Books: Scarecrow Napoleon

NORTHCLIFFE: AN INTIMATE BIOGRA-PHY—Hamilton Fyfe—Macmillan ($4).

Viscount Northcliffe died insane but his Daily Mail was hitting at the 2,000,000 mark, so he was called a great man. He had the kind of brains often prized as first-class because it produces numerically big results. Though one of his technical peers (Lord Salisbury) called his magnum opus “a journal produced by office boys for office boys,” Panegyrist Hamilton Fyfe dares repeat the slur, trusting in his faith that the big battalions are on the side of God.

During the War Northcliffe’s press out-jingoed Hearst; he himself, as Director of Propaganda in Enemy Lands, imitated the cooing dove, made soft appeals to erring German brothers. Biographer Fyfe notes the inconsistency, says Northcliffe was unaware of it. But Co-WorkerH. G. Wells was annoyed, resigned from Northcliffe’s propaganda board.

Biographer Fyfe, onetime Northcliffe subordinate, onetime member of Northcliffe’s board of propaganda, admires his late great master but tells some surprising things about him. Says he: Northcliffe supplied most of the ideas for his news papers but his rash expenditures had to be constantly checked by his more businesslike brother (now Viscount Rother-mere). Fyfe thinks Northcliffe made a mistake when he twice refused Lloyd George’s offer of a cabinet post, thinks Northcliffe realized it too late when he saw there was no chance of getting the Premiership, thinks the disappointment may have helped addle Northcliffe’s brains.

Often likened to Napoleon, Northcliffe came to fancy the likeness. During his last few years he grew more & more dictatorial, capricious, megalomaniac. Suspicious, he fancied the Daily Mail office was becoming a “family party.” He found “someone in the Cashier’s Department is a relation of a man in another department, and there are many such cases. The office is a honeycomb of relations end relationships.” Dissatisfied with his Advertising Department, he suddenly promoted the Daily Mail hall porter, one Glover, to be its head. He defended his action in a remarkable memorandum: “He [Northcliffe] had long consultations with Mr. Glover . . . and was profoundly impressed by Glover’s horror of advertisements that destroy the news columns and, I may add, by his remarkable chest measurement and reach. . . . He strips in the ring at 18 stone and has a reach longer than Dempsey’s.”