The Press: Shakeup in Chicago

For six months Hearst’s Chicago Herald-American had dawdled along in a well-worn rut. Next to Bertie McCormick’s Tribune, it had the biggest circulation in town and was holding it. But the Herald’s news coverage had gone dull after the whoopdedoo of the Heirens murder case. Sex crimes got big headlines now & again, but the news lacked the red-and-saffron splashes of rich detail that had won the Herald its readers.

The lapse did not escape the eye of William Randolph Hearst, who seldom waits for a paper to get into trouble before jacking it up. A fortnight ago, in the wake of the merger of the tabloid Chicago Times with Marshall Field’s Sun (TIME, Aug. 4), a shakeup hit the Herald’s top brass. Chicago-trained, cigar-chomping George Ashley De Witt came on from Washington as executive editor—the job once held by loud Lou Ruppel, who got in bad with the Chief by branding Chicago “Dirty Shirt Town.” Drawling Lou Shainmark came back from the Washington bureau to his old job as managing editor. A squad of other executives was reshuffled.

To mastermind the change of command, an old soldier of fortune who had fought through Chicago’s rowdiest journalistic wars slipped into town. Ruddy, trumpet-voiced Walter Howey, prototype of the managing editor in The Front Page, had temporarily dropped his regular chores (supervising Hearst’s two Boston tabloids with one hand and the American Weekly with the other) to help raise the steam pressure in the Herald-American’s boilers.

Howey would say not a word about what was afoot at the Herald. “Just watch the paper, that’s all,” said Shainmark. Last week it was worth watching once more; the front page looked like the result of an explosion in a type foundry.

SUPPORT OUR MAYOR KEN.NELLY! cried an eight-column 120-point red banner —line (the kind dear to Hearst’s heart).

CAPONE MOB COMING BACK, shouted the black streamer below it. The kind of newsbreak that Howey & Co. knew how to play to the limit had come along at just the right time. Four former henchmen of Al Capone had been paroled from prison, and the Herald was sure that they —and maybe even gunplay—were due in Chicago any minute. Across the page from that story, the Herald told all about “two good policemen who are on trial for trying to solve [a] murder.” This kind of news, said a front-page editorial, was run “to help Mayor Kennelly prevent the return of gangster rule in this city.” Capone’s mob might or might not be coming back, but there was no doubt that an able mob of Hearstlings had moved in on the Her old-American.