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By Root 486 0

House. He had told Roosevelt that a certain stand he had taken was a serious mistake, and the President had replied, “Horsefeathers, Roy, horsefeathers!” The publisher's attitude toward the war, like that of some of the America First leaders, is possibly affected by the simple fact that he is a wealthy man who does not wish to be disturbed. In addition he regards himself as intuitive and a repository of confidential information. If he were a racetrack plunger, he would never look at horses or form charts. He would put his faith in his hunches and conversations with dopesters. Some of the dopesters he has listened to, like Al Williams, have a high opinion of German prowess and may have influenced him to put a bet on isolationism. Munich, in Howard's estimation, was good business sense. He has said that Neville Chamberlain has not yet been fully appreciated. Howard visited Europe in the summer of 1939 and filed a series of dispatches to his papers belittling the danger of war. Some people accused him of acting, like Senator Borah, as if the world crisis were a political gimmick rigged by Roosevelt. It usually takes Howard, on a foreign reporting tour, around four days to learn the truth about a major power, but he can fathom a nation of less than twentyfive million inhabitants in one afternoon. Before going on such a trip, Howard, who tells new acquaintances that he is “primarily a reporter,” bashfully asks his subordinates if they think it worth while for him to cable some stories. They invariably think so.

It is impossible to imagine Howard playing HarunalRashid on the Bowery, as hulking Captain Joseph Medill Patterson, publisher of the Daily News, sometimes does. Howard's contacts with the people are generally those he makes on Pan American clippers, at de luxe hotels, and at dinner parties. One acquaintance who made a considerable impression on him in the thirties was Baron Axel WennerGren, the Swedish industrialist, who is heavily interested in the Electrolux and Servel corporations and whose European holdings include timberlands, paper mills, and munitions factories. WennerGren was at the time a friend of Edward VIII, Mrs. Simpson, and Von Ribbentrop, then German Ambassador to London. He had also known Hermann Goring during the German's sojourn in Sweden after the first World War. WennerGren's viewpoint, as recorded in the WorldTelegram and elsewhere, seemed to be that though there were labor unions in Sweden they knew their place, whereas in Germany and Italy the workers, by insisting on too much, had made necessary a totalitarian revolution, and that he feared the same thing might happen in the United States. Whenever WennerGren was coming to New York, Howard was apt to have a reporter sent to meet his ship, with advice on what opinions to look for in the statement the Baron had not yet made. The Baron believed that Germany and the United States could get along beautifully with the right people running both countries. Senator Wheeler was another whose interviews were frequently “frontoffice” assignments. Not only such officially protected game as WennerGren and Wheeler but almost all WorldTelegram interviewees wearing suits that cost more than one hundred dollars would begin by asking the reporter, “How is Roy?”

In the years between his purchase of the World and the beginning of the second World War, Howard succeeded in becoming a fairly wellknown New York figure, although he never got to be a celebrity du premier plan, like Jimmy Walker or Walter Winchell or Dutch Schultz. He is certainly the only publisher of a New York newspaper except William Randolph Hearst whose photograph would be recognized by the average newspaper reader. Captain Patterson, Ogden Reid, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, and William Dewart are men without faces as far as the public is concerned. Returning to his hotel from one of the sessions of the Democratic convention in Chicago last summer, Howard and a few of his employees, unable to get a taxi, climbed aboard a crowded streetcar. A large, sweaty fellow in work clothes looked down at the small,