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By Root 585 0

make was Fiorello H. LaGuardia, who was elected Mayor in 1933, the WorldTelegram furnishing his only outspoken newspaper support. The tone of numerous Howardinspired editorials in the same paper has since suggested that the Mayor is not sufficiently grateful. Likewise, Howard has given LaGuardia numerous pointers, which are generally conveyed to him through the WorldTelegram's City Hall reporter. To these LaGuardia has paid little attention. Whenever the publisher sends an emissary to tell him how to run the city, the Mayor lectures the City Hall man on editorial policy. LaGuardia asks for the heads of reporters with the same assurance that Howard asks for those of city commissioners. The two little men obtain equally negative results and are in a fairly constant state of reciprocal exasperation.

The WorldTelegram split page rose to journalistic eminence side by side with the United Feature Syndicate, a ScrippsHoward subsidiary organized in 1921 principally for the purpose of marketing weekly articles by David Lloyd George. As the first World War receded in public memory and Lloyd George in prominence, the articles became more difficult to place. A United Press man named Monte Bourjaily was delegated to take charge of the syndicate. He hired Benito Mussolini, Camille Chautemps, and a now nearly forgotten German statesman named Wilhelm Marx to write monthly letters about European politics and offered the fourfold service to nonScripps Sunday newspapers. The syndicate feature sold moderately well. Upon the accession of Pius XI, Bourjaily obtained the American newspaper rights to an authorized biography of the new Pope by an Italian cardinal. This feature sold extremely well, and the cardinal used his share of the payments to rebuild a church. United Feature later bought the American newspaper rights to Charles Dickens' The Life of Our Lord, an unpublished manuscript that his heirs made available for publication in 1931. The Life of Our Lord earned a quarter million dollars for the ScrippsHoward syndicate. Bourjaily next bought the rights to Napoleon's letters to MarieLouise, until then never published. This feature did not go well, apparently because few newspaper readers knew who MarieLouise was. A competing syndicate scored handsomely by dressing up Napoleon's letters to Josephine with illustrations and selling them to more newspapers than bought the letters to MarieLouise, although the letters to Josephine had been in the public domain for a century.

Bourjaily also tried to sell Broun's column to newspapers outside the ScrippsHoward chain, but never with great success, because, from fifty miles outside the city limits, Broun in those days assumed the aspect of a gindrinking Communist with loose morals. United Feature entered the syndicated columnist field in a serious way in December 1933, with the launching of Westbrook Pegler. This writer had some years earlier worked for Howard, almost totally unremarked, as a reporter, a war correspondent, and finally as a sports editor of the United Press. He had then switched to the Chicago Tribune syndicate as a sports columnist, and his work had been sold to a number of other papers, including the Post in New York. In 1933, Colonel Frank Knox, publisher of the Chicago Daily News, who wanted Pegler's stuff for his own paper, suggested to Howard that the News and the WorldTelegram combine to engage Pegler as an essayist on general subjects. Howard agreed, and Pegler was signed up at a salary of thirty thousand dollars a year and half of all syndicate sales in excess of sixty thousand dollars. Pegler, as a sports writer, had been philosophical rather than technical, presenting the wrestling and boxing businesses as a sort of parable of Realpolitik, which had only a slight literal relation to anything that would interest a sports fan. As an essayist, Pegler was assigned a spot on the split page with Broun.

Pegler wrote several practice columns to prime himself for his new job, and showed them to Howard. They included one approving the lynching by a mob in San Jose, California, of