The Press: Eagle to Gorilla

Within twelve hours after the Supreme Court voided NRA last fortnight the arch-Republican New York Herald Tribune and Los Angeles Times removed the Blue Eagle from their mastheads. Within 24 hours the Boston Transcript, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Detroit Free Press, many another anti-New Deal newspaper did likewise. Hearst’s Chicago Herald & Examiner hoisted red-white-&-blue flags in the Eagle’s place. The New York Times and Scripps-Howard dailies everywhere left their Eagles flying. The lusty, liberal tabloid New York Daily News, first in the city to hoist the Eagle, ostentatiously hauled it down, with a biting editorial explaining that the News and the rest of the Press now had the right to work its employes longer, pay them less, or throw them out altogether.

The Newspaper Code Authority warned all publishers to erase all Eagles by June 16, when the Code expires. At the same time the Publishers Code Committee asked its members to keep its personnel in office and in funds to lobby against such measures as the Wagner Labor bill and the Thirty Hour Week bill.

Least concerned of all U. S. journalists over the fate of NRA was the country’s most famed editor, Arthur Brisbane, who now runs Hearst’s tabloid New York Daily Mirror. While his neighbor Daily News was filling every editorial page for a week with angry philippics and cartoons against the Supreme Court, Editor Brisbane happily buried NRA with a scant half-column editorial. Then he got down to subjects much nearer his soft old heart —babies and gorillas. In a resounding editorial on the Dionne quintuplets’ first birthday, he pointed the inevitable Brisbanal moral:

“They have lived where others would have died, BECAUSE OF SCIENTIFIC CARE. . . . These babies have not been kissed on the mouth by Tom, Dick and Harry, as so many unfortunate little children are kissed; nobody has been allowed to plant germ diseases in their systems.

“In England, gorillas have recently lived and thriven amazingly because the keepers now put plate glass between them and the staring crowds. It is impossible to breathe or sneeze into the face of the captive gorillas and whereas formerly, gorillas in captivity always died quickly of consumption, these have lived. . . .”

—⊙—