Press: Columnist to Columnist

In a small cottage at Bethany Beach. Del., one tumultuous night last week, General Hugh S. Johnson sat down at his telephone by candlelight. Outside the wind screamed and howled in the flying spume as the tail of a West Indian hurricane lashed the little house, creaked its beams, I rattled its windows.

“HELLO!” screamed General Johnson to Central. “Hello! Get me New York City—Murray Hill 2-3020!”

The tempest’s teeth had snatched out main telephone lines, necessitated emergency connections. Distant operators relayed the call and in Manhattan a tiny voice answered: “Hello—United Feature Syndicate.”

“This is Hugh Johnson,” howled the General. ”Can you take down my column for tomorrow?”

Back came the New York voice, remote and cheerful: “Certainly, General. Go ahead!” Above the storm’s roar the General valiantly began to bellow: “It will be a wonder if this article ever gets to the papers. It is written in a little cottage on the Delaware eastern shore. Last night a hurricane struck. The water —

“What was that, General? A what struck?” “A HURRICANE! H. U. . . .”

”Oh, a hurricane. I’ve got it. Go ahead.” “The water at high tide—T-I-D-E— clawed down the sand bank that protects it from the ocean. That sixth word is clawed — CLAWED — C-L-A-W-E-D ! All wires are clown. The wind is so fast we can’t walk against it, autos can’t get through, there are no lights and communications. . . . People here don’t keep much food on hand and the dairy, milk, ice, meat —all food service is gone. It takes a revealing flash like this to —GET THE HELL OFF THIS LINE! Not you, New York, just a minute. . . .”

With such natural difficulties to surmount as party-line subscribers cut in and out, General Johnson persevered in his dictation, soon developed the point that a storm of this magnitude would have attracted attention around his old prairie home, reached the sentence, “In that sod house the winter’s wood was in the shed.” Ten minutes later he was still trying to make New York understand “sod house” and “winter’s wood.” An hour after he began, when both author and syndicate amanuensis were complaining of sore ears, the lines gave out for good on the pregnant phrase: “We are subject to an economic system, and—*

However, United Feature was glad to get even half a Johnson column for the New York World-Telegram, 30 other papers. Scarcely two months ago, few of the 2,273,222 readers thus affected would have cared if Hugh Johnson Says had completely failed to appear. Difference between the storm-racked Johnson column of last week and its beginnings represented one of the year’s most sudden and startling reversals of journalistic form.

In October 1934, when General Johnson resigned as NRAdministrator, he had shown in his public speeches an old professional writer’s picturesque gift of phrase. (As an Army officer he began by writing West Point stories for boys.) In March 1935, he employed this literary talent in his famed denigration of Radio-priest Coughlin and Louisiana’s late Huey P. Long (TIME, March 18, 1935). Impressed, United Feature signed up the General to do a “lighting” daily column. Though Hugh Johnson Says began with a bang, it soon degenerated to a mere pop. Returning from abroad last April, Scripps-Howard’s Roy Wilson Howard spotted the Johnson feature as a weak point in his lineup.

Instead of ousting the column, Mr. Howard put the General on his mettle by moving his space in July to Page One of the World Telegram’s Second Section, the paper’s most prominent feature position. Soon General Johnson’s “stuff” improved, became fiercely partisan for his old chief Franklin Roosevelt, rang with colorful invective. Last week a rare journalistic accolade was bestowed on Columnist Hugh Johnson when his running mate, freckle-faced Westbrook Fegler. who has been at columning some eleven years, leaned out of his crow’s nest across the World-Telegram’s ”folio page” to give the newcomer a friendly hail, pay him a well-deserved compliment.

“I have never met General Hugh Johnson,” wrote Mr. Pegler, “so I don’t think I can be accused of log-rolling or back-scratching when I remark that ‘Old Iron’ pants,’ as the boys used to call him around the NRA, is turning out a really good newspaper column these days. This is a bit of a surprise. . . . Whenever it was that Old Ironpants made his first attempt at this line of work, he seemed to be writing with his elbows, and apparently didn’t have what it takes.

“He was hot for the first few days, but this is a long-haul job. writing a daily column, and pretty soon they began to shove him back toward the goiter-cures and electric belts, as we say in our business.

“Then he suddenly found his stuff again, and now Old Ironpants is back in the regular lineup, and a star at that. I guess his trouble was, the first time in the league, that he was putting in long hours trying to save the country on the side and didn’t realize that either task is a full-time job in itself. . . .

“Aside from his experience and reading, which are great equipment for his job, I like Old Ironpants’ column for the wild, somewhat hilarious joy with which he sails into an argument. Sometimes it is a little cruel, because he is such a tremendous puncher, and like Dempsey, once that bell rings, he knows nothing but punch, punch, punch until something drops. He loves to tackle those stiff, straight-up-and-down stylish debaters who use the fancy words.

“I realize that this is an unusual sort of column, plugging another columnist’s stuff, because Macy doesn’t advertise Gimble, and we are both working the same side of the street. Still. Old Ironpants is a public man, and a figure of our time in the U. S. A., and I imagine that years from now, when the historians are writing about the fury of this campaign, they will poke around in Hugh Johnson’s stuff to recall the spirit of the fight.”

* Also working under difficulties last week was another United Feature columnist, Anna Eleanor Roosevelt Roosevelt. While her attack of influenza was putting her on the front page, My Day continued to appear as usual in the feature section. On the clay General Johnson’s truncated column went to United’s clients, Columnist Roosevelt reported: “Everyone should be a little ill now and then in order to be reminded how very kind and thoughtful the rest of the world is to those of us who fall by the wayside. . . . I have just been asked what flavor I would like in gelatine. . . . Not having eaten anything but liquids since Sunday, makes me somewhat indifferent to the flavor of anything.”