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By Root 594 0

in Washington, is one of Franklin D. Roosevelt's principal advisers on public relations. Men who worked with Howard in Indianapolis remember most his eagerness and the neat manner in which he always draped his jacket on a hanger before sitting down at his typewriter. An older man on the News named Charles Stewart, who liked Howard, presently got a job as telegraph editor of the St. Louis PostDispatch and took the cub with him as assistant. Howard's mother rented a house in St. Louis, and Stewart boarded with the Howards. When Ray Long became managing editor of Scripps's Cincinnati Post a couple of years later, he sent for Howard to be news editor, and mother and son moved to Cincinnati. Mellett also joined the Post staff. Scripps's Midwestern papers were then known as the ScrippsMcRae League; the McRae was Milton McRae, a junior partner who owned a relatively trifling amount of stock. Howard, who had been reading O. Henry, was eager to move on to New York and become a New Yorker. Long managed to have him appointed New York correspondent for the ScrippsMcRae League, and Howard took the train for the big city. When he became proprietor of the New York Telegram twentyone years later, he put notices on the bulletin board in the city room that said, “Remember! New York is Bagdad on the subway.” O. O. McIntyre, when he eventually began writing his column, seemed to Howard the only authentic interpreter of the New York scene.

The twenty-three-year-old Howard who came to New York with an assured thirtyeightdollaraweek job, a beginning most of his colleagues would have envied, had already acquired a species of bantamweight dignity. “When you're my size,” he sometimes says, “you can't afford to be a comedian.” Newspapering, despite urgent prodding from schools of journalism, has always lagged behind the learned professions on the march to seemliness. Lawyers wrestled and played practical jokes on each other in Lincoln's time, but newspapermen continued to rough each other up for many decades thereafter. Howard, small, obstreperous, and glossy, had had to put up with an unusual amount of mauling during his Indianapolis and St. Louis days. One contemporary remembers seeing him tossed across the city room of the Star by a fatheaded giant giving a demonstration of jujitsu. Another time a colleague on the PostDispatch playfully touched a lighted match to the nape of the cub's neck. Howard, unfortunately, had that morning drenched his hair with a tonic that contained alcohol. A blue flame flickered over him, and for a moment he resembled a crepe Suzette flambee. He never entered into the spirit of these high jinks, and finally his special brand of dignity came to be respected.

The Hoosier boulevardier was just beginning to settle into his role as the Babylonian correspondent of the ScrippsMcRae League when Scripps, in 1907, acquired the Publishers' Press Association, a decrepit newsgathering service which he made the nucleus of a new agency he called the United Press. The Publishers' Press, which had its headquarters in New York, cost Scripps about $180,000. The Associated Press has always been a cooperative enterprise which will issue no new franchise on its telegraphic news service in a city where there are member papers unless the members consent. Since at that time there was no other largescale telegraphic agency in the country, a nonmember paper was at a tremendous disadvantage. Scripps said that the U.P. would buck the A.P. and sell news to anybody who would pay for it. He considered it his greatest contribution to a free journalism, and it proved to be one of his most profitable accomplishments. Shortly before his death he wrote, “Perhaps the greatest reason, however, for my objecting to becoming an integral part of the Press Association [the A.P.] in the crisis was that I knew at least ninety per cent of my fellows in American journalism were capitalists and conservatives. In those, my youthful days of pride, I swelled up with vanity at the thought that I was to be the savior of the free press in America. Of course, I have learned