The Telephone Booth Indian - Abbott Joseph Liebling [105]
After the Republicans had renominated Hoover, the ScrippsHoward editorial convention at French Lick endorsed him. The publisher showed no warmth for Roosevelt until the summer after the inauguration, when “New Deal” had become a password to popularity. He then threw himself on the President's neck with all the shyness of a hostess in a navy cafe. “Roy is a fellow who likes to climb aboard a band wagon,” one politician said awhile ago, “and then gets mad if the fellows who were on first won't let him drive and play the bass drum at the same time.”
Howard's infatuation with the President ended with the “breathingspell” letters they exchanged in the summer of 1935. Alarmed by the administration's tax program and quietly relieved by the Supreme Court decision which terminated the NRA, Howard proposed to Stephen Early, the President's secretary, that Mr. Roosevelt grant him an exclusive interview. The President was to furnish prepared answers to a questionnaire previously submitted by Howard. The affair was to be on the grand scale. There would be photographers, newsreel cameramen, and probably a broadcast, and the purport of the President's answers would be that recovery had already been achieved and that reform was something business might thenceforth cease to worry about. The President demurred, but agreed to answer a letter from Howard and permit publication of the letter with his reply. The publisher wrote that largescale industry, harassed by taxation which it considered “revengeful,” felt there should be “a breathing spell and a recess from further experimentation until the country can recover its losses.” The President answered, “The 'breathing spell' of which you speak is here—very decidedly so.” He also said, “The tax program of which you speak is based upon a broad and just social and economic purpose—this law affects only people who have incomes over fifty thousand dollars a year.” Howard published Roosevelt's reply, but his editorials soon indicated that he thought the President had trifled with his affections. “I was never so thick with the President as people said,” he now remarks modestly, and adds, rather defiantly, “and I'm not so thin with him now as some people would like to have you think.”
In the 1936 presidential campaign, Howard gave nominal support to the administration. George Morris, a shrewd old political writer whom he had inherited with the Telegram when it was a wardheelers' Bible, assured him from the start that Landon would carry only two states. The publisher nevertheless took occasion during the campaign to visit Landon on his special train in Buffalo to pay his respects. “Our bark is worse than our bite,” he told the Republican candidate. The fight over the Supreme Court made the division between Howard and Roosevelt definite. In the course of this struggle, the WorldTelegram expressed extravagant admiration for Governor Herbert H. Lehman of New York, who helped beat the President's proposals. The praise bounced back in Howard's face in 1938, when Lehman ran for reelection against Thomas E. Dewey, the publisher's favorite adolescent Republican. A typical WorldTelegram editorial of those days might begin with some such statement as “The State is indeed fortunate to have a choice of two such equally remarkable candidates” and then go on to the end praising Dewey. After Lehman's reelection, Howard may have felt that both men owed