Soul's Helmsman

The late great Joseph Pulitzer founded the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1878. His capital was $5.200. The paper's circulation started at 987. In 1882 it was earning $85,000 a year. With his profits Publisher Pulitzer bought the New York World in 1883, built it into an even greater newspaper than the Post-Dispatch.

When he died in 1911, Joseph Pulitzer made a curious mistake. He left eight-tenths of the stock in his two publishing companies to his sons, Ralph and Herbert. To his son Joseph Jr., whom he apparently considered less able than the others, he left one-tenth. Under studious Ralph and socialite Herbert the World slowly lost most of its prestige and all its profits. Under able young Joseph the Post-Dispatch continued affluent and influential. When the wrecked World was sold in 1931, the Post-Dispatch remained the last monument to the liberal, crusading principles of Pulitzer journalism.

Chief item in old Joseph Pulitzer's creed, stated daily since his 60th birthday in the Post-Dispatch masthead, is: ". . . A true newspaper is one that would never be satisfied with merely printing news. ..." The true importance of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch is not that it is one of the six largest daily advertising media in the country or that it prints more news and handles it better than any of its competitors, but that its editorial page is a great battering ram of influence on the public opinion of the Midwest. Responsibility for Post-Dispatch editorials is vested in the "editor of the editorial page." Last month Clark McAdams, editorial page editor since 1926, was advanced to the position of associate editor. By last week, his successor had had ample time to shake himself down into his new job and Post-Dispatch readers had had ample opportunity to detect in the management of the page "the sharp incisive style of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch's able Washington correspondent, Charles Griffith Ross.

Stoop-shouldered, scholarly, homely "Charley" Ross had been chief of the Post-Dispatch's Washington bureau since 1918. Graduating from the University of Missouri in 1905, he worked for three years on various newspapers including the Post-Dispatch, then taught copy reading and editorial writing in the School of Journalism of the University of Missouri from 1908 to 1918. In 1916 he took a year off, went to Australia, worked on the Melbourne Herald. In Washington no correspondent was more respected by his colleagues than Ross. In 1931 that respect became almost reverential awe when he won a Pulitzer Prize for a series of articles for the Post-Dispatch's "Dignity Page" called "The Plight of the Country." This series composed one of the most thoughtful and fair-minded journalistic inquiries into the Depression and such remedies as the Hoover Administration was applying. Last year Ross acted as president of the Gridiron Club. For years he had helped to stage-manage its shows, with the aid of a stop watch to see that no skit, no song lagged beyond its allotted time. Today he has one son at Dartmouth, another at Georgetown.

Editor Ross's authority on the editorial page will be reflected in a change of style rather than of policy. He will continue to give support to President Roosevelt and General Johnson. His views are liberal but not as far to the left as those of another crack Post-Dispatch news hawk, Paul Y. Anderson, who uses the Nation to blister his conservative adversaries. His successor as No. 1 Post-Dispatchman at the capital is Raymond P. ("Pete") Brandt, a onetime Rhodes Scholar who grew up in Sedalia, Ohio. A good hard-digging reporter, "Pete" Brandt was president of the National Press Club the year Ross headed the Gridiron.

To the Midwest, these changes on the Post-Dispatch--which were not mentioned in that paper--were important because its original 987 readers have grown in the last 56 years to 237,000, largest circulation in St. Louis.* Its 1934 property assessment ($1,778,230) makes it the largest single taxpayer in the city, outstripping even St. Louis' famed breweries and shoe factories. As a publishing property its value is conservatively estimated above $10,000,000. Its radio station, KSD, is profitable. Like many another newspaper's, the Post-Dispatch's profits have declined since Depression but in 1933 it paid its usual yearly bonuses to executives and editors.

Under Publisher Pulitzer, the executive staff of the Post-Dispatch keeps the paper running smoothly when he is, as he was last week, away for the summer at Bar Harbor. Managing Editor Oliver ("Jack") Bovard, lean, austere, hard to know, has held his job for 22 years. Meek, small, sandy-haired Cartoonist Fitzpatrick works in a cubbyhole off the city room. His drawings, notable for the dramatic effect obtained with an economy of line, are subject to editorial approval but are seldom changed. Best known among the 126 Post-Dispatch reporters and newsmen who take their orders from Managing Editor Bovard is probably Paul Y. Anderson, once the paper's East St. Louis correspondent, whose race riot investigations in 1917 started him on his way up. Smarter than his foppish attire would suggest, he is particularly able on the crusade type of story. Many of the crucial questions asked witnesses in the second Oil Scandal investigation (1927-28) were first written down on slips of paper by Anderson and then passed along to the less alert Senate investigators to put at the hearings.

Also on the staff are Public Utilities Expert Cam Shalton, Sleuth John T. Rogers (who in 1931 got a bonus of more than $6,000 for solving the kidnapping of Dr. Isaac Dee Kelly Jr.), Political Commentator Curtis Belts. When a big story breaks the Post-Dispatch sends so many men out to cover it, that rival newshawks complain that at the scene they can see nothing but Post-Dispatch men. The importance of last week's changes to the Post-Dispatch itself was not easy to predict. The paper has been called "an American Manchester Guardian." Among the qualities that have justified that comparison are its intelligence, its liberalism, its independence. On the strength of its own information it boldly denied the false Armistice of 1918 while almost every other paper in the land was carrying it as fact. These qualities and the loyalty that they inspire in the Post-Dispatch's staff caused Editor Ross once to write a sentence which he could well have repeated last week: "To say that the Post-Dispatch . . . had a soul is to risk a cynical retort; but how can one better convey the idea . . .?"

*Largest circulation in Missouri is that of the Kansas City Star (294,000 evening circulation) whose smart managing editor, Roy Roberts, was another ace Washington correspondent.

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