The Telephone Booth Indian - Abbott Joseph Liebling [86]
The report that set the country to celebrating the end of the first World War on the afternoon of November 7 was received by the United Press in New York and said, in the customary newspaper cablese: “URGENT ARMISTICE ALLIES GERMANY SIGNED ELEVEN SMORNING HOSTILITIES CEASED TWO SAFTERNOON SEDAN TAKEN SMORNING BY AMERICANS.” It was signed “HOWARD SIMMS.” Howard, then president of the United Press, was supposed by his subordinates here to be in Paris. William Philip Simms, now foreign editor of the United Press, was then the organization's manager in Paris, and it was a rule that all United Press messages from France had to bear his signature. When Howard sent the cable, he was not in Paris but in Brest, where he had just finished having a chatty lunch with ViceAdmiral Henry B. Wilson, commander of the American naval forces in France. According to Howard's subsequent account of the affair, he had concluded that the World War was about washed up and had obtained permission to return to America on a transport scheduled to sail from Brest on November 8. Armistice was in the air. The German government had appointed a delegation to meet with representatives of the Allied powers and receive terms. The two delegations were due to come together sometime on November 7, but Howard did not know the exact hour. When he met Admiral Wilson, the naval officer told him that he had just had a telephone call from a friend in the United States Embassy in Paris. The friend had told Wilson that the armistice had been signed. Howard promptly wired this interesting item from Brest, which was the cablehead of the transatlantic cable. The Brest censors were in the streets celebrating the armistice rumor, which had spread rapidly from the officers of Admiral Wilson's staff to American sailors and from them to the inhabitants. The telegraph operator assumed the censors had passed Howard's dispatch and simply transmitted it. Howard had added Simms's signature ultra vires as Simms's boss, and because of Simms's name the United Press office in New York assumed that the message came from Paris via Brest, instead of directly from Brest. Simms, if consulted, might have advised his superior to doublecheck his information, a naive procedure habitual among journalists of lower voltage.
Newspapers in the United States passed the news along to the public under headlines like the New York Journal's “GERMANY GIVES UP, WAR ENDS AT TWO P.M.” and the Evening Post's “REPORT ARMISTICE SIGNED; CITY IN WILD DEMONSTRATION.” Factory whistles blew; church bells rang, and office workers began throwing paper out of windows. It cost New York eighty thousand dollars to clear the debris of the celebration off the streets. The State Department issued a statement in the afternoon denying that the war was over, but the public refused to be balked. The Associated Press, older and more conservative rival of Howard's pushing organization, denied the report from the first, but newspaper editors suspected that it was covering up its own lack of enterprise. An angry crowd tried to wreck the office of the Associated Press at 51 Chambers Street, shouting that it was a nest of German spies. Outside the headquarters of the United Press in the Pulitzer Building, an airraid siren, vintage of 1918, shrieked at oneminute intervals.
During the twentyfour hours that followed the publication of Howard's report, other, lesser American correspondents in France were desperately chivied by their editors, who plaintively cabled, “CAN YOU CONFIRM WAR END?” A Times man at the headquarters of the American Second Army received twentyseven messages from Carr Van Anda, his managing editor. The correspondent kept asking Major General Robert L. Bullard, the army commander, if the war had ceased, and Bullard kept insisting it hadn't. Each denial, when cabled to America, apparently