The Press: Big Wind

“Not since the year of the Big Wind in Ireland has the world had anything quite so windy to read about as the things we have been reading about for the last week . . . in reference to the eternal Mooney case. . . . Everything that could bring the State and its administration of justice into disrepute has been done by the [San Francisco] press. [It] may congratulate itself upon having made a holy show of the State.”

Not Henry Louis Mencken was speaking, nor Oswald Garrison Villard, but their local counterpart in San Francisco—Editor Edward Morphy of San Francisco’s old conservative weekly Argonaut. Said he: “The Argonaut is opposed to blah and sobsister stuff. Blah seems to be the present standard of American newspapers.” Also is the Argonaut opposed to Prohibition, reformers, the Klan, Radicals. It is for Capital Punishment; has small patience with labor unions; delights in baiting the bustle and flamboyance of Los Angeles.

The Argonaut, founded in 1877 by Frank Pixley and Fred Somers, enjoyed a bombastic heyday under their regime. Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Ambrose Bierce were early contributors. As editor from 1907 to 1924 the gifted Alfred Holman maintained a high standard of literary excellence. Though parts of the paper seem dull nowadays, San Franciscans point with pride to Editor Morphy’s irascible editorials. He is well qualified to tell about the Big Wind in Ireland for he was born and educated there. Onetime gravedigger and longshoreman, he joined the Argonaut in 1925 with a background of 20 years vagabond-reporting and editing in the Orient and India.

San Francisco newsmen have come to expect castigation from Editor Morphy for their antics. This time, however, they knew, and knew he must know, that the paper which had set the pace on the Mooney-Billings case was the San Francisco News. The News is a Scripps-Howard paper and Publisher Roy Howard went to San Francisco personally to supervise the building up of the Mooney-Billings story into a Sacco-Vanzetti Case of the West—a feature for the nation-wide Scripps-Howard chain. Observers outside of California also knew that leading papers not in the Scripps-Howard chain had been playing up California’s “holy show” all over the land and would doubtless have done so regardless of how the San Francisco press treated the story.

Last week’s Mooney-Billings developments: the justices of the California Supreme Court convened in Folsom Prison to re-examine Convict Billings.