Roy Howard has always liked fancy clothes and at this first meeting with his employer, he was at his fanciest. The great man scowled down at his midget caller and in their ensuing conversation sought to squelch him thoroughly and forever. After the little fashion-plate had carried his point and walked off, Old Man Scripps is supposed to have uttered the famed encomium, the truth of which other great men have learned about Roy Howard: "That young man boots." will never get indigestion licking my Aftermath, The court decision con signal firming for the the sale of maddest the Worlds newspaper was scram the ble for circulation and advertising that New York newsmen could recall. Every paper in the city burst forth with great advertisements, bidding for the Worlds' late readers (313,911, morning; 276,267, evening; 491,796 Sunday). The World-Telegram was said to have started out with 750,000 (the Telegram itself had had some 250,000), but everyone knew that a large part of "curiosity" the total circulation. Of all the competitors none bid more strongly or loudly than youthful William Randolph Hearst Jr., who strengthen saw his and seized the publishing-family's opportunity to American.
*The Times, in reporting this part of the Pulitzer testimony, made it read "high-class newspapers like THE NEW YORK TIMES in the morning field and The Sun in the evening," did not mention the competing Herald Tribune. The Herald Tribune, in its account, did mention the Times--and next clay called attention to the Times's glaring omission in a brief editorial headed by the Times''s own lofty slogan: "All the News That's Fit to Print."
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