The Press: The Herald’s Century

In institution-cluttered Boston, the hundredth birthday of almost anyone or anything is back-page stuff. But last week a freshly turned centenarian made the headlines—though it had to print them itself. Having hit the century mark, Boston’s morning Herald told the world (or at least the hub of it) all about it.

Shrewd, Harvard-accented Publisher Robert B. Choate, 48, had dreamed up a celebration that was as inexpensive as it was spectacular. To the Charles River Basin the Herald’s advance ballyhoo brought a crowd optimistically estimated by the Herald to be 500,000 and by anybody’s count, a lot of people. For five hours they lined both sides of the river, watched as the Army, Navy and Coast Guard put on a stunt series, heard the Port of Boston band (also working gratis) make music. The windup was a fireworks display, which the Herald bought at half price. Hits of the show: the Army’s jet-propelled Shooting Star, a Coast Guard breeches-buoy rescue of an Old Howard burlesque dancer, Lotus DuBois. During the excitement 29 people were pushed into the Charles.

On Sunday the Herald modestly followed up with a 440-page issue. Bow-tied Publisher Choate was too smart to clutter it with trite messages of congratulation, carried only one—from Harry Truman. The “Boost New England” theme made the kind of Chamber-of-Commerce play that brought in more than enough ads to pay for the jumbo issue.

An Indifferent Lot. Boston is top-heavy with newspapers. It has eight, and only New York City with nine dailies has more. Among the eight, the Herald stands second lowest in circulation (144,000), owes its prosperity to advertisers’ knowledge that it is read by the people with the most money. With the exception of the excellent Boston-published Christian Science Monitor, which is more a national than a local paper, the Herald is probably the best of a lot of indifferent, purely local Boston sheets. Its competition: the reactionary Post, the sometimes timidly liberal morning and evening Globe, its own editorially neutral evening Traveler (all of which run front-page display ads) and two Hearst tabs.

Let’s Not Offend. The Herald (as many U.S. papers once did) still gets a wire at 11:30 every night, telling what the New York Times is featuring on Page One, and governs itself accordingly. Controlled by lawyers, industrialists, financiers (the law firm of Choate, Hall and Stewart, the United Shoe Machinery Corp. and Old Colony Trust Co.), the Herald is frankly sensitive to the viewpoint of the “interests,” has an editorial page to match. Publisher Choate once told a newsman: “It is natural that as sound business interests own the paper, we shall reflect their point of view.” But the Republican Herald works hard not to offend anybody in Democratic Boston. It prides itself on an occasional burst of virility. Five days after Mayor James Curley was convicted of fraud last January, the Herald was the only Boston paper to rise up and say (in a carefully modulated voice) that it was perhaps a little regretful that a city of 770,816 should be run from a jail.