The Press: Grasshopper Bites Publisher

“Special” articles attacking WPA are not new to readers of the Chicago Tribune, but last month Managing Editor Robert M. Lee decided they could stand some more. For two straight weeks “The World’s Greatest Newspaper” was loaded with columns of WPAtrocities, photo-graphs of grinning shovel-leaners, and such headlines as

GRAFT, FRAUDS,

THEFT! WPA REEKS

WITH CORRUPTION

Many A Way Found to Rob

The Government

As in a previous series, Reporter Clifford Blackburn did most of the heavy work, bore down especially hard on WPA loafing and “incompetence.” Last week the Tribune printed an editorial acknowledging “compliments” from letter-writers on its WPArticles, but nowhere in its columns appeared any reference to the week’s biggest news about its series.

Calling to his office 19 reporters (including one from the Tribune), handsome, pugnacious Howard O. Hunter, Assistant Administrator who bosses 1,250,000 WPA clients in 13 Midwest States, gave the Tribune a thorough tongue-lashing for “filthy editorializing” and “vicious propaganda.” Then he handed each man a 25-sheet mimeographed release stuffed with facts and affidavits backing his main charge: in every case “in which specific persons or locations are named . . . every statement published by the Tribune was found to be false.”*

Reporter Blackburn, continued Mr. Hunter, knew plenty about one case of WPA “inefficiency”: Records showed that Blackburn was given a WPA job in January 1936, assigned to a tree-cutting project, suspended for 15 days for drinking “in sufficient amounts 1) to draw the . . . attention of local police, 2) to cause him to remove trees not designated.” He was fired in July 1937, after letting a falling tree damage a city truck. But Mr. Hunter’s real target was rich, Roosevelt-hating Publisher Robert Rutherford McCormick, whom he brashly labeled “vicious” and “irrational.” Other item: One Tribune article told of “Johnny,” a young Italian “who has never known any work but WPA” and, according to Blackburn, didn’t want any. “Johnny,” cracked Mr. Hunter, was a former newspaper distributor and bookkeeper who had been trying for a long time to get back some money he had loaned Reporter Blackburn. One of the Tribune’s shovel-leaning pictures, said Mr. Hunter’s statement, was taken at a private sewer job; another had been hastily cut down to a single column between editions when Tribune editors found it showed a number of men working hard in the background.

While Chicago newspapermen circulated the Hunter rebuttal among their friends, famed Tribune Cartoonist Carey Orr continued to picture WPA as an improvident little grasshopper, dressed in a high hat and picket sign. Aching to prove he is no grasshopper, Georgia-born, 43-year-old Howard Hunter, who has spent one-third of all Federal money allotted to WPA in the last three years, made a wisecrack worthy of Harry Hopkins by disclosing he attributes his perfect complexion to the Tribune. “My stomach functions perfectly and I never take salts,” said he. “I just read the Tribune every morning.”

* Last week the Tribune’s morning rival, the Herald & Examiner, also had cause for mortification when Frank Kolesiak and Emil Guerricri, two men who ”confessed” to Herex reporters they had started a fatal hotel fire, established alibis and were completely exonerated by a Grand Jury (TIME, Sept. 26).