Press: Anderson Out

One of the country’s greatest reporters was out of a job last week, perhaps more to his own surprise than to that of Washington correspondents who have been his admiring friends for 15 years. Paul Y.* Anderson gave the St. Louis Post-Dispatch the best 23 of his 44 years, helped earn it great prestige and himself a $16,000 salary, finally won the 1928 Pulitzer Prize with an almost single-handed crusade which reopened the reeking Teapot Dome scandal. Paul Anderson began to think increasingly of late that his endless exploits had also earned him an independence no other Washington correspondent enjoys. The disciplinarian Post-Dispatch disagreed, so the result of his frequent protracted absences was inevitable, though long delayed. Tedious hours of poring over the finely printed technical briefs in the Madison, Wis. oil case overtaxed Paul Anderson’s eyes last week, he said, and he had to remain in a dark room three days. Post-Dispatch Managing Editor Oliver Kirby (“O. K.”) Bovard phoned from St. Louis several times, could not locate Mr. Anderson’s dark room, angrily but reluctantly fired him.

Abruptly was ended an association which began after Paul Anderson left his Smoky Mountains home in Tennessee and had finished cub’s jobs on the Knoxville Journal, the St. Louis Times and Star in quick order. On his first assignment for the Post-Dispatch in 1914 he tore open the rank official corruption in East St. Louis while gamblers and police snarled telephone warnings to his wife on Saturday nights: “Look for that damned husband of yours in Cahokia Creek tomorrow morning!” On July 2, 1917 the famous race riot broke out, 34 Negroes and eight white men were slaughtered—18 of them before 23-year-old Paul Anderson’s eyes. He took a hotel room in East St. Louis, swashed the blood off his shoes, ferreted out a stack of evidence which helped send 20 roughnecks to prison.

Two years’ relaxation as an editorial writer followed, but Paul Anderson preferred his exciting reportorial life, quit the Post-Dispatch to go to Washington, went back with the paper on its staff there. He has had plenty of excitement since. One night five years ago a stranger walked into his office, popped a question at Mr. Anderson: “What’s the matter with this country anyway?” Anderson thought the worst thing was the improper distribution of income. The stranger agreed: “That’s what I think. I’ve just come from Louisiana to do something about it.” Anderson turned to his typewriter and wrote a resolution to prohibit a net individual income of more than one million dollars. There began a long friendship with Huey Pierce Long. His other close friendships with Senator George William Norris, Justice Louis D. Brandeis, Senator Robert Marion La Follette Jr., John L. Lewis, Secretary Harold Ickes are watermarks of Paul Anderson’s liberalism, which did not jibe with the change that had come over the loyally Democratic Post-Dispatch when it renounced President Roosevelt in the 1936 Presidential campaign. Nor did it jibe as early as 1933 when Mr. Anderson was helping form the American Newspaper Guild and also aiding his friends Donald Richberg and General Hugh Johnson draft a newspaper NRA code, meanwhile lambasting publishers in general in the Nation. “We think you are overworking yourself,” said Managing Editor Bovard in ordering him to cease his Nation column.

No longer overworking for Mr. Bovard but on the Post-Dispatch payroll for several weeks, Paul Anderson and his third wife will go on a delayed Florida honeymoon. Last fall New York’s Mayor LaGuardia married him to an amateur actress he met when Atlantic City threw its annual party for the Press last year. The honeymoon over, he will begin writing a personal history.

*Originally the “Y” in Paul Anderson honored the name of a family friend. When the friend refused him a job 31 years ago, Paul Anderson said: “I’ll never mention your name again,” and had his middle name legally shortened to plain Y.