Ink-Stained Wretches
Newspapers and Journalists
It seems to me not unfair to say that America leads the world in hypocrisy, and always has, despite the sharpest kind of competition from Great Britain.
—Heywood Broun
In the Twenties, New York City had more than fifteen daily newspapers. Many people read both a morning paper and then an evening edition after work. The Round Table actively participated in the world of journalism, its members ranking among the most widely read writers of their era. Their king, of course, was Franklin P. Adams, followed closely by Heywood Broun and Alexander Woollcott. Other newspaper wage slaves were Robert Benchley—who happily flunked out of daily journalism—Marc Connelly, Jane Grant, Ruth Hale, George S. Kaufman, Herman Mankiewicz, William Murray, Laurence Stallings, Frank Sullivan, Deems Taylor, and John V. A. Weaver. The Round Table got its start because of a newspaper critic (Woollcott), and the group’s fame grew largely due to the columnists at the table who wrote about their lunch companions.
Before the rise of radio and television, all of the major newspapers had offices on Newspaper Row at the intersection of Park Row and Nassau and Spruce Streets. Lined up like battleships were the offices of the World, Sun, Tribune, and Times, all in beautiful stone edifices designed by the best architects of the day. This city within a city was the center of the media universe before World War I. The newsmen had their own saloons, restaurants, and cafés. When the subway opened in 1904, the first entrance went in across the street, at City Hall. The intersection of Park Row and Spruce Street, now Pace Plaza, once was known as Printing House Square. Newspaper Row was demolished beginning in the Fifties. Today Pace University occupies most of the area where the newspapers were published.
The spire of the Tribune Building before it was demolished in 1966. ◆ ◆ ◆
Newspaper Row, circa 1905, from left: the World, the Sun (smaller building in foreground), the Tribune, the Times. Only the Times building, now Pace University, still stands today. ◆ ◆ ◆
Since the Colonial era, scores of papers have come and gone in New York City, but none was more lamented than the New York World. The paper played an important part in American history, and its impact still resonates. Founded in 1860, it lost money until 1883, when Hungarian immigrant Joseph Pulitzer bought it for $240,000 from financier Jay Gould.
There were three separate editions and staffs: morning, evening, and Sunday. Depending on the perspective, Pulitzer either stands tallest in American journalism history, or he’s seen as a massive egoist, putting anything into the World to draw readers. He helmed an empire that engaged readers and took an active part in their lives. (His newspaper delivery vans handed out bread to the poor, inventing the bread line.) The World was as well known for its philanthropic work as it was for publishing pieces by Mark Twain and O. Henry. The editorial page supported a fund-raising campaign for the pedestal on which the Statue of Liberty stands.
The World stood at 63 Park Row, with editorial offices on the eleventh floor of a tower that Pulitzer erected in 1890. A golden dome topped the 309-foot-tall building. Pulitzer died in 1911, and the paper ran for twenty more years.
The only known remaining piece of the Pulitzer Building is this stained-glass window, now in the World Room at the Columbia School of Journalism. The Pulitzer Prize committee meets in this room. ◆ ◆ ◆
Star reporter Herbert Bayard Swope became executive editor in 1921 and brought in the best talent, increasing high-quality reporting and also hiring New York’s first black reporter. By the time the Round Table came to it, the highly respected World was the “newspaperman’s newspaper.” Swope receives credit for creating the page opposite the editorial page—the “Op. Ed.”—a phrase he coined. Onto this page he brought a lively mix of writers, most from the Vicious Circle. Among the first of them to write for the World was Robert Benchley, a month after he quit Vanity Fair in 1920. Benchley’s book reviews often had nothing to do with the books themselves, and could easily contain ruminations on train schedules.
Swope poached Broun and Adams from the Tribune in 1921. The thirty-three-year-old Broun could write anything, from a play review to a recap of the Harvard–Yale football game. He had free rein in his column “It Seems to Me,” which ran for six years, to discuss books, sports, movies, or politics. The last of these landed him in hot water when Broun butted heads with Swope. When F.P.A. brought his famous “Conning Tower” to the op-ed page, it caused a sensation.
Dorothy Parker was a regular contributor; F.P.A. and the World published her two best-known poems, “Résumé” and “News Item,” on the same day in 1925. F.P.A. also gave big breaks to James Thurber and E. B. White, who landed on The New Yorker together a few years later. Swope hired Deems Taylor as music critic at a time when it was unheard of to hire a composer for that role. But Taylor, warmly received and much praised, set the standard for thoughtful music criticism. He lasted four years on the staff.
Laurence Stallings joined in 1922 to write book reviews and editorials. The passionately liberal war veteran referred to a black man as “Mr.” in print, angering readers in his Georgia hometown. The other veteran to join the World that year was Herman Mankiewicz, who came straight from working in Berlin. A native New Yorker, Mankiewicz had grown up with the paper.
In 1923 Woollcott left the Times for the World to be lead drama critic. He received $15,000 a year and three months’ vacation. The other great talent on the staff was humorist Frank Sullivan, who joined at the same time. When F.P.A. went on vacation, Sullivan filled his “Conning Tower” column and was such a hit that he was taken off straight reporting. Sullivan was so distraught when the Pulitzer brothers sold the newspaper in 1931, throwing three thousand men and women out of work, that he quit the newspaper business and moved back home to Saratoga Springs.
Today no plaque or monument marks the former Pulitzer Building and its wonderful gold dome. Before it was razed in 1955, Swope and F.P.A. toured the deserted newsroom one last time. It’s now a highway approach to the Brooklyn Bridge. The stained-glass window from the city room was moved to Columbia University’s Journalism School building, where, each year in the World Room, the Pulitzer Prize winners are announced.
2. The New York Evening Mail
The Evening Mail building, on the right, in 1908. The Singer Tower, under construction, is next door on Broadway. Both have been demolished. ◆ ◆ ◆
The Evening Mail made Franklin P. Adams a celebrity in New York. His column “Always in Good Humor” began on the editorial page in 1904; later he changed the title to “The Conning Tower.” Among his hundreds of contributors were Edna Ferber, Ring Lardner, Sinclair Lewis, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Alice Duer Miller, and Dorothy Parker. Almost six years after arriving in New York, F.P.A. achieved national fame for a dashed-off piece of verse. On the occasion of a trip to the Polo Grounds, the home ballpark of the New York Giants, Adams watched his beloved Chicago Cubs fail. Returning to work—in the days when all baseball games took place in the afternoon—F.P.A. turned into the composing room “Baseball’s Sad Lexicon” about Cubs infielders Joe Tinker, Johnny Evers, and Frank Chance. All three went into the National Baseball Hall of Fame together, due in large part to F.P.A.’s immortal words of July 10, 1910:
These are the saddest of possible words:
“Tinker to Evers to Chance,”
Trio of bear cubs, and fleeter than birds,
Tinker and Evers and Chance.
Ruthlessly pricking our gonfalon bubble,
Making a Giant hit into a double—
Words that are heavy with nothing but trouble:
“Tinker to Evers to Chance.”
When F.P.A. quit the Evening Mail in 1914 to go to the Tribune, his handpicked successor was one of his favorite contributors: George S. Kaufman. The younger man had been sending pieces to F.P.A. since 1908, and his mentor recommended him for the job. Another future Round Tabler whom F.P.A. helped get a job on the Evening Mail was Brock Pemberton, who arrived in New York from Kansas with a suitcase and little else. Both Kaufman and Pemberton started their New York careers on the Evening Mail. Another friend of the group was esteemed sports scribe Grantland Rice.
The New York Evening Mail was located at 203 Broadway, a few blocks south of Newspaper Row, across the street from St. Paul’s Chapel. In January 1924, the Evening Mail ceased to exist after it was bought and merged into the Telegram. Today the building is an office tower.
3. The New-York Tribune
Heywood Broun joined the Tribune around 1912 at a salary of $25 a week. He was a general assignment reporter before being put on the sports desk. His first assignment was to interview pitcher Christy Mathewson of the Giants. Broun beat him at checkers instead and later became the future Cooperstown legend’s bridge partner. When the Giants went to the 1912 World Series, Broun covered the game for the Tribune. Broun was among the first reporters to earn a byline, not often given out then.
Franklin P. Adams, who wrote pieces for the Trib’s Sunday magazine in 1906, was lured away from the Evening Mail in 1914 with the amazing salary of $25,000 a year (about $595,000 today). He and Broun became fast friends in the city room. Within a year, F.P.A. brought over his protégé, Kaufman, who started out covering the shipping news and later moved to the drama department. The future playwright soaked up the Broadway world, putting what he learned into his writing.
The Tribune merged with the Herald in 1924 and moved uptown to 225 West 40th Street. Publication of the New York Herald Tribune collapsed in 1966 amid a labor strike. The Tribune Building, once the tallest in Manhattan, was at 150 Nassau Street on Newspaper Row. It was a beautiful Neo-Grecian tower designed in 1873 by Richard Morris Hunt, who also designed the Fifth Avenue facade of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Tribune Building was demolished in 1966.
4. The Morning Telegraph
No paper in New York had a reputation quite like the Morning Telegraph, which ran from 1840 to 1972. If you read it, you wanted news of horse racing, vaudeville, and Broadway gossip. It was the kind of place that let chorus girls hang around the newsroom after they got off work. The sports editor in the Twenties was the Old West gunslinger Bat Masterson. Reporter John J. Fitz Gerald popularized the nickname “Big Apple” for New York City while on the paper.
The Morning Telegraph perfectly fit Broun and Connelly. Broun’s career at the Morning Telegraph started with an internship at the paper, arranged by his father, the summer following his sophomore year at Harvard. After the fiasco of flunking French and not earning his diploma in 1910, Broun was hired full-time. At age twenty-two, he was covering baseball games, interviewing actresses, and writing editorials—sometimes all in the same day—while making $25 a week and loving it. When he found out that book critics got free review copies, he started writing a literary column. When he asked for a raise and byline two years later, he was shown the door.
Connelly had an easier time when he joined during World War I; at least he was a real reporter. Connelly, a leg man in Pittsburgh, had come to New York with a play he’d written. When that didn’t pan out, he went looking for a journalism job. “In 1917 and 1918 the Morning Telegraph printed so much theatrical news that it was known as the chorus girl’s breakfast,” he recalled years later. While covering show business, Connelly met his first collaborator, Kaufman, who had the same beat for the Times.
The paper, published for 132 years, ceased publication during a printers’ union strike in 1972. The Morning Telegraph offices were at 826 Eighth Avenue. The building has since been demolished.
5. The New York Times
No newspaper looms over American culture today more than the New York Times. But that wasn’t the case in the era of silent films, speakeasies, and flappers. In the Jazz Age, the World and the Tribune had the reputation for good writing and reporting. The Times was just one of a dozen newspapers in the crowded New York news market, but it prevailed by means of superior editing and wise business decisions. The Times always had strong publishers, while the others changed hands and suffered from poor management.
The Times began in 1851 at 113 Nassau Street with Henry J. Raymond as editor. The paper wasn’t very successful, but its fortunes improved in 1896 when it began a new era under publisher Adolph S. Ochs. His descendants have run the paper for more than a century. In 1857, the Times occupied a building at 41 Park Row. Just eight years after Ochs took over the paper, the Times moved to Longacre Square, renamed Times Square in 1904. The Times outgrew the building in a few short years, and in 1913 it moved to the home it would occupy for more than ninety years, located at 229 West 43rd Street.
The Times occupied this landmark building from 1913 to 2007. ◆ ◆ ◆
Around this time the first future Round Table member joined the staff. Alexander Woollcott was twenty-two years old in 1909. The recent Hamilton grad went to work on the city desk. His most harrowing assignment was being sent to Nova Scotia to report on the dead from the RMS Titanic in April 1912. Soon after, he moved to the drama department, where he remained for almost twenty years as the city’s preeminent theater critic.
Next to join the staff was Jane Grant, who unwittingly became the first female general assignment reporter on the Times. She started out answering the phones in the society department and moved up to covering hotels and weddings. Her quick thinking and verve got her promoted shortly after World War I. She interviewed Charlie Chaplin in 1921 (“Circumstances made a comedian of him and he has given the best in him to a laughter-loving world,” she wrote). In 1934 she went to Tokyo to interview Emperor Hirohito of Japan, then traveled to Berlin several weeks later to meet the Nazi government. In 1935 she was the first woman from the Times to report from Moscow.
George S. Kaufman joined the drama department and worked under Woollcott. Even when Kaufman became a hit maker, he kept his day job for a number of years, fearful that his playwriting spell might stop. Others who wrote freelance pieces for the Times included Ruth Hale, Dorothy Parker, and Laurence Stallings. In 2007, the staff moved into a new office tower at 620 Eighth Avenue. The old offices were converted to retail shops, restaurants, and offices. A bowling alley now occupies the former editorial offices.
6. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle
The Brooklyn Daily Eagle was in its time one of the most-read newspapers in the country. With offices at the corner of Johnson and Washington, it was founded by Isaac Van Anden in October 1842 and was like a Times for Brooklynites. Walt Whitman was editor from 1846 to 1848, and another editor, Henry C. Murphy, was the state senator instrumental in building the Brooklyn Bridge. In 1897, editor in chief St. Clair McKelway opposed Brooklyn consolidation with the other four boroughs to make up greater New York City—futilely, as it turned out.
The Eagle, a vital newspaper, attracted talented writers and editors to its staff. Among them was John V. A. Weaver, who came to New York and befriended Woollcott. Through Woollcott, Weaver met William B. Murray, music critic for the Eagle. Weaver became literary editor. Ruth Hale contributed, too; when she wasn’t ghost-writing book reviews for her husband, Heywood Broun, she wrote about them for the Eagle.
The Eagle folded in 1955. In 1996, a new weekday publication launched under the old name.
One of Heywood Broun’s many projects was writing, producing, and starring in a 1931 Broadway revue called Shoot the Works at George M. Cohan’s Theatre, formerly at 1482 Broadway. It lasted for ninety performances. In the front row is Connie Madison, whom Broun married in 1935. ◆ ◆ ◆