Hawkins for Howard

Active command of the world's liveliest newspaper chain changed hands this week with a characteristic minimum of fuss & feathers. Robert Paine Scripps, controlling stockholder of Scripps-Howard Newspapers, announced that William Waller Hawkins was succeeding Roy Wilson Howard as board chairman. For Mr. Hawkins the shift was not only a hard-earned promotion but the fulfillment of a precedent which has become part of U. S. journalistic tradition. For 30 years, as Bill Hawkins and Roy Howard have climbed the publishing ladder, Big Bill has repeatedly helped boost his little friend up a rung, then succeeded to the perch himself with his next step.

What a shortstop is to a pitcher, what a tail is to a kite, what a pin is to a pinwheel --Bill Hawkins is to Roy Howard. In 1906 when Roy Howard, a brash boy wonder two years off the Cincinnati Post, was made New York manager of the brand new Scripps' Publishers' Press Association at $50 a week (which he agreed to plough back for stock), his first appointee was Bill Hawkins, out of Springfield, Mo. by way of the Louisville Courier-Journal. Next year reorganization carried them into the United Press together. There for 13 years they perfectly complemented each other. UP's President Howard might be in London getting the historic 1916 "knockout" interview from David Lloyd George, or in Brest getting the equally historic false Armistice report from Admiral Wilson. UP's Vice President & General Manager Hawkins kept his two big, reliable feet on the ground at headquarters in Manhattan, saw that all the bases were scrupulously and soundly tagged as UP steadily expanded from 21 bureaus serving 267 clients, to 104 serving more than 1,350. Although it was never possible for both of them to get away from the job for much fun together, the team of Hawkins & Howard was inseparable at work. They bought neighboring houses at suburban Pelham, each put a son in the business.* When Howard went over to manage the Scripps papers in 1921, Hawkins succeeded logically to the UP presidency. It was not much more than two years before speedy Pitcher Howard was calling for Shortstop Hawkins, who became vice chairman & general executive manager of Scripps-Howard in the exciting period of its great Eastern expansion into Pittsburgh, Washington, Baltimore and finally New York.

"Mr. Howard," said this week's announcement, "as second largest stockholder, continues as chairman of the executive committee and as president & editor of the New York World-Telegram. He is divesting himself of administrative responsibilities in order to associate himself more closely with Robert P. Scripps . . . in purely editorial activities, especially those pertaining to national and international relationships."

Net of this was that, at 53, Roy Howard was about to become that rare specimen, a U. S. executive who, instead of continuing along a channel of activity into which he has permitted circumstances to push him, insists on his right to climb out and do the job for which he is best fitted and likes most. "I have never been one of those gifted birds who could sit back and say: 'All right boys, go get 'em!'" complains Roy Howard. "I have to say: 'All right boys, let's go get 'em!' " The cares and complications of management bore and worry him, as is evidenced by his long dependence on dependable Bill Hawkins.

In spite of the "administrative responsibilities" of the past 16 years, Scripps-Howard's Howard has nevertheless managed to keep a dramatic hand in "national and international relationships." In the past three years he has circled the globe twice. The last junket, from which he returned last April, kept him away from home eight months. That he was earning his salary every minute he was absent, no one can deny. As he stepped on the boat at San Francisco last September a neatly planned interchange of letters with the White House evoked from Frank-lin Roosevelt the political catch-phrase of the season: The promise to U. S. business of a "breathing spell." In December, after intimately traveling through the month-old Philippine Commonwealth with President Manuel Quezon, Roy Howard again produced a front-page sensation by asserting that the Islands wanted, not full independence, but permanent commonwealth status. Three months later the snappy little publisher was inside the Kremlin, drawing from steely Dictator Joseph Stalin the hypothetical circumstances under which Russia would fight Japan.

In the opinion of his closest associates, lively little Publisher Howard relinquished the Scripps-Howard high command not that he might further indulge his instinct for finding and timing news, but rather to permit him to concentrate more attention on the World-Telegram.

Of all the Scripps-Howard chain, the World-Telegram's metropolitan performance is almost exclusively a Roy Howard show. Singlehanded in 1931 he carried through the negotiations by which the failing Brothers Pulitzer's Worlds were merged for $3,000,000 (plus $2,000,000 future profits) with the flashy Scripps-Howard Telegram, bought four years before. It was Publisher Howard who junked the morning and Sunday Worlds, announced to a skeptical city that the independent, crusading, liberal traditions of Joseph Pulitzer's great paper had suffered not death but "rebirth." Not until 1933, when the World-Telegram won a Pulitzer distinguished service award for a variety of effective campaigns, did New York City take Publisher Howard at his word. Manhattan publishers are notoriously close-mouthed about the balance sheets of their papers. Best opinion is that all New York newspapers cost way too much to run, none pays a respectable return on the money invested in it. If the World-Tele-gram, on which a $1,350,000 exploitation fund was lavished in its first eight months, has yet had any profits to share with the Brothers Pulitzer, the news has not been made public. Its circulation, never far over 400,000, has lately remained about 100,000 above the arch-conservative Sun, about 200,000 below the rowdy Journal. Publisher Howard prefers to measure the World-Telegram's progress in the past five years in terms of public service rather than circulation or profit, points out that the paper has made a place for itself in the nation's largest and most competitive community. This fact few could deny after the World-Telegram, unsupported by any other important metropolitan paper, helped Fusion Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia into City Hall in 1934. turning out Tammany for the first time since the old World ousted it in 1914.

The World-Telegram soon developed into Mayor LaGuardia's most vigilant critic. And so have Scripps-Howard papers recently delivered stinging attacks against certain aspects of the New Deal, largely through Columnists Raymond Clapper and Westbrook Pegler. Publisher Howard went on record in 1932 as a friend of the New Deal's "principles," chiefly because he believes that they alone are sufficiently resilient to give but not shatter under the pressure of what he sees as a world-wide Leftward swing. Does his present critical attitude indicate that he has fundamentally changed his mind about Roosevelt & Co.? Last week, best answer seemed to be that one of cagey Roy Howard's strongest policies is never to let a politician feel too sure of him.

On the World-Telegram's editorial page one day last week appeared an open indictment of President Roosevelt for squaring "personal political obligations by saddling the Federal Bench with unknowns" nominated by Tammany and The Bronx's Boss Edward J. Flynn. The Republicans "earned a cheer for having accepted the principle of social security." James A. Farley was castigated for making "a spoilsman's happy hunting ground of the Postal Department," which in turn was felicitated in an adjoining column for "a swell job on its bonus bond deliveries." All of which indicated that in his 36 years in the newspaper business, Roy Howard has learned, like a movie hero's wife, how to be an office holder's best pal and severest critic.

*Last week in Knoxville, Tenn., Son Jack Rohe Howard was working for the Scripps-Howard radio division. Son George Hawkins was in the Far East writing special feature articles.

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