The Press: THE PRESS: Insult

In the days when U. S. journalism was young and yellow, newspapermen often quarreled violently and in public. One editor would refer to his colleague as “that scurrile cur, that . . . slander-monger Drennelthorpe, of the Courier Gazette . . . whereupon Mr. Drennelthorpe would visit the writer with a bowie knife and a hickory cudgel. Every reporter was trained to use a shotgun, and in most composing rooms a portrait of Andrew Jackson looked down with sombre eyes upon a neat rack of buggy-whips. Newspaper men still quarrel. Most of them do so with a certain reticence. Respecting the dignity of their differences, they wage their wars out of sight. But last week the public was astounded to find, in a famed tabloid sheet, a reversion to the vilest of tactics of journalism—a gratuitous insult hurled at an honored newspaper builder, a sickly slur cast at a courageous weekly. Don C. Seitz, long business manager of the New York World, was the victim. The Outlook was the insulted weekly. The perpetrator of the offense was a scribbler of editorials for the New York Daily News. Mr. Seitz recently resigned his post with the World and the Evening World. He contributed an article to the Outlook. The editor of that publication, in a column called “Contributors’ Gallery,” thus summarized the importance of Mr. Seitz’s position J “Don C. Seitz was for 25 years business manager of the New York World. Probably there is no man in American journalism that has as broad an experience as a journalist and as wide an acquaintance among newspaper men. He knows at first hand all phases of American life; he has, too, a historical background against which to view the present scene in its proper proportion.” Now the News writer, looking for some item on which he could compose an editorial that would entertain the chicle-chewing rag, tag and bobtail, happened upon Mr. Seitz’s article, and the Outlook’s comment upon Mr. Seitz. He noted with joy that Mr. Seitz had offered criticism on some of the more unfortunate elements of modern life—the very elements of which the News is Herald and High Defender. Ha! here was dragon’s meat indeed. Class prejudice could be stirred up like a muddy puddle. Ignorant and penurious people could be made to feel that they had a grievance. They could be made to hate the “highbrow” Outlook, to distrust the “capitalist” New York World, to scorn Mr. Seitz. The News push-pen jammed a piece of copy-paper in his typewriter, wrote as follows:

“A Mr. Don Seitz for many years was business manager of the World and he was considered a fine business manager until the elder Pulitzer died. Since that time he never had a new idea, and it became evident to every one in the business that he had never really been business manager at all, but merely Mr. Pulitzer’s office boy. “So the World finally gave him the air and he retired to a little weekly sheet devoted to the advancement of temperance, morals and prohibition. In a recent article he says the times are terrible because we have these low movies, 28 this screeching radio, these awful tabloid newspapers. “He says these things appeal only ‘to shopgirls, petty clerks, laborers and the like.’ Old Pulitzer established his fortune and that of Seitz by appealing to the masses, composed of ‘shopgirls, petty clerks, laborers and the like.’ He would smile in contempt if he could read what his former office boy is now writing. “It happens all the time. A man gets in his dotage and sighs for the good old days before they had automobiles, subways, etc. As for us, we would not go back to them. The good old days were really the bad old days. For all our faults today is the best day we have ever had.” Quite possibly the author of this insult had originally no personal dislike of Mr. Seitz. He attacked this able and respected gentleman simply because it is the policy of the News to attack anyone who confesses, in print, that he finds vulgarity offensive. Decent people everywhere—people who might merely have been amused by the honest verbal bowie-knifing of the oldtime editors—deplored the fact that when a rowdy abuses a gentleman, the latter will so seldom stoop to retaliate. “We do wonder,” they murmured, “whether Mr. Seitz owns a buggy-whip.” Was it Mr. Seitz “back in the good old days” article that actually inspired the flaying he received at the hands of News? No, the words that actually inspired the attack had appeared in another Outlook story entitled “The American Press —Guttersniping.” Here he had presented a brief biography of the News, as follows: “Finally, in 1921,* Arthur Clarke, a member of the Evening World staff, and George Von Utassey, a Hearst graduate, proposed to Joseph Medill Patterson and Robert R. McCormick [of the Chicago Tribune] that a tabloid sheet be tried in New York. The pair consented to back it but without much enthusiasm. To save investment, the plant of the Evening Mail, unused at night, was hired, and publication began as a morning newspaper under the name of the Daily News. New York newspaper men generally doubted if there was a grade of New Yorkers enough below the Evening Journal’s constituency in intelligence to give the paper a following. They were mistaken. It went slowly for a year. Clarke and Von Utassey were shaken out, and the tone of the sheet lowered until it became acceptable to a hitherto undiscovered mass. It then grew like Jonah’s gourd, belying the saying that there is always room at the top. In newspaper circulation, the room appears to be at the bottom. . . . The News is . . . unqualified success.”

* Mr. Seitz’s error; the News was founded in 1919.