Editor Boiling

An ebullient editor was marked "IA" by his draft board, and overnight the U.S. had its screwiest Selective Service case of World War II. The editor was voluble Ralph McAllister Ingersoll of crusading, neurojournalistic PM. And the rumpus he kicked up could have happened only in Manhattan.

Fascist-fighter Ingersoll, 41, told his board that he had two dependents (a divorced wife and an invalided family servant) but insisted that he wanted to serve wherever he could do the Axis most harm. The board, without going into its reasons, decided he could do most harm in the Army. Then, to Ingersoll's declared surprise, his employer, wealthy Marshall Field, wired Selective Service Director Hershey asking that Ingersoll be deferred because he was essential to PM and PM was essential to public morale.

Meantime Ingersoll got the impression that one member of his draft board would be just as well satisfied if PM were not around. Boiling over, Editor Ingersoll wrote a 6,000-word letter to the board. He also spread it over three pages in PM. From such widely divergent sources as the Communist Daily Worker, the conservative New York Herald Tribune, Editor & Publisher came editorials ranging from question to damnation of the board's decision.

PM printed them all, along with the gibes of the Hearst and Patterson-McCormick press, the full texts of radio commentators. For several days headlines about Ingersoll and Draft Board 44 all but drove the war off PM's front page. The draft board, reconsidering its decision, reaffirmed it, by a 2-to-1 vote.

Few editors in Manhattan felt like taking up the cudgels for Editor Ingersoll, particularly after his attempt to try his case in his own paper. Yet all of them knew that, for better or for worse, Editor Ingersoll had given PM its character and direction--just as truly as Bertie McCormick has to the isolationist Chicago Tribune or Joe Patterson to the New York Daily News--and that to draft him was a blow at a wing of the press which also has a right to freedom and continued existence.

For the inarticulate draft board, the saddest parts of the pother were that Ingersoll had told it he would not permit his employer to ask for his deferment, that Marshall Field's telegram to General Hershey was filed late and out of order, that the board had never been favored with proof of Field's claim that his editor was indispensable. Nonetheless the case was sent up to an Appeal Board, while PM still fulminated.

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