Press: Awards’ Aftermath

To the number of those who annually dissent from the awards of the Pulitzer Prize committee (TIME, May 11) were added last week 8 of the 9 Justices of Iowa’s Supreme Court. The gold Pulitzer plaque for the most meritorious public service by a newspaper in 1935 had gone to Iowa’s Editor Verne Marshall and his Cedar Rapids Gazette for having aroused law enforcement officers into a flurry of arrests, leading to indictments and convictions of State officials for various corrupt practices. Day after the Gazette got its plaque the Supreme Court set free 31 officials. Previously State Liquor Commission Chairman Harold M. Cooper had been released from the charge of having knowingly permitted one J. Leroy Farmer “unlawfully to possess liquor.”— Releasing the 31, the Supreme Court ruled that, among other things, Special Prosecutor Horace Moore Havner had accepted a $700 special fee from the Gazette, which therefore invalidated the grand jury indictments he had obtained against the 31 defendants.

In Cedar Rapids crusading Editor Mar shall complained: “The court was misled by defense counsel. . . . Prosecutor Hav ner has not had a single penny in compensation from any source except the Woodbury County Board of Supervisors. The Pulitzer award is the answer to anyone who interprets the Supreme Court ruling as a vindication of the crowd indicted in Sioux City many months ago!”

Last October the Pulitzer Award Com mittee announced that henceforth no award in journalism or letters would go to the same man twice. On the eve of making this year’s selections public, the Committee changed its mind, stuck to the system followed since the establishment of the prizes 19 years ago. In England Playwright Robert Emmet Sherwood, whose Idiot’s Delight had taken this year’s play prize, declared: “Had not the restrictions which barred former winners been removed, I should have been forced to refuse the prize. . . .”

Last August when Harold Davis learned that his Honey in the Horn had won him the $7,500 Harper Novel Prize, his wife was cutting his hair in the patio of their house at Cuautla, Mexico. Mr. Davis was so stunned he did not know what to do. Last week Prizewinner Davis was sound asleep in an antique hotel near shady Lebanon, Tenn. when a Nashville Banner newshawk roused him to tell him Honey in the Horn had won the $1,000 Pulitzer novel award. Yawned Novelist Davis: “Of course I am very happy.”

When Mrs. Josephine Sibbald Barber, 30-year-old widow, heard that her late husband Wilfred was the posthumous winner of the award for distinguished foreign correspondence, she was in Manhattan ending the fourth month of her vain search for work. To her, through her husband’s estate, the Pulitzer Committee sent the $500 the Chicago Tribune’s Barber had won by dying on duty in Ethiopia.

* Last year TIME incorrectly reported that Chairman Cooper was convicted of illegally disposing of State liquor seals.