The Press: Big Story

Last week the U. S. press had its biggest story since 1918, and what might be its last chance for a long time to cover as big a story in comparative freedom. If war came, censorship would reign over most of the British Isles and the Continent. Faced with this opportunity, the press covered everything it could find out about Europe’s Seven Days as no story had ever been covered before.

The Associated Press had no reporters in Europe, the United Press 500, International News Service 125. Among them they cabled nearly 1,000,000 words in a week. Telegraph and telephone lines were so jammed that at times messages were ten hours late. For six hours on Friday Germany was entirely cut off from the rest of the world, and at one time the U. P.’s Paris bureau had to telephone London by way of New York. Five newspapers had their own staffs abroad: the New York Times and Herald Tribune, the Chicago Tribune and News, the Christian Science Monitor. With the press services, they wrote the war news that the U. S. read last week.

The newspapers printed all the war news they could get. In the East it crowded most other news off the front pages. The supposed suicide of Bolivia’s Strongman German Busch and the death of Sidney Howard (see p. 39) got brief treatment the day after Russia and Germany signed their Non-Aggression Pact. But there were exceptions. The Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger thought the second indictment of Moe Annenberg* was equally big news that day and gave a four-column headline to it. And throughout the week the New York Herald Tribune consistently played down the bad news, played up every item that spelled possible peace.

The Times and the Daily News matched each other in excitement and general pessimism. Two days before the Russo-German trade treaty was announced, the Time’s Herbert L. Matthews and Frederick T. Birchall cabled from Rome and London that war seemed almost certain. Both papers printed the story of the German submarine heading for Martinique, and the News went completely haywire by suggesting that the President send a couple of battleships to blow it out of the water. Next day the News apologized to its readers for getting too excited.

Scoops were few. The U. P. got a beat on the first German soldier killed in Poland. H. R. Knickerbocker of I. N. S. cabled an exclusive on Hitler’s statement that he would rather fight now than later. Headlines were big and bold, but not as big and bold as they could be. The Times used a 36-point, eight-column spread three times during the week, saved its 60-point for worse news. Outside of New York few papers increased the size of their headlines. Headline-of-the-week was the Daily News’s :

WAR, OR MY PEACE —HITLER

Editorials in most cases reflected the policies of the papers, their geographical position and the bias of their publishers. The Chicago Tribune was isolationist, warned the country not to forget its last war lesson in “false friendship, broken faith, entrapment, disparagement and repudiation. ” So were the Philadelphia Record the Detroit News (“It’s the same old war! We got crossed up on it once. Once is enough.”), and most of the Western papers. The Washington Star thought the U. S. “should support the French and the British to the extent envisioned in President Roosevelt’s original proposal for neutrality legislation.” The New York Herald Tribune practically lined up with the British and French, and the Times went the whole way: “At last there is a democratic front. . . . Inevitably we are more deeply engaged in the conflict.” The columnists reverted to type. Dorothy Thompson saw the world revolution coming nearer, Westbrook Pegler went yah! at the Communists, General Johnson was for letting Europe blow itself up, and Heywood Broun, hitherto a believer in the democratic front, began preaching pure pacifism. Said Eleanor Roosevelt: “Peace may be bought today at too high a cost in the future.” The Communist press made itself silly trying to explain what Russia had done.

Said the New York Daily Worker: “The people of Poland . . . realize the firm position of the Soviet Union in uncompromising pendence.” support for (The their London freedom Daily and inde Worker used the same argument, even the same language, in praising Stalin’s “uncompromising firmness” with Hitler.) The New Masses ran a series of parallel columns contrasting life in the Soviet Union with life in Nazi Germany.

Cartoonists showed more humor than their editorial colleagues. Most of them jeered at the Russo-German rapprochement, refused to get excited about war. The Philadelphia Record’s Jerry Doyle produced a sketch of a swastika-shaped Stalin clutching hammer and sickle, with the caption: “Forward Marx!” and the Manchester Guardian got some fun of its own out of Das Schwarze Korps’ cartoon poking fun at the staff talks in Moscow (see cut). Prepared all summer for this European crisis, the press was not caught napping as it had been in 1914. For six weeks the U. P. had been filling in weak spots in Europe, acting on the assumption that war would start in August or September. The A. P. had four times as many men in Europe as it had at any time during the last war. Last week the A. P. sent a man 350 miles from Rome to the heel of Italy to get a 200-word story whose chief item of interest was that the Italian remount service was inspecting the local donkeys. In July 1914, Karl von Wiegand cabled the U. P. 138 words on the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia and was called down for wasting tolls.

*For conspiring to influence a witness in his Chicago Grand Jury hearings. The Grand Jury recommended that the States revoke the charters of Moe’s racing news wire service.