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By Root 581 0

both to William T. Dewart. Dewart kept the Sun, which he still owns, and sold the Telegram to Howard for $1,800,000. The Telegram was housed in a ratinfested old barracks at Washington and Dey streets, where its personnel was strictly forbidden to smoke lest the Fire Department condemn the building. The paper, founded in 1876 by James Gordon Bennett as a raffish afternoon running mate to his morning Herald, had a circulation of 195,000, which depended chiefly on the racing news and Tammany political gossip that it published. It had been adopted by Tammany as a kind of house organ and got considerable political advertising. Howard was so impatient to own a New York newspaper that he closed the deal before he persuaded Robert Paine Scripps to string along with him. Young Scripps acceded to the fait accompli.

Howard, having restlessly kibitzed the New York newspaper business for twentyone years while working for the United Press and ScrippsHoward, had a number of ideas about what a metropolitan newspaper should be. He completely revamped the character of the Telegram, although he retained several members of the staff, and started out to show New York a supercharged version of, say, the Evansville Press, with trimmings from Smart Set. The publisher believed that news stories in New York papers were too long. Shorter, crisper stories would be more widely read, he told his editors. The space saved on news stories could be devoted to feature articles with the accent on fine writing. The first effect of Howard's doctrine was a reduction almost to the vanishing point of news matter in the paper. The second was a mass invasion of New York by fine writers, recommended by ScrippsHoward editors in twentyfive cities, including Albuquerque, New Mexico; Youngstown, Ohio; and Covington, Kentucky. They wrote in a style which has been classified by historians of English literature as Oklahoma Byzantine. Since they were unacquainted with the gags that press agents had sold to previous generations of feature writers, the Telegram's pages began to look like a retrospective show of publicity wheezes. Some of the young men were encouraged to shine in the high aesthetic line, while others wrote, for the first page of the second section, intheknow biographies of sterling Wall Street characters, most of whom subsequently jumped bail. Howard's first managing editor was a man named Sturdevant, who once had been happy as the editor of the Youngstown Telegram. Sturdevant was followed in office by Ted Thackrey, present executive editor of the Post, who was then fresh from Cleveland. Lee B. Wood, who had made a name in Oklahoma City, eventually displaced Thackrey. None of them could do anything to make Howard's venture profitable, and the Telegram finally declined to the point of losing a million dollars a year. It was steadily losing readers, too, many of them people who had developed hallucinations from reading its prose and were dragged from subway trains slapping at adjectives they said they saw crawling over them. This did not shake Howard's confidence in himself. He can take a beating and come back with the undiminished aplomb of an actress blaming her last flop on an unsuitable vehicle.

He made his first spectacular move toward establishing the new Telegram by hiring Heywood Broun in the spring of 1928. Broun was at liberty because, after a long wrangle with the late Ralph Pulitzer, publisher of the World, over his columns on the SaccoVanzetti case, he had written an article for the Nation which Pulitzer considered “disloyal.” The first sentence of that article was “There ought to be a place in New York City for a liberal newspaper.” Howard gave Broun a twoyear contract at twentyfive thousand dollars a year. By hiring him, Howard got a name for broadmindedness and at the same time gave a large number of people one reason for reading the Telegram. Broun was the bestknown columnist in the country, with the exceptions of O. O. McIntyre and Arthur Brisbane. The glory reflected on the employer of a public figure pleased Howard, and he began to be seen