The Press: Unlike Son

When famed Hearst Editor Arthur Brisbane died on Christmas Day 1936 he left a son, four daughters, around $5,000,000 and an unmatched 39-year record for turning omniscient piffle to profit in his column Today. Last fortnight a new Brisbane byline bobbed up for the first time in the Hearstian New York Mirror. Wrote Seward Brisbane, 24, of an interview with another great man’s son:

“Jan Masaryk is a pretty illustration of man s inability to transcend his environment, except when it becomes absolutely unbearable. . . . Florid, faultless plaid suit, suede shoes, a proper inch of cuff showing, a hearty voice spouting inconsequential generalities for the press. He was a study in hopeless indifference. How unlike the father! . . .”

Brisbanian were the sharply noted details, but not the long words and generally gloomy tone. That does not worry Seward Brisbane. Says he: “Pop killed himself doing work with which I was wholly unsympathetic. . . . We had lots of fights. . . . If it hadn’t been for grandfather’s intellect, Pop might have been a buccaneer. . . .”

“Grandfather” was Albert Brisbane (1809-90), a dreamer and schemer of socialist Utopias who inherited all the money he ever needed. Tall, withy, high-strung Seward Brisbane is a lot like him. He quit Harvard after two years “because I couldn’t get interested in sitting around drinking with other fellows who had money,” later worked briefly and unhappily as a Mirror reporter, spent a year in France. Now he is studying at Manhattan’s New School for Social Research, wants to get into politics “on the reforming side.” Toward newspaper work he feels an “intense hostility.” Reason : successful newspapermen develop a competitive “thirst for power.”