Public Opinion at Work

When globe-trotting Publisher Roy Wilson Howard went to Moscow in 1936 to interview Joseph Stalin he also met a bearded, scholarly American named Angus Ward, then U.S. consul in Moscow. He heard of him no more until last October, when he read that Ward, by then U.S. consul in Mukden, Manchuria, had been clapped in jail by the Chinese Communist government. Like many another indignant American, Roy Howard waited for stern and decisive action by the U.S. State Department to get its consul out of jail. After a wait of weeks, while State hemmed & hawed and did nothing either stern or effective, Roy Howard hit the ceiling. He decided to get Angus Ward out himself.

Build a Fire. Howard called up redheaded Walker Stone, 45-year-old boss of the Scripps-Howard Newspapers' Washington bureau, gave him his assignment and told him: "Build a fire. Stir up the animals." Stone set Reporter Andrew Tully to prowling the corridors of the State Department, assigned Oland D. Russell, his Far Eastern expert, to dig up other angles, briefed Editorial Writer Parker La Moore on the campaign ahead. Cartoonist Harold Talburt sharpened his Pulitzer-Prizewinning pencil.

Soon Howard's men had six articles ready to go. When the State Department sent what Howard thought was a "mealymouthed" protest to Red China's Mao Tse-tung, Howard let fly with his first salvo.

ANGUS WARD ALIVE -- OR ELSE! W35 the head on La Moore's opening editorial, boxed across the top of the New York World-Telegram's editorial page, and echoed by the other 18 Scripps-Howard newspapers (total circ. 2,500,000).

Recalling that Teddy Roosevelt sent warships to Tangier in 1904 to rescue a U.S. citizen named Ion Perdicaris (who had been kidnaped by a Moroccan bandit named Raisuli), La Moore quoted T.R.'s famed ultimatum to the Bey of Tangier: "Perdicaris alive--or Raisuli dead."*Lashing out at the State Department's Office of Far Eastern Affairs for its "notorious . . . pro-Communist sympathies," Scripps-Howard in another blast cried: "Writing polite little notes has produced no results. Action is needed. A U.S. naval blockade of [Chinese] ports would bring the Communists to terms . . ."

Out or Rot? Day after day, the Scripps papers thundered in behalf of mild-mannered Angus Ward, ridiculing the Red accusation that he had beaten up a Chinese servant, as akin to "saying Gandhi was a big bully." Under the sarcastic caption, THE EAGLE SCREAMS, Cartoonist

Talburt drew a bedraggled U.S. eagle, being kicked in the tail by a Chinese Communist. The eagle's scream: "Ouch! Please stop."

On Page One, Howard's New York World-Telegram demanded: "Mr. President, what are you going to do? Get him out or let him rot?" At President Truman's press conference, Merriman Smith, of the Scripps-Howard-controlled United Press, put the question: What about the imprisonment of Angus Ward? Said the President: an outrage. Then the State Department sent an appeal to 30 nations in Ward's behalf. A few days later Ward was free (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS). In a final cartoon, Scripps-Howard assigned the credit to public opinion, the force it had done much to inform and arouse.

*The Bey's boss, the Sultan of Morocco, was unable to catch Raisuli, settled the affair by paying a $70,000 ransom to the bandit to release Perdicaris.

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