The Press: Little Caesar

New York is the capital and crossroads of the world’s press. No papers anywhere gather and print more straight news than the morning New York Times and Herald Tribune. The tabloid, comics-choked morning News has the largest daily circulation (2,007,797) of any newspaper. The conservative Sun and its afternoon feature-story rival, the World-Telegram, are commuters’ specials. And there are half a dozen other papers not counting The Bronx News.

This vast daily fountain of print is a national press. But it is also a hometown press and as such, for nine long years, it had been full to bursting with news of its own kinetic, photogenic mayor, Fiorello Henry (“Butch”) LaGuardia. Whether as fire buff, civic scold, uplifter, ambulance chaser, hemisphere-defense expert, official greeter, fashion critic or hometown booster, Butch always has been copy. And the press has been good to him. Few politicians have ever received the continuous campaign support that New York’s newspapers have bestowed on their bumptious little dictator and fiery reformer.

The Mayor has not responded in kind. Suspicious of the press from the first, he nonetheless got along well enough with them for a while. Then Butch decided to abandon regular press conferences. The occupants of “Room 9” (City Hall pressroom) took that in stride and kept the copy rolling. He got mad at a reporter, tried and failed to persuade his publisher to fire him. Warier after that, Room Niners still kept up the coverage.

These painful episodes were neither continuous nor frequent, but they kept up. Last winter they became intolerable. In February LaGuardia told Room Niners that he wouldn’t talk to them again until they learned how to quote him accurately. In the spring, overworked and editorially battered, he resigned as head of the Office of Civilian Defense. By then he showed unmistakable signs of being unable to distinguish between criticism of his public acts and his oversensitive self.

The result was a series of high-pitched outbursts. LaGuardia served notice on New Yorkers that hot water would have to be rationed to save fuel. When it was discovered that the public did not like it, the Mayor blew up, blamed the press for misinterpreting the story. Actually they had published the story exactly as he gave it out.

Later, when Room Niners asked the Mayor to comment on the gubernatorial campaign, he replied that he didn’t propose to be quoted on that or any other matter until they had learned the ethics of their profession. The only newspaper folk he was interested in talking to, he said, were sportswriters, music critics, and women’s page people.

Promptly, these miscellaneous characters came to him in droves. Butch was charming—in a knowing way. He spoke affectionately of the weather, digressed into politics long enough to say that State Democratic Chairman James Aloysius Farley must go. The Post’s Mary Bragiotti (women’s page) found him “a lovely Mayor—to us girls.” The Herald Tribune’s mountainous, tough-minded sports editor, Stanley Woodward, asked him what he meant by saying newsmen had no ethics. Said the Mayor: “The truth is I’m having press trouble. And I think I’m partly to blame. But a lot of things happen that get me mad. I can’t seem to get out a statement that isn’t all cut to pieces with interpolations and editorializing. . . .”

Even the Mayor’s close friends became alarmed by his behavior. They knew that some reporters had been unfair to him, that most had not. They well knew his terrible-tempered propensity for bulldozing his official subordinates, screaming and cursing at his office force. They took it. The press didn’t. Fortnight ago the climax came.

On his Sunday fireside chat the Mayor addressed himself to a little boy named George, who had written in about a gambling place where his father generally lost his weekly paycheck. Said the Mayor: “George, I’m going to put a policeman in that store. You just keep me informed, and other little boys who see the family happiness destroyed because some thieving tinhorn is robbing his daddy of money on horse races or gambling also please let me know. I won’t tell anybody that you told me the place, but I’ll send the police there. …”

The morning papers played the story straight. But the angle-grabbing afternoon papers twisted it to mean that LaGuardia was urging youngsters to squeal on their fathers. The tabloid News picked it up and wrote an editorial. The Mayor went purple. Over the air he denounced the papers for helping race-track bookies by printing racing news. He predicted that the press would probably continue to “belittle, ridicule and oppose” his antigambling campaign. In a letter to the News he wrote: “I am sorry you have been misled into believing that I asked boys to peach on their fathers. I did not. The papers that said I did lied and knew they were lying when they said it.”

Last week Columnist Westbrook Pegler, who is by no means a friend of Fiorello LaGuardia, seized this climactic outburst to suggest that the Mayor needs a psychoanalyst. “The Little Flower,” wrote Pegler, “has been going haywire lately. . . . He owes his job to the decent press of New York, which he hates because he can’t suppress news of his own absurdities. . . . The papers have tried to cover up his alarming instability. . . .”