Southern Succession

Into a pair of oversized Kentucky shoes, worn only twice before, a Yankee journalist stepped last week. New York-born, 42-year-old Herbert Agar, onetime diplomat, novelist, playwright, poet, critic, historian, became editor-in-chief of the Louisville Courier-Journal.

First editor of the Courier-Journal was Colonel Henry Watterson ("Marse Henry") who helped to found it by a merger in 1868. A bellicose, one-eyed, ex-Confederate cavalry scout with walrus mustaches, Colonel Watterson knew 13 U. S. Presidents, thoroughly approved of only one: Abraham Lincoln. He took keen pleasure in abusing each of the others in turn, whether Democrat or Republican.

In the Courier-Journal Colonel Watterson said flatly that Theodore was "as mad as a March hare," suggested that his family ought to lock him up before he did more harm. Another time he called Roosevelt "as sweet a gentleman as ever scuttled a ship or cut a throat." When World War I began, Marse Henry wrote: "We must not act either in haste or passion." But it was his habit to end his editorials with the cry: "To hell with the Hohenzollerns and the Hapsburgs!"

At first a supporter of Woodrow Wilson, he grew scornful of the President's caution, eventually warned his readers: "Beneath the veneering of scholarly polish lies the coiled serpent of unscrupulous ambition." After rich Judge Robert Worth Bingham bought the paper in 1918 and supported the League of Nations (". . . inevitably Woodrow Wilson would be caught by such a whimsy . . .") Marse Henry quit in disgust. He died a few years later.

Judge Bingham, nominal editor of the Courier-Journal for ten years, doubled its circulation, upheld the national reputation that Colonel Watterson had given it. But he left the editorial page to Harrison Robertson, and in 1929 resigned the title to him. (Judge Bingham became Franklin Roosevelt's Ambassador to Great Britain, died in office two years ago.) Editor Robertson never worked for any other paper. He had been 60 years a member of the Courier-Journal staff when he died last fortnight.

Author Agar, who succeeds him, studied arts at Columbia, philosophy at Princeton, spent four years in Britain, where he was literary editor of the English Review, London correspondent for the Courier-Journal. After he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1934 for his book The People's Choice (thesis: most U. S. Presidents were "a feeble and meritless tribe") he went home, joined the Courier-Journal staff.

Once a conservative who believed that democracy had been a dismal failure, Editor Agar swung leftward with Roosevelt. His recent books are pious, eloquent, Democratic; his syndicated column, Time and Tide, has a resolutely New Deal aura. He takes his seat in Marse Henry's vacant office next January, at the close of a current lecture tour.

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