Underwood & Underwood

T

BY RICHARD BARRY

HE next President of the United States will be a middle-aged newspaper man from Ohio. His name will be either Warren G. Harding or James M. Cox. Externally their his tories are monotonously similar, and almost commonplace; each a farmer boy who drifted to the nearest large city, where he stuck through all grades of the publishing business until he controlled a leading newspaper, and in time rose from lesser political office to the highest place in his party. Neither went into politics until he was independent financially. Both emerged suddenly from comparative obscurity as National standard-bearers.

This 1920 campaign has produced less of personality than almost any other. What part of this is due to the fact that journalism, the craft whose arch-priest is anonymity, has furnished the protagonists? Mostly we have had lawyers as Presidential candidates. If not lawyers, then soldiers. The rare farmer, publicist, or professor has been the exception to prove the rule. Now we have no choice in the matter; whatever happens, there will be a newspaper man in the White House, and for the first time.

But what sort of a newspaper man? We must discard our former measures and grapple with a new yardstick. We became accustomed to estimating law

yers for public service. Were they jury lawyers, counselors, legislators, or (woe betide them!) corporation attorneys? Subconsciously we rated them accordingly. Soldiers it was easy to estimate. The chief question was: Had they commanded winning armies?

Now, is it enough to say that he is a newspaper man, and let it go at that, making a decision solely on the merits of the campaign propaganda? Or, shall we ask what kind of a newspaper man he is, wherein he specialized, wherein he succeeded, and what, therefore, may be his dominant philosophy of life?

These questions seemed important to the writer, and he went to Marion and Dayton, to the candidates themselves, to their associates and subordinates, to their competitors and fellow-townsmen, to arrive at the facts in the respective to arrive at the facts in the respective cases. Here are the two stories as he has seen them.

Warren G. Harding, for over thirty years editor of the Marion "Star," seeing the town grow from six thousand to nearly thirty thousand, and growing with it proportionately, long its most conspicuous citizen, has partaken of its nature completely. Harding is Marion; Marion is Harding.

It is a town where every one, from the President of the First National to the oiler at the roundhouse, is "folks," where nearly every house has a garage,

and where the pineapple or cedar-mop hair cut is in vogue. A town like this does not breed great newspaper men, not if they stick there. It is the sort of place that the big leaders in the chief centers come from.

One night over thirty years ago three young men Johnny Sickel, Jack War. wick, and War'n Harding-paused outside the Elite Restaurant, in Marion, discussing a proposition to buy a moribund newspaper called the Marion "Star," about to be abandoned. Sickel was the capitalist, having been left a legacy of nearly four hundred dollars a few days before. Warwick was an apprentice printer, and Harding had been for a few months a six-dollar-aweek reporter on a Democratic newspaper, from which he had been discharged for wearing a Blaine hat. Some one suggested that they conclude the discussion over a plate of oysters, but as they started into the Elite Harding suddenly objected. "Boys," said he, "if we buy the 'Star,' who'll pay for the oysters ?"

They did buy the "Star"-for $300 cash, each a third owner. Harding's father, a country doctor, loaned him his hundred; Sickel loaned Warwick his. Now mark how destiny led each his appointed way along the path of his nature.

Sickel, quickly bored with the inability of battered type to make legible marks on paper for which the bill collectors were already dunning for payment, shortly sold his interest to Harding for a promissory note and got out, to slip from this to that and be heard from no more.

Warwick, who, as Harding once told the writer, 66 was the clever one of us," with a nimble wit and drawling humor, spared himself the labor of writ ing his news by setting it up directly at the case, and thus, to do it more quickly, his personals became shorter and shorter, with often a quotable quip. Harding went in for longer "pieces "-descrip tive, argumentative, rhetorical. It was also his lot to "make up" the paperthat is, arrange the type and apportion the allotment of news, editorial matter, and advertising. and advertising. One day Warwick called out from his case where he was setting type to Harding, with sleeves rolled up, over the composing stone, his grimy hands lifting the "takes into the first page: "These long pieces of yours are all right, but what I think the "Star" needs is more little fellows." "Right you are, Jack," responded the lanky editor, "and you are the one

to write them.'

So he was. Soon the papers in the.

big cities found it out, and the "little fellows" from the Marion "Star" were often copied in the Cincinnati, Cleveland, Toledo, and even the Chicago dailies. Then came the call to the larger journalism, and Warwick shook the dust of the small town from his feet and hoisted himself another rung up the obvious ladder. As he said "good-by to his partner, to whom he had sold his interest for a promissory note and enough railway fare to take him to Cleveland, he added, whole-heartedly : "Warren, this is too small a town for you. As soon as I am located and get my bearings I'll find a place for you.'

"Thanks, Jack," replied he who was now sole owner of the debt-burdened Marion "Star," an obscure paper in a town barely on any map and not located at all on some, "but I think I'll stick."

After that came the long pull, the grinding, commonplace, petty struggle with compositors, carrier-boys, advertisers, subscribers. The "Star" rose from obscurity to affluence, from being a tail-ender to first place in the town's journalism, from being worth little more than $300 to being capitalized at $80,000. So far as the writer could 5 learn, there was in that history, which could be repeated in practically every city and town of the United States, but one unique feature.

The unique feature is this: there was never any appearance of struggle in Harding. Although many a time uncertain how he was to meet his payroll, he never apparently was anything but prosperous. Moreover, he singularly avoided contest. He spoke only good of his competitors. No one ever heard him berate a rival at least not publicly. He grew slowly, normally, like a blessed oak deep-rooted in comfortable soil. The lightning never hit him, and if the drought came he had enough reserve strength to weather it without hurt. Of the fevers of metropolitan journalism he was as ignorant as is a country Percheron of the thrills of the race-course.

Certain rules were early established and still prevail on the Marion "Star." For instance, no cases of drunkenness or misdemeanors arising from them, unless capital crime, are ever reported there. Harding's explanation to his staff is that any gain in news value to the paper does not offset the heartache that publicity brings to the friends and family of the delinquent.

Another rule is that no news shall be published concerning the editor and his family. In later years this has become a hard rule to follow, and in 1920 an impossible one.

A while before the Chicago Convention the Marion "Star" carried this small item among its "personals:" personals:" "Senator and Mrs. Harding arrived to-day at their Mount Vernon Avenue home, where they are expected to remain a week."

International

THE UNPRETENTIOUS HOME OF SENATOR HARDING'S NEWSPAPER AT MARION OHIO

Early the next morning the Senator was at his desk and called for the reporter who wrote the item. "Are you guilty of this?" he asked, sternly.

"Yes, sir," came a stout confession with a stiffening of the lip.

"Do you think that is news worth space in a paper?” "I do, sir.

"Who told you it was news?"

Well, sir, I believe that when the United States Senator from the State of Ohio returns to his home from a long. absence in Washington the people of Marion are entitled to know it."

"I don't agree with you," countered the editor-owner. "Please see that it doesn't happen again."

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Then the features which are stern in repose softened into a beguiling smile as he called all his staff to him. Adopt ing the paternal attitude, he pleaded: 'Boys, I know I'm going to get the worst of it from you this year. I know you are going to turn me down on my rule of keeping myself out of the paper; but I beg of you please go easy on me. Give us just as little of Harding as the law will permit.'

The Marion "Star" is distinguished for three things: careful business management, a brightly written and tastefully edited editorial page, and the enterprising introduction of what are known in the business as "magazine " features, such as cartoons, the offering

of prizes for the beautifying of homes, etc., etc. It is a brightly written paper, which has always avoided sensationalism and which is looked upon in Marion as a rock of reliability. Since its owner has been in public life its staff carefully avoids him in securing news in which he is concerned. An instance of this occurred when the writer happened to mention to the editor, Mr. Van Fleet, an item of local importance which the editor, with a proper news instinct, wanted immediately to publish. The writer protested that it would be necessary to get permission first from the Senator.

"That settles it," groaned Mr. Van Fleet. "He'll probably give it to the others first and let us hustle for it. I'll tell you what happened at the time of the acceptance speech. I knew he wouldn't let us photograph him, but I heard that a lot of out-of-town photographers had permission for a 'shot' the day before, so I slipped our man in the crowd, hoping he'd get by; but no-W.G. spotted him. The next morning early-it was the big day of the acceptance, when I thought he surely would be occupied with something more important, he called me to know what I intended for illustration that day, and finally wormed out of me that. I had a new picture of him slated for a five-column space on the first page. He vetoed that instanter, and asked,

Mayfield & Howard, Dayton

'Haven't you a picture of Lodge down there? I grudgingly admitted we had, and so we compromised by giving Lodge first position, with Harding a second place of similar space. And that was the most important event in the history of Marion.

James M. Cox offers a journalistic picture almost the reverse of this. His story is that of the agile, energetic, intuitive, brilliant, and hard-hitting man who has forged his way from the bottom to the top by sheer force of indomitable will, who seeks the limelight, and who never hesitates to make enemies. Cox doesn't wait for things to come to him; he goes out after them and gets them.

It is not necessary to assume that campaign committees have directed the present methods of the two men. The fact that Harding is on his front porch, patiently spinning the web that he hopes will embrace the Presidency, while Cox is chasing hither and yon over the country, breaking all previous records in an effort to capture it, is only the natural

expression of the natures of the two men. From the very beginning, and in all things, each has been like that.

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As a young man, barely twenty, Cox found himself, thirty years ago, after teaching a country school, a small town correspondent of the Cincinnati "Enquirer." Near by occurred a railway wreck. It was Opportunity's first knock on his door. His answer was that of the born events man, the intuitive "go-getter" reporter. Instead of first learning the details he filed with the telegraph operator who controlled the only wire to Cincinnati a copy of the local directory, it being the rule that the one who first took the wire could hold it until through sending. Then, at his leisure, he went forth and carefully gleaned the details of the wreck. When his rivals came to the wire ahead of him with their stories, they found the only avenue to Cincinnati blocked by Jimmy Cox's directory. As he did not unduly hasten in getting his facts, being assured of his open line of communication, he got a more thorough and a better story than the others. Moreover, it beat theirs in.

"What

But Cox did not rest there. did you do the day after your victory?" Napoleon always asked his generals. Cox applied to the Cincinnati "Enquirer" for a job on the city staff the day after his victory. He got it, and that is how he "broke in to metropolitan journalism.

He began in Cincinnati as copy reader on the telegraph desk, an irk some job that usually turns a man into an automaton after a few years. Cox never shirked it, nor mourned because it gave him no chance for individual scoring. He worked nine, ten, and sometimes twelve hours a day at his desk, and, as one of his early friends has told the writer, 66 as much more on the hoof about town digging up spot news. "Spot" news, be it known, is news at its source, and usually of ephemeral interest. Soon he knew all the leading men of Cincinnati by sight or personally and was a walking encyclopædia of the city's fluid interests.

One day, in a public elevator, Cox overheard two railway executives discussing a coming merger, as yet secret. They had no suspicion that within a few feet unobtrusively stood the shrewdest newspaper brain in the city. Then, as now, Cox was of medium height, medium weight, medium color, of negative personality, and with nothing external to reveal that he possessed an intelligence of singular clarity and a will of instant decisions.

The next morning Cincinnati rang with the important news of the new merger, a clear "beat" for Cox's employer, and henceforth the telegraph copy-desk grubbed on without the initiative and industry of the young man who now took another step upward on the obvious ladder.

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"In the late nineties," to quote an old Cincinnati editor, "Jimmy Cox was the best reporter and about the worst writer in southern Ohio. There was not a week that he did not turn in a sensational scoop,' and seldom were his facts wrong; never a faker, he never spared himself in any effort to get first-hand exclusive information. But when it came to writing it, the copy usually had to be done over' in the office. Jimmy never seemed to notice the fact that his literary sense was far inferior to his journalistic instinct. His only vanity was in being first; his only pride, in beating all rivals; and to be first he stopped at nothing. It was useless to talk to him of consequences or of policies. He lived solely for the moment, and his moment was now."

Among the prominent men whom young Cox knew well was Paul Sorg, tobacco millionaire. When Sorg was elected to Congress, he proposed that the enterprising young reporter become his private secretary, and when Cox went to Washington he was also the correspondent of two Ohio dailies.

To be "Washington correspondent"

= is the pinnacle of most youthful journalistic ambitions. Cox reached it before he was thirty, but he quickly saw that Washington correspondents are not only poorly paid, but that the sort of "leg" work in which he was proficient was little appreciated, while the "desk" work, for which he cared nothing, was the chief source of advancement. The youthful Cox decided that it was no place for him; certainly not at that stage of the game.

The Dayton "News," a floundering journal of great age but of uncertain future, was for sale. Congressman Sorg loaned Secretary Cox the money for its purchase. There was only one fly in this ointment. Sorg insisted that a number of prominent business men in Dayton be solicited to purchase shares of stock in the new enterprise, as he believed that the newspaper would thus gain a strength not entirely financial. Cox, beholden to his mentor, was obliged to consent, but bided his time.

Within fifteen years Cox had not only paid back all the money he owed Sorg, with interest, but had also bought out all his stockholders and was the sole proprietor of the Dayton "News," with no one to consult on policies and with no one to share his profits. He had also purchased and was the sole owner of the Springfield "News," which he also converted from a floundering into a flourishing property.

He entered Dayton burdened with debt. To-day, Governor of Ohio, Presidential nominee, his annual income is reported among his associates in Ohio to be in excess of $200,000 and his personal fortune in the early millions. Superficially, the aegis of success is seldom brighter.

But the present study is concerned primarily with methods and their indirections. Along what paths did Journalist Cox climb on his upward road? "Lucky Cox," some call him in Ohio, but if he was lucky, it was because he was quicker than others to divine the drift of events and to seize their advantage for his own. "Cox

" is another phrase with the local cognoscenti, for hair-trigger certain he is each day, though his next day's certainty may belie all that went before.

These characteristics ruled the Dayton "News" throughout its stormy upbuilding. It was the period when the muckrake was mighty throughout the American newspaper world. None ventured more in the realms of exposé than the Dayton "News." No socalled "yellow" paper of Chicago, Denver, or New York went further in circuitous and persistent enterprise to "reveal" to the public the inner workings of big business. One after another Cox attacked the public utility corporations of Dayton, and nothing was more welcome in the editorial rooms of the Dayton "News" than publishable

blocks of stock in the telephone company, in the street railway company, and in the public gas companies. For none of these stocks did he pay cash or its equivalent, but devoted his "services" as organizer or promoter, so that eventually he emerged, what with the success of his papers and the increased value of his other holdings, a millionaire.

An episode of the Dayton flood, when Cox was Governor, illustrates the functioning of his dual capacity as State executive and newspaper opportunist. With admirable despatch he met the emergency of nature's cataclysm and as chief of the State neither slept nor ate until he had done all in his human power to alleviate the suffering and lessen the property loss, summoning assistance, getting off special relief trains, eliminating red tape in the syncope of a perilous hour.

Neither did he forget the Dayton "News." It, with its rivals, the "Journal" and "Herald," Herald," was inundated, and for a few days no presses in Dayton could work. As the managing editor of the "Journal-Herald relates the story, a detachment of the

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State guard was ordered to take an old press from Columbus, load it on an empty box car, attach it to a relief train, and hasten it to-Dayton along with the other supplies for the stricken populace. Just outside the inundated district the press was emplaced under a tent, guarded by the State troops, and given over to the Dayton "News," a gratuity not extended to the also suffering "Journal" and "Herald."

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The old-fashioned words "conservative" and "radical" may be used to describe and differentiate the newspaper enterprises known as the Marion "Star" and the Dayton "News." But these terms only partially express the difference. From a purely professional and business point of view both are progressive and efficient institutions, and each leads in its community.

However, the soul that lies behind each is essentially of contrasting character, with roots that go deeper into our common humanity. Behind the Marion "Star" is a patriarchal disposition which looks upon a newspaper as

a species of community center which should perform a service for all, and which no one man may dominate except in so far as his influence is recognized by common consent. Incidentally, it should be recorded that years ago Harding voluntarily offered shares in his paper to trusted employees at a time when he had acquired sole control. During a similar period Cox was buying out the partners who might later share profits.

Behind the Dayton "News" is what may be called, in a Socialistic sense, a "paternal" disposition. While no one except the owner holds any stock in the paper, old employees are well treated and retired on pensions. Public and other policies have the same inflection. Intelligent and unflagging attention is given to all questions, but the answers. are always in terms of the decision of the sole individual who has been farsighted and determined enough to acquire undisputed authority.

Translate this into terms of politics, and it may seem a paradox of Republicanism and Democracy. But here are the facts. They speak for themselves.

NEW branch of the law is being developed the law of the air. The development is going on right before your eyes. The present generation has seen the origin of this new branch of law and will see much of its development. Lawyers are not the only people who are interested in this kind of law; for while the lawyers. have a technical interest in the peculiar legal principles that will be applied to airplanes, the public has even a greater interest.

Nobody thinks of the airplane as a trespasser or as a nuisance, yet this is precisely what the craft of the air is; and it is both of these things as well as a fine spectacular sight for everybody in America, from the smallest boy up to the oldest citizen. Being both a trespasser and a nuisance is what makes the airplane interesting to lawyers and is what gives it standing in the law, so to speak. It is because the airplane does trespass on the rights of others and because it may become a nuisance that it has so much legal interest for us. The airplane has been written about as a new bird of passage in the air, it has been complimented as the future arm of warfare, as the unifier of nations and the transport of commerce, but as a legal object it has not yet come clearly into the public view. But the law always

BY WAYNE C. WILLIAMS

A few moments before its tragic fall, which killed its pilot and his passenger, this airplane, flying low over the courts, had been a menace to the lives of thousands at the National Tennis Tournament at Forest Hills on Labor Day. Such an object lesson should be heeded by the law of the air follows the facts. The facts determine the follows the facts. The facts determine the fundamental conditions out of which the law springs, and the customs and habits which aircraft make necessary are already shaping the legal principles that will guide us in the future. Some of these principles are already at hand. The lawyer knows about them, and so does the layman. They are part and parcel of our common life.

The leading principles are already

here. These are the principles governing the law of trespass and nuisance. It now remains to apply and develop these principles. Strange it is that a craft so modern and unique that nothing like it was ever heard of before should have applied to it legal principles that are as old as Alfred the Great.

When we watch an aviator soaring over the earth, we do not think of him as a violator of the law, yet, techni