The Telephone Booth Indian - Abbott Joseph Liebling [91]
The first World War brought the United Press the big newspapers of South America as customers. Before the war they had been clients of Havas, the agency subsidized by the French government. Also, during the war, newspapers all over the United States felt the need of more wire service, and the United Press, which was selling its service to five hundred clients in 1914, had seven hundred newspapers on its list in 1918. Howard's false armistice had no effect on his fortunes, which unexpectedly improved further when Scripps quarreled with his eldest son, James, publisher of the Seattle Star and several other Western papers. James gained control of the stock of these papers and broke with his father. James's death in 1921 came before a reconciliation was possible. A second son, John, died in 1914. James's defection in 1920 left only Robert Scripps, twentyfive years old and profoundly uninterested in the newspaper business, as an heir. The elder Scripps had to pick a practical newspaperman as a running mate for his son, and since most of the editors who had helped him build his newspapers had short life expectancies, Howard was the logical choice. Old Scripps made him chairman of the board of the ScrippsMcRae newspapers in 1920. Howard resigned as president of the United Press in order to accept the new job. McRae, the second barrel of the ScrippsMcRae name, was already out of the firm. The following year Howard's name replaced McRae's on the mastheads of all the papers in the chain, which added to Howard's prestige. The resplendent young newsservice man was nevertheless looked upon with some suspicion by the older set of Scripps's followers among newspaper publishers, Midwestern liberals who thought Howard had been corrupted by his residence in the East. Scripps gave up active direction of the Scripps enterprises in 1924, but retained a controlling financial interest.
The combination of Howard and Robert Paine Scripps, who together took over the direction of the news empire when the elder Scripps retired, was once compared by a company eulogist to “the two blades of a pair of shears.” It was an accurate metaphor only if the writer was thinking of a tailor's shears, which has one flat and one cutting blade. Robert Scripps was the flat blade. Originally planning to be a nature poet, he had been drafted into the newspaper business because his father believed in keeping his properties in the family. Robert Scripps used to say, “I hate to make decisions. Roy loves to make them. So I let him.” E. W. Scripps died aboard his yacht, Ohio, off the coast of Liberia on March 12, 1926, at the age of seventytwo. He left his newspapers, valued at a total of forty million dollars, to his son and three grandsons in a trust which would be dissolved upon the death of the last surviving grandson. Eleven months later, Howard acquired the New York Telegram for the ScrippsHoward chain. At last, by stretching a point, he could call himself a New York publisher. It was a little like the gesture of a turfstruck movie actor who buys a lame old horse for the sake of wearing an owner's badge. Ever since he had come to this city, Howard had wanted a New York paper, but E. W. Scripps had forbidden him to buy one. The Telegram was literally a museum piece. Frank Munsey had willed it along with the Sun to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which had sold