• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 532 0

WorldTelegram by a reporter on the chain's Birmingham Post. The great droughts, the West Coast shipping strike, and the trial of Al Capone got the same modest attention. The feature writers gave the paper a facade of knowingness. The feature men's most important work appeared on the first page of the second section, known in shoptalk as the “split page.” Every week one of them wrote a series of articles on such topics as Powers models, soldiers of fortune, voodoo rites, and prison reform. Howard decreed that there should also be a feature story about a woman, with accompanying photographs, on the third page of the first section every day. He said that people were interested in women. The WorldTelegram consequently published daily a story about a woman who made powder compacts out of flattened tomato cans or was making good in some Broadway show, which usually closed by the end of the same week. The only requirement was that the subject should be as goodlooking as a muskrat, and this was frequently waived. Appearing on the split page along with the polychromatic prose of the feature men were Broun's column and Alice Hughes's shopping notes. It was on the split page that Howard eventually developed one of his major contributions to newspaper strategy, the practice of letting columnists more or less express a paper's editorial policy while the editorial writer en titre, whom comparatively few people read anyway, remains free to hedge at the publisher's discretion. In the beginning, however, the page resembled the continuous entertainment at a pretentious Coney Island restaurant.

There had been slight rifts at the Telegram between Howard and Broun in the first years of the depression. The publisher, for example, had asked Broun not to devote so many of his daily columns to Shoot the Works, a cooperative musical revue the writer had put on with unemployed actors. Commercial producers, who paid for their advertising, were complaining. In the summer of 1930, Howard, in a Telegram editorial, had chided Broun for running for Congress on the Socialist ticket. The Telegram had backed Norman Thomas for mayor in 1929, but in 1930 Howard seemed to imply in his reproof to Broun that a few decent people were beginning to read his paper. Neither of these quarrels lasted long, since Shoot the Works soon ran out of audiences and Broun failed by a wide margin to get elected. The strain between the two men increased after Howard merged the World with the Telegram. Howard's paper was no longer an outsider trying to attract attention but an insider trying to hold on to everything it had suddenly fallen heir to. Broun, instead of being a magnet to draw readers from the competing Evening World, was now merely an employee who might say something to offend the advertisers. He could not possibly draw readers from the conservative Sun, and the Evening Post, as run by the CurtisMartin Newspapers, was crumbling to powder without outside assistance. Liberal readers in New York had to take the WorldTelegram because they had no alternative.

Most successful New York newspapers began their runs from the liberal position that the WorldTelegram now held almost by default. James Gordon Bennett, when he founded the Herald in 1835, was labeled a scurrilous radical. Joseph Pulitzer cast himself in the same role in 1883, when he began to edit the World. Hearst made his first impression here as an imitation radical. The Daily News, the most profitable newspaper of our period, has from the first been on the whole the city's most forthright champion of social legislation. Howard abandoned his strategic ground as casually as he had attained it. The WorldTelegram differed from the Herald, the World, and the Journal in one important historical respect. It turned conservative without making big money.

The sole form of liberalism that Howard thought it safe to emphasize in New York was something called Fusion, which is somehow usually popular with large taxpayers. Fusion furnished Howard with his one opportunity to feel like a kingmaker. The king he indisputably helped