The Press: How the News Spread

In Andy Jackson’s day, the Nashville Republican had already gone to press when a big story came in. So the conscientious editor laboriously scrawled on the margin of each copy his last-minute bulletin: “Mrs. Jackson has just Expired.”

Last week, U.S. editors had much bigger news to report quickly, but with far better mechanical facilities. The public was hungry for details. Said Ivan Annenberg, circulation manager of Manhattan’s Daily News: “In all my years of newspapering, I have never seen papers sold so fast.” Newspapermen had long since conceded radio’s advantage in speed. They had almost forgotten how it felt to sell “extras.” But this time it was different.

The man who broke the news to the press was himself an able, veteran newsman—Steve Early. Taking over from Jonathan Daniels, his successor as White House press secretary, who was shaking and white-faced with shock, Early quickly set up a three-way call to the press associations to tell them simultaneously: “Here is a flash. The President died suddenly early this afternoon.”

Then, as nearly every accredited correspondent in the capital crowded into the White House press room, it was Steve Early who climbed up on a leather chair, and in an even, taut voice gave the press a chronology of the President’s last hours.

“Turning the Rules.” The news broke after most Eastern afternoon papers had completed their press runs, but some managed to get out hasty extras. Both Manhattan’s Daily News and PM covered their entire front page with a photograph of Franklin Roosevelt. Before midnight, the New York Times hit the streets with five full pages on Roosevelt’s career which had been set up in type in advance. Many U.S. newspapers were similarly forearmed, and slip-ups were few. But on Hearst’s San Antonio Light, a Mexican copy boy who could not read English clipped the news flash off the teletype and hung it on a hook at the news desk, where it lay unnoticed for 20 minutes. The news hit the Oklahoma City Times just as it was tearing up its forms to report a tornado.

The New York Herald Tribune dropped all display advertising so that it could use the newsprint thus saved to print 100,000 extra copies. Many other newspapers did the same. The San Francisco Chronicle went farther, dropping all chatty columns, women’s features, etc. PM omitted its regular Sunday picture of a pin-up girl. Everywhere newspapers broke out their 260-and 300-point wood-block headlines (known irreverently to printers as the “Second Coming” type). And even the New Deal-hating Chicago Tribune used a journalistic symbol for mourning, familiar in Lincoln’s day: “turning the rules” so that column lines would print a heavy black. The Tribune also had a chaste editorial tribute to the President. (Among major anti-Roosevelt papers, only the New York Daily News and its sister, the Washington Times-Herald, carried their feuding beyond the grave. In place of an editorial, they ran a column of “Famous Sayings of Franklin D. Roosevelt,” slyly picking the ones they had frequently berated, including the “again and again and again” anti-war pledge.) The Christian Science Monitor, to which death is a taboo subject, ran an eight-column banner: “TRUMAN PLEDGES U.S. TO ROOSEVELT POLICY.” Only in the second paragraph was there a fleeting reference to “the sudden, unwarned passing of Mr. Roosevelt.” Cerebral hemorrhage was not mentioned, but the Monitor spoke guardedly of “what had happened in the ‘Little White House’ in Warm Springs, Ga.” The New-Dealing New York Post headed its Army-Navy casualty list:

“ROOSEVELT, Franklin D., Commander in Chief, wife, Mrs. Anna Eleanor Roosevelt, the White House.”