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as an expression of the old Scripps progressivism. In the early twenties he had written a series of articles denouncing what he called “government by the courts,” and limitation of the power of the Supreme Court had become almost a Scripps copyright theme. When, in 1937, Howard wanted the News, like the other papers of the chain, to campaign against Roosevelt's scheme to reorganize the Court, Mellett resigned, giving up an income of twentyfive thousand dollars a year to take a government job at eight thousand dollars. That same year Howard broke irrevocably with Broun. The precipitating cause was a document in the form of a letter “to a famous newspaper publisher,” which Broun contributed to the New Republic. Broun, addressing his purportedly fictitious publisher as Butch Dorrit, wrote:

Do you honestly think that the great American public is all steamed up about your income tax? Take off the false whiskers. There's nothing immoral or unethical in your espousing the conservative side all along the line, but doesn't that pretense of progressivism sometimes cleave to your gullet? All your arguments are based upon the premise that you're a great success. You've scrapped some great papers and what have you got to show for them? What's left is an eightcolumn cut of the Quints asking permission to go to the bathroom.

This last sentence was a reference to the fullpage layouts of pictures of the Dionne Quintuplets with which the WorldTelegram had been embellishing itself about once a week. The Newspaper Enterprise Association, a ScrippsHoward feature syndicate known as the N.E.A., had triumphantly obtained exclusive American rights to newspaper photographs of the sisters. Perhaps more cutting was Broun's allusion to Howard's tax affairs. Broun's contract still had two years to run, but after this incident he and Howard did not make even a pretense of mutual tolerance. “I wouldn't pour water on Broun's leg if he was on fire,” the publisher once said to some WorldTelegram men. The Bureau of Internal Revenue, in an attempt to illustrate loopholes in the tax law, had named Howard and several of his associates, along with other wealthy men, at a hearing by the Congressional Joint Committee on Tax Evasion and Avoidance, as creators of personal holding companies. The Treasury subsequently maintained that the choice of names was accidental, but some observers thought the accident well planned. The testimony, they figured, was aimed to forestall a ScrippsHoward newspaper campaign for downward revision of the surplusprofits tax. A newspaper owner who was already taking full advantage of a wide gap in the law would make an awkward figure as crusader for further tax reductions.

Old Scripps had anticipated an economic revolution within a hundred years and had been accustomed to say that it was up to people of wealth to make the change painless. Howard once said, “I wonder if the old man would have been such a liberal if he had had a pistol up against his belly the way I have.” Howard was referring to the American Newspaper Guild. Broun was one of the founders and the first national president of this union of newspaper editorial and businessoffice workers. The coming of the Guild to the ScrippsHoward papers brought a general rise in minimum wages and the establishment of severance pay in proportion to length of service. The Guild also protected the fortyhour week established by NRA. These changes cost the newspaper chain about a million dollars a year. Restrained editorial support, in the old days, of unions in other industries had cost precisely nothing, and Scripps himself might have balked at paying this much in cash for his franchise in the friendoflabor business.

In 1934, when Broun's original contract with the WorldTelegram expired, the Guild, which had not yet arrived at the WorldTelegram, had still seemed innocuous. It had not yet joined even the American Federation of Labor, from which it later seceded to affiliate itself with the CIO. Westbrook Pegler, who had been placed on the famous “firstpage secondsection,” or “split page,