"Journal's Execution"

". . . To celebrate my return to the Graphic I am giving away ten $100 bills . . .," loudly announced Publisher Bernarr Macfadden fortnight ago in his Manhattan tabloid. ". . . The Macfadden Magazines have required all of my time. I have not been in the Graphic office half a dozen times in the last two years."

Last week Publisher Macfadden began to make up for lost time. Upon the front of his Graphic he spread a full page "composograph" (faked picture) of a young man in Sing Sing's electric chair. The young man was Francis ("Two Gun") Crowley, 20, undersized, dull-witted hoodlum who murdered a policeman last year. His capture was a sensation of the sort on which he thrived. Cornered in a midtown apartment house with his 17-year-old girl friend and another gunman, he held off more than 100 police, armed with tear gas and machine guns, for two hours while newsreel cameras ground away (TIME, May 18).

Several days before the execution last week the sensational press tried to inject into it some of the epic quality of the capture. Notably energetic was Hearst's evening Journal. It tried to engineer a last-minute visit of Helen Walsh, the girl friend, to the death house; it assigned seven reporters and photographers to the story and ballyhooed it with a radio broadcast by the city editor. Other newsmen at the prison called the proceedings ''The Journal's execution."

"Two-Gun" refused to see Miss Walsh (his comment: "The hell with her") ; but to the end he supplied a certain amount of drama of his own kind. He bade a friendly farewell to the warden whose broken wrist was in a sling. Said he: "Gee, I feel sorry for you." (The warden, for the first time in his twelve years administration, did not attend the execution.) He walked grinning to the chair, told one of the guards that one of the electrodes against his leg did not seem tight enough, and he died. . .

Times and Herald Tribune each gave the execution and obituary a column and a half on inside pages. Hearst's morning paper, the American, limited its report to less than two columns. One of its reporters in the death chamber was Rev. Charles Francis Potter, publicity-craving founder of the first Humanist Society in New York. His story began: "I killed a boy a few minutes ago and I don't feel very good about it."

The Graphic explained its "composograph" (a famed old Graphic device which had fallen into disuse during Publisher Macfadden's absence) in a subsequent issue: "It is a prison rule that no cameras are allowed in the execution chamber. The Graphic's editors would not wish to print the actual photograph of the execution in any event." But the Graphic's editors did their best to make the full-page picture look as much as possible like a repetition of the Daily News's exploit of printing an actual photograph of Ruth Snyder in the electric chair in 1928. The Snyder picture was taken by a tiny camera strapped to a newsman's ankle. Last week prison guards carefully examined the ankles and wristwatches of every witness to the Crowley execution.

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