Government by newspapermen

JAY FRANKLIN

Showing the power of the press to place haloes or horns upon the perspiring brow of the Administration

Back in the dear dead days beyond recall, before a tin cup and a "Pity the Blind" sign were regarded as the most flattering attributes of a party in power, we used to think that a government must be judged by what politicians did in office, and that what the newspapers said about it was highly irrelevant. Not all the tongues of partisan detraction could conceal the achievements of a great and benevolent Administration nor could the most eloquent of party spell-binders deceive the electorate as to its failures. There was a tacit, if erroneous, assumption that the Americans had a certain amount of common sense and could he relied upon to distinguish between political leadership and journalistic mythology. Criticism was supposed to he a small part of the great game of politics, and politicians grew fat on the theory that every knock was a boost.

We have changed all that. Ever since Woodrow Wilson put ascension robes on the entire Democratic Party, our Presidents have become increasingly sensitive to criticism, until to-day the Hoover Administration bids fair to go down in history as the most thin-skinned political group that ever occupied the White House. The President rode into office on a wave of propaganda of the dimensions normally sufficient to persuade the American public to try a new cigarette or to test the merits of a new mouth-wash. It was a masterpiece of publicity and although the Hoover boom became very nearly a Hoover boomerang, the country became ineradicably Hoover-conscious.

No trademark was ever defended against unfair competition with greater fury than the defense of the Hoover, the Father of His Country, the Friend of the Widow and Orphan, the Great Engineer and Constructive Statesman. The war of the candy-makers against the slogan of "Reach for a Lucky instead of a Sweet" was good, wholesome fun compared to the horrified and indignant reaction of the Hoover propaganda machine to any and every attempt to reach for a hammer instead of a horn. What was to have been a government by experts became increasingly a government by newspapermen; the Administration measured its victories in terms of headlines and columns of type, and the sham battle of the Parties became a shambles of hysterics over what had been published.

The Democrats were swift to discover this weakness in the Republican armor. John .1. Raskob hired the services of Charley Michelson, former Washington correspondent of the New York World, to write Democratic publicity. Michelson, a ponderous old journalistic war-horse, did a pretty good job. He took the Administration as his assignment and wrote razzing speeches about it which were gratefully delivered by Democratic leaders in Congress. Michelson's canned oratory was much in demand, being shrewd, literate, amusing and based entirely upon the Administration's performances which had been as surprising to the Administration's friends as well as to its enemies. He did not even throw mud, having Prohibition, the Tariff, Farm Relief, Depression and Unemployment all ready for his hand. Michelson had, however, about as much real influence on the course of events as a light-wines-and-beer plank would have at an Anti-Saloon League rally.

Any pre-war President would have shrugged his shoulders, told off a couple of party sandbaggers to "get" Michelson, and tended to knitting. But the Hoover Administration had a syndicated fit. Michelson was denounced for "vilifying" the President. The genial Secretary of War, Pat Hurley, waxed politically indignant over the "kept muckrakers and paid liars" who were besmirching the unsmirchable. The Purity of the President became the only Republican campaign issue and when Mr. Michelson's former paper published some conventional oil "revelations" by Ralph S. Kelley, former head of the Denver field force of the Department of the Interior, the President himself complained bitterly that Kelley had sold "his fabrications to a journal identified with the opposition political party, and they were launched in the midst of a political campaign". Where else could the culprit have sold attacks on the party in power and when else could he have got anything for them? And what of it? That's politics.

The Administration doesn't seem to like politics. Yet the truth is that the Presidency is habitually enveloped in a cloud of perfumed publicity, and that for one Charley Michelson there are a dozen Hoover writers publicly burning offerings upon the White House door-step. The Administration evidently having decided that what people write about it is politically important, is taking no chances with the public. Who is to say that the Administration is wrong? After what Wilson did with uncontrolled publicity in 1917 and 1918, it may well be that the most direct road to future power lies through press clippings and inspired magazine articles. That also is politics.

Ever since the Hoover boom became a political cannonade, the President has disposed of a heavy battery of heavy newspapermen, who perform the functions of a poet laureate and a male quartette. This solid, faithful Old Guard still refuses to surrender and thunders its defiance at the oncoming Democrats. The battle of the mimeographs and microphones has raged for two years and if the Administration is right in its premise that publicity is more decisive than performance in winning public approval—these are the men who are directing political thought in America today. Their names mean little or nothing to the average American. In Washington, they are as prominent as obelisks.

William Hard, lean, little and stupendously solemn; once a free-lance and a first-class journalistic buccaneer, who, with his intelligent and energetic wife, fought the Treaty of Versailles for the Irreconcilables, wrote for the naughty Nation, and shone as a radical critic of political complacency. Now, as radio announcer and syndicated solon, he sings tin praises of the Administration, plays medicineball at the White House, and writes for the Saturday Evening Post.

Frank Kent, shrewd, cynical, saturnine authority on practical politics, is the Presidential sniper. He it was whose well-aimed article in Harper's brought the appalling fact tumbling out of the tall timber, that Michelson was on the Democratic payroll, and invested that fact, which had been publicly announced months before, with all tin? glamor of a Guilty Secret.

Mark Sullivan, elderly, portly and pontifical, whose election forecasts were once the criterion of political acumen and whose kindly judgments on men and events endeared him to politicians harassed by both men and events, is now turning out the old theatre programmes and the shriveled head-lines of the pre-war era. in volume after volume of Our Times, at $5 per volume. Between whiles he writes cautious "yes-and-no" generalizations on behalf of a string of Republican dailies and has tasted the Presidential salt.

Will Irwin, one of the old "Success Boys at Stanford", now one of the Saturday Evening Post cardinalate, is the masked Michelson of the Hoover whooperups, voluminously faithful to "The Chief", confused by many with Irvin Cobb, but not nearly as amusing.

Horrified with the knavery of the meddlesome Michelson the Republicans promptly attempted to duplicate him, hiring Jimmy West, former Associated Press man and journalistic live-wire, to engage in counter-battery work. Even as when the Germans started poison-gas the Allies had to follow suit. Not content with this regrettable bit of reprisal, Republican engineering genius went further and started a weekly tabloid, entitled Washington, to lay the lure of Republicanism before the rabble and to expose, as it were, the bare knees and undulant bodies of Hoover's political bathing beauties and to play up the latest Democratic divorce case in Heflinland. While one must applane! the audacity of this plan to put a little sex appeal in the Administration, one doubts that it will reach other than the political straphangers, who would vote for Hoover Prosperity until the end of the world.

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Opposed to this formidable line-up, in which such weeklies as Collier's, Liberty and The Saturday Evening Cost serve as the back field which rapidly passes the buck and claims that every Republican fumble was a Democratic offside, is a weak enough team.

With The New York Times as center and The New York World and The Baltimore Sun as ends, the Democrats dispose of only three first-rate journalists. Michelson, of the World, has already been disposed of; his burning iniquity in criticising the sacrosanct already smokes to Heaven. There remain the Times and the Sun, the rest of the line-up being represented by the Scripps-Howard papers, with occasional reinforcements from William Randolph Hearst and from Will Rogers, whenever the latter gets bored with his favorite role of perpetual umpire and coach for both teams.

Richard V. Oulahan of the Times, careful, friendly, Irish and well-informed, is hardly a dangerous opponent for Mr. Hoover. Indeed, he is on close personal terms with the President and though his sympathies and those of his paper lie with the Democrats, he has never sunk into partisanship. His political articles run as (dose to the truth as anything emanating from Washington.

In marked contrast to Oulahan is Drew Pearson, of The Baltimore Sun. His articles are brilliant, dangerous and vindictive, and he would scientifically slough his best friend to score a point against the Administration. His specialty is State Department news and his uncanny knack of smelling out the weak point in a clumsy bit of diplomacy is the despair of the officials.

In this connection, mention might be made of the trick play staged by Democratic publicity in the last week of the campaign. This was the appearance of a carefully half-baked mudpie, impugning the business character, professional attainments and administrative record of Hoover's pre-Presidential career. It came out as a book, under the engaging title of The Great Mistake, and claimed that Hoover had dealt dubiously with the native owners of a Chinese mine a generation ago, that most of his mining companies went into quick liquidation after stock had been sold to the public, and that there was Something Very Queer about Sugar in the days when he was Food Administrator. On the theory that if you throw enough mud some of it will '■tick, this was fair enough politics, but as a "scoring play" for the Democrats :! was not nearly so effective as the Republican chant of "Ma! Ma! Where's My Pa?" of the Cleveland era, the rumors of Roosevelt's drunkenness, the smoking-room stories anent Wilson's second marriage, or the lastminute Democratic report in 1920 that Warren Gamaliel Harding was a mulatto. The obvious pseudonym of the "John Knox" who compiled The Great Mistake suggests that the journalistic vilification of our President is more than a Republican invention. That it is effective in weakening Hoover is more than doubtful.

By this time, the effect of the Administrations reliance upon publicity is sufficiently obvious.

Whether or not it is good politics, government by newspapermen is bad statesmanship. Its inevitable tendency is to discourage all criticism of the President as a party leader and to substitute unwholesome adulation of the Chief Executive. Every President is human, fallible and temperamental. Every President makes mistakes of judgment and of policy. Sometimes these mistakes are downright foolish, rarely are they intentional. To insist that the press of the nation and that the President's party opponents shall limit themselves to praise, which is what is meant by "constructive criticism"; to ask them to admire his inland waterways if they cannot praise his appointments; to laud his good intentions if they cannot approve of his policies, is unfair to human nature. As it is, we are already tending to exaggerate the power of the President and to resent the checks on that power which are provided by a representative form of government. The American people alternate between yearning for a God whom they can adore, a sort of perpetual Lindbergh in the White House, and treating the President as a combination whipping-boy and scapegoat. They could easily be pushed over into a sort of Republican Emperorworship or could be induced to oust an unpopular President after two years of office, if determined and self-satisfied Executives cater to mob approval. The rank and file have brains enough to discount partisan excess, if it is evenly divided, but how can they be expected to form a just estimate of the capacities of a President if they are constantly told that he is good, true and beautiful, and while millions tramp the streets for work and children cry for bread, that his glory reaches unto the Heavens and bis wisdom encompasses the earth?

From all such winds of party doctrine, we are delivered by the Charley Michelsons of the Nation and by those independent journalists who refuse to subscribe to the doctrine that anybody is a great statesman if he happens to be in office. For this deliverance we pay a heavy price.

This leads our political newspapermen to form an exaggerated idea of their own importance, to become solemn and delphic, and to believe that it is their Duty to Shape Events when they are merely paid to report them. Few people, except politicians, can be so deadly dull and so stunningly selfsatisfied as the average Washington correspondent. Instead of writing news he writes prophecies and instead of following events, he plays favorites. We have to thank the publicity-seeking politicians for this dreadful perversion of necessary journalism. Until it is demonstrated that a news story is not the same as a political act, and that a good press is not equivalent to statesmanship, the government by newspapermen will continue, and until it ends we will never get an intelligent public opinion about politics.