The Telephone Booth Indian - Abbott Joseph Liebling [93]
III—An Impromptu Pulitzer
Edward Wyllis Scripps, founder of the Scripps newspaper empire, was content to create the secondor thirdbest newspaper in each of a couple of dozen cities. When Roy Wilson Howard, chairman of the board of the ScrippsHoward newspapers, bought the Pittsburgh Press in 1923 for $6,200,000, Editor and Publisher, the trade magazine of the newspaper industry, observed that this purchase of a readymade daily marked a change in a Scripps policy almost fifty years old. Howard bought the paper and announced its acquisition while old E. W. Scripps, who had retired from active supervision of the chain, was on his yacht Ohio somewhere in the South Seas. Robert Paine Scripps, his son, was with him. The younger Scripps had succeeded his father as titular head of the ScrippsHoward newspapers, but Howard was generally permitted to do about as he pleased. Colonel Oliver S. Hershman, who had published the Press for twentythree years, wanted to retire but drove a hard bargain for his paper. Howard and a retinue of other ScrippsHoward executives, including William W. Hawkins, his administrative alter ego, checked into a Pittsburgh hotel, secretly, in order to mask their movements from possible competitive bidders, about a week before the deal was closed, all the executives registering under the names of their secretaries. They bargained with Colonel Hershman and his lawyers almost continuously for a week, and finally reached a point where Howard's offer was within twentyfive thousand dollars of Hershman's asking price. Hershman flipped a coin to decide who would pay the difference, borrowing a quarter from Howard for this ceremony. Howard called and lost.
As Howard's control of the ScrippsHoward interests became more nearly complete, he continued this policy of buying going papers. In making an acquisition of this sort, he sometimes had to go to a bank for money. Old Scripps had a horror of borrowing from a bank, a practice which he feared might affect a paper's editorial independence. Howard feels that his own integrity is superior to such considerations. The Press has paid heavy dividends on the ScrippsHoward investment. A couple of other Howard purchases, like the Denver Rocky Mountain News and the Denver Times, which he bought and merged in 1926, and the Buffalo Times, which he got in 1929 and discontinued in 1939, turned out to be heavy losers. There were twentyfive ScrippsHoward newspapers when E. W. Scripps died in March 1926. Howard added four to the chain within the next year. Since then the number has declined to the present nineteen. In the same period the total number of dailies in the United States has dropped from 2333 to 1998. Howard's fourth addition to the chain after E. W. Scripps's death was its first New York newspaper, the Telegram, acquired in 1927. He paid something less than two million dollars for this property. When, in 1931, he made a bid for the New York World with a view to merging it with the Telegram, the gesture seemed slightly presumptuous. It was as if the Knott hotel chain had offered to take over the WaldorfAstoria.
The World, Evening World, and Sunday World were properties of the Press Publishing Company, of which almost all the stock was held by the estate of Joseph Pulitzer. Pulitzer's will forbade the sale of the Press Publishing Company stock “under any circumstances whatever.” He had written, “I particularly enjoin upon my sons and my descendants the duty of preserving, perfecting, and perpetuating the World newspaper (to the maintenance and upbuilding of which I have sacrificed my health and strength).” Ralph, Joseph, Jr., and Herbert Pulitzer were directors of the Press Publishing Company, as well as trustees of their father's estate, but the will had assigned a sixtenths interest in the newspapers to Herbert, the youngest son, so in a pinch he could outvote his brothers. The papers earned a handsome income for sixteen years after the senior