The Press: War in Wichita

The fight between the Wichita, Kans., Eagle and the Wichita Beacon which started five years ago when the thick-skinned Brothers Levand—Max, Louis and John—bought the Beacon from Senator Henry Justin Allen, last summer became Wichita’s best newsstory. Last week the thin-skinned Brothers Murdock—Victor and Marcellus—who own the Eagle were under the impression that the Levands had suffered a stunning defeat. Eagle headlines happily screamed the news that the two liveliest Levands, Max and Louis, had been indicted on five counts, for misleading advertising.

Explained in detail on the Eagle’s front page, the accusations against the Levands were based on a scheme for attracting advertisers which they had developed last summer: an “emblem of quality” bearing the signature of Wichita’s director of public welfare, Dr. R. E. Hobbs, and used in advertisements in the Beacon. Dr. Hobbs declared that his signature had been used without permission. Earlier in the week, the same grand jury had indicted the Beacon’s principal advertiser. Allen W. Hinkel Co., Wichita department store, for misleading advertising in the Beacon.

If the Levand Brothers are not so well known to the rest of the world as they are to Wichita, it is certainly not their fault. Trained under the late piratical Frederick G. (“Bon”) Bonfils, they have done their best to perfect the methods they learned on his blazingly yellow Denver Post.

For a time the Murdock Brothers, who had long carried on a hot but comparatively respectable feud with Senator Allen’s Beacon, affected to ignore the Levands. That became impossible last winter when, boasting the largest circulation in Kansas, the Levands succeeded in getting the Hinkel advertising, for which the Eagle claimed it had a contract. First reprisal of the Eagle was to print photographs of the interior of the Hinkel store, showing empty spaces at important counters, during a sale advertised exclusively in the Beacon. Next day they began serial publication of The Great I Am, a thinly veiled, highly colored biography of the late Publisher Bonfils. Author of The Great I Am, Lou Goldberg, promptly reminded Louis Levand that when Bonfils had published a serial, a rival paper had distributed free copies of the book. Although he appears as a scalawag in The Great I Am, Louis Levand gaily ordered 200 copies of the book, turned them over to Hinkel & Co. which put them on sale for 39¢.

Last week the Levands were unperturbed by the indictment which will bring them to trial in January. Said a Beacon editorial called “In the Eyes of the People” : “The entire matter . . . goes squarely back to the refusal of Mr. Hinkel to advertise in the Eagle. . . . The Eagle has been guilty of the most unethical practices in the history of the newspaper profession in America. . . .”