I know that my retirement will make no difference in its cardinal principles, that it will always fight for progress and reform, never tolerate injustice or corruption, always fight demagogues of all parties, never belong to any party, always oppose privileged classes and public plunderers, never lack sympathy with the poor, always remain devoted to the public welfare, never be satisfied with merely printing news, always be drastically independent, never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty.
— JOSEPH PULITZER, “PLATFORM,” POST-DISPATCH, APRIL 10, 1907
How would one go about identifying the finest local newspaper staff ever assembled? Because newsrooms do not have the “all-century-team” distinctions that are so popular in the sports world, Pulitzer Prizes might leap to mind as a good metric for the task.
1 If the yardstick was the winning of Pulitzer Gold Medals, though, the runaway choice would have to be the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch from the mid-1930s to the early 1950s. The paper won five in the fifteen-year period from 1937 to 1952, a record total that stood for fifty-two years. (The
Los Angeles Times won its sixth Public Service Prize in 2011 to stand alone as the most honored.) Making the
Post-Dispatch performance even more remarkable, though, was that it bracketed World War II, when more than half the paper’s staff was serving in the military. Not counting the four war years, it won the gold medal every other year during that fifteen-year stretch.
Its winning journalism was eclectic, ranging from the exposure of local voter fraud and federal government corruption to an environmental project that helped cleanse its hometown’s filthy air. The repercussions of the journalism were significant too. The clean air drive provided a model for other blighted cities from Pittsburgh to London. The paper’s revelation of federal tax-related payoffs sparked high-level government resignations in 1951 and led to civil service being installed at the agency formerly known as the Internal Revenue Bureau. Quite literally, then, taxpayers have the
Post-Dispatch to thank for the Internal Revenue Service.
How did one Midwestern paper launch so many gold medal–winning crusades in so few years? For one thing, the paper’s long investigative reporting tradition, dating back to the first Joseph Pulitzer, attracted great editors and reporters from around the country. Its record for impressive reporting had continued through the 1920s because of writers like Carlos F. Hurd, John T. Rogers, and Paul Y. Anderson. (In April 1912, Hurd had been the only reporter on the
Carpathia, the
Titanic’s rescue ship; Rogers and Anderson each won early Reporting Pulitzer Prizes—Anderson in 1929 for helping expose the Teapot Dome oil reserves scandal.) The
Post-Dispatch was especially well known in the 1930s and 1940s for its managing editors, first Oliver Kirby Bovard and later Benjamin Harrison Reese. Both had an almost military approach for running a newsroom but also inspired reporters to perform to the best of their abilities.
2O. K. Bovard personified the newsroom “field general,” who instilled both loyalty and fear in his troops. OKB, as he signed his memos, lived for a good scoop and insisted on reporters who could dig deep and pursue tenaciously. Failure to get a story was not an option. Because he liked to build reporting campaigns on the accumulation of seeming minutiae, he hated “minor errors.” He was known to fire reporters for getting a middle initial wrong. His biographer, James Markham, called him a “one-man journalism school” and wrote that a reporter “had only to show that he had worked under Bovard on the
Post-Dispatch, and he could get a job almost anywhere.”
3Some of the paper’s scrappiness reflected a deeply rooted institutional inferiority complex. The first owner of the Post-Dispatch, after all, had left what he called “provincial” St. Louis for the East and the World, recognizing New York as the center of national and international influence—and of big circulation. (Not coincidentally, it also offered huge journalistic targets as the seat of some of the worst corruption in America.) The first Joseph Pulitzer often shortchanged his St. Louis paper, especially by taking talent eastward.
To succeed Pulitzer as editor of his flagship
World he designated his oldest son, Ralph, while his second son Joseph Pulitzer II was eventually relegated to the post of editor and publisher of the St. Louis paper. In no small measure, however, the designation of JP II to run the
Post-Dispatch became a key ingredient in the paper’s rise to greatness.
JP II has sometimes been pictured as the Pulitzer son least likely to succeed, at least in his father’s eyes. (His third and youngest son, Herbert, also worked at the World.) And a disappointed Joseph Pulitzer did indeed pull the struggling young Joseph out of Harvard in 1906 and sent him to work in St. Louis almost as chastisement. But the patriarch’s thoughts about his middle son were more complex and conflicted than that. JP II had trained for years at his father’s side at the Chatwold estate in Bar Harbor and elsewhere and had worked both at the Post-Dispatch and the World before being sent to St. Louis with the idea of preparing to take over that business. Young Joseph’s biographer, Daniel Pfaff, believes that he almost certainly “was in Pulitzer’s opinion the most promising of his three sons.” Unlike the quiet Ralph, “Joseph was robust and outgoing, and had his father’s vigorous confidence—minus the piercing style of command.” And indeed, young Joseph might eventually have taken over both the World and the Post-Dispatch had he not been scorched by his mercurial father’s remarkable change of heart about him. The father’s reversal is reflected in a 1909 revision of his will, which reduced JP II’s stake in the earnings of both newspapers from 60 percent to 10 percent while boosting to 80 percent the share assigned to Herbert and Ralph. (The remaining 10 percent went to top editors and managers of the papers.) As Pfaff describes it:
The precipitating episode occurred while [young] Joseph was working at the World. One evening during dinner at the family’s New York mansion on East 73rd Street, Pulitzer—whose hearing was extremely sensitive—erupted at his daughter Edith for making too much noise carving her squab. Joseph came to her defense saying he’d seen enough of his father’s bullying and was leaving home for good. He left, but returned about a week later after accepting a compromise his father had offered: He would stay at the World a while longer with the possibility … of being permanently assigned to St. Louis.
FIGURE 13.1 Joseph Pulitzer II and son Joseph Pulitzer Jr. in the late 1940s, with bust of Joseph Pulitzer. Source: Used by permission, St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Joseph Pulitzer II unquestionably loved both St. Louis and the
Post-Dispatch, and the paper thrived with JP II as editor and publisher. He saw the rivalry with the
World as a challenge to make the Gateway City paper even better. The editor was a vital ingredient. Unlike his bombastic father, this Pulitzer had a management style combining relentlessness with gentle persuasion. One of American journalism’s underrated figures—perhaps because he liked to work out of the spotlight—the younger Pulitzer clearly outshone his brother Ralph as a manager. By studying the
World’s problems closely as it slid toward its 1931 demise, Joseph learned how to build journalistic excellence without sacrificing profitability. In his view, intelligently investing in news coverage was the path to financial success. That meant paying editors and senior reporters well, handing out bonuses for good work, and gently but firmly prodding top editors.
4Such prodding usually came via his “yellow memos,” typed on his own special tinted newsprint stock. Dubbed “the yellow peril” by editors who got them, the notes were actually written with extreme deference in most cases. A typical opening for a yellow memo in which Pulitzer disputed some decision might be, “You’ll pardon my disagreeing, but….” The modesty was genuine, built on respect for his editors. Yet it ran deeper; beneath the patrician exterior and wealth, Pulitzer was an insecure man.
5The extent of that insecurity emerges in the oral history interview he gave in 1954, a year before his death. His candor may be partly explained by the condition that the interview would not be released during his lifetime:
This is probably a stupid thing to say—but I always felt as a kid that my lack of intellectual attainment might not prove to be a serious handicap after all, but might give me a sense of what is generally popular, what the people want to know about. I don’t know whether that makes good sense or not. I always had confidence that I could do something in the way of getting out and selling a newspaper…. I’m not a flaming first-page editorial writer and I’m not a great reporter and all that. I have never uncovered a great crime and I’m not a genius of the business office or anything of the kind. As a friend of mine at home says, “I do the best I can with my shaped head.”
6
A Force Was with Them
The staff was also guided by an inspirational written force: the eighty-two-word statement of principle known as the
Post-Dispatch platform that is printed at the beginning of this chapter. Originally written by the first Joseph Pulitzer on his sixtieth birthday in 1907, it marked his retirement from active management of the paper he had founded in December 1878.
7Editors and reporters identified certain projects as “platform stories.” Staffers knew that they would get a warm reception for any crusade that aimed to right wrongs on behalf of people with no voice of their own. The platform’s leading proponent was Pulitzer himself. “I’m afraid I’m not as religious as I would like to be but this platform is literally my Bible. As it is a Bible, I hasten to add, for every man on the
Post-Dispatch,” he told the oral history researcher.
8Pulitzer’s humility kept all this high-mindedness from lapsing into arrogance. He may have been the leader of his newspaper—and of the vaunted Pulitzer Prize advisory board, which he chaired from 1940 until his death in 1955—but he did not see himself as particularly powerful. His own insecurity, along with his divided loyalties to the Post-Dispatch and to the prizes, help explain the dilemma that Pulitzer constantly faced. While he feared that a Pulitzer-owned newspaper winning too many Pulitzer Prizes would undercut the image of the broad national awards program that his father envisioned, he also wanted the Post-Dispatch to win them.
That conflict explains the running tabulation he kept of the World and the Post-Dispatch Pulitzers in the 1920s, which continued for the Post-Dispatch alone after the World was sold in 1931. He wanted to make sure his paper was not winning too many prizes. It also explains the continuing schizophrenia he had about Pulitzer Prizes. Entering the 1930s, JP II ached for his paper to win a gold medal, yet he worried how it would look in journalism circles if that happened.
Much later, after the
Post-Dispatch had won its five gold medals, managing editor Ben Reese would describe the conflict he observed in his boss: “As a matter of fact, he really hates to see the paper win the public-service prize, but he insists that we make entries. He’s very anxious for wide participation, wide nominations” among the nation’s newspapers.
9 Pulitzer’s agonizing over whether the
Post-Dispatch was winning too much would reach a peak between 1937 and 1952—to the delight of the rest of the staff.
“Ghost Voters”
What Selwyn Pepper remembered most about the summer of 1936 is the sweltering heat—to this day, still one of the hottest St. Louis summers on record. But for Pepper, the summer also stood out because of a story he was assigned to help cover in his first year as a
Post-Dispatch reporter.
In six days—starting on July 22 under the headline “Wholesale Frauds Found in Primary Registration in City,” the paper presented evidence that precinct by precinct, and even building by building, thousands of names were listed fraudulently on the voter rolls for the August 4 primary. That first day, the accounts of the reporters who had canvassed the city ran alongside photographs of clearly unoccupied stores or flophouses where dozens of “ghost residents” were registered to vote. Together the page-one stories and pictures underscored the absurdity of the claims that voters lived at the locations.
The paper had been tipped to the impending fraud by the activist head of an organization called the Citizens’ Non-Partisan Committee. He relayed evidence to Bovard of a 1935 fraud that had occurred during the approval process for a $7.5 million city bond issue to develop the riverfront. With the system gearing up to conceal fraudulent registrations again in 1936, Bovard established a separate task force under then–city editor Ben Reese to attempt to document this attempt at election stealing.
Pepper, then twenty-one, had been among those armed with registration lists and dispatched by Ben Reese and assistant Raymond Crowley to check various buildings and see who actually lived there. At one flophouse along the Mississippi riverfront Pepper encountered a man who had no problem confirming that everyone on the reporter’s list was a resident. Pepper recalled: “He kept saying yes to everything. So I asked if Ben Reese lived there. And he said yes. Did Raymond Crowley live there? Yes.” After sweating through the interviews, he came back to the office and fed his notes to a rewrite man.
10Pepper’s technique caught on. One follow-up story mentioned that a reporter had used such a trick with a woman hotel manager who had suspiciously confirmed all the registered voters on the Post-Dispatch list. “Her glibness in replying,” said the story, “led the reporter to recite a list of names of prominent St. Louis attorneys. She assured him that each one lived there, too.” Pepper summarized the entire effort as he remembered it nearly seventy years later: “It was thrilling, and also exhausting.”
As evidence piled up, the newspaper declared that there was “a vicious conflict between two factions of [Democrats] to carry a vital primary election by fraud.” After first laughing off the investigation as mere “newspaper talk,” the bipartisan board of election commissioners, sworn to conduct honest elections, eventually relented. The board members ordered an official recanvass at the behest of the governor who had appointed them. On July 31 the
Post-Dispatch carried the results: 46,011 phony names, nearly 15 percent of the legitimate city registration—clear evidence that party hacks were getting set to throw the election with last-minute votes they already had in their hip pockets. Six weeks later, the governor fired the election board.
FIGURE 13.2 The St. Louis Post-Dispatch of July 22, 1936, exposes the scope of the city’s election fraud. Source: Reprinted by permission, St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Another staffer put on canvassing duty, Wayne Leeman, remembered doing voter interviews with a notary in tow—and thinking how much that was costing the paper. Whatever the price, JP was paying it. Perhaps Reese was thinking of the fraud exposé when he later said of Pulitzer’s management of the paper: “There’s no story in the world too expensive for us if we really want it.”
11As was typical of such campaigns at the Post-Dispatch, and at many other newspapers of the day, none of the stories carried bylines. (Even in the paper’s own Pulitzer Prize entry, and its eventual coverage of the award it received, individual reporters and editors were rarely mentioned by name.)
The next question for JP was whether to enter for the gold medal, given his conflicting desires. A yellow memo to Bovard, dated January 19, 1937, indicates that the editor signed off on the entry—but cautiously:
Memo for O.K.B.:
This entry appears to be well worth making. Let me say, however, that I should really prefer to have nothing further to do with our entries so that I can go into the meeting and say that … I had nothing to do with Post-Dispatch entries and that all I did was to lift the ban against them in the belief that the paper and its staff were entitled to consideration…. J.P.
12
Of the twenty-one entries received in public service, the Pulitzer jury ranked the
Post-Dispatch’s first among its five finalists. The board, without JP’s participation, voted the same way.
13 As usual, none but the winner was identified publicly by the advisory board.
1937—The
St. Louis Post-Dispatch for its exposure of wholesale fraudulent registration in St. Louis. By a coordinated news, editorial and cartoon campaign this newspaper succeeded in invalidating upwards of 40,000 fraudulent ballots in November and brought about the appointment of a new election board.
14
St. Louis Quits Smoking
When Bovard left the
Post-Dispatch in 1938 in a dispute over control of the editorial page, it was a huge loss. But the new managing editor Ben Reese had learned Bovard’s ways, as had the new city editor, Ray Crowley.
15Pulitzer himself inspired the campaign that won the second gold medal. Awarded eight months before Pearl Harbor, this prize would recognize a civic war against an enemy that faced cities across the country: smoke. The plague had made St. Louis perhaps America’s filthiest city.
In making the regular trip between St. Louis and his father’s old Chatwold estate in pristine Bar Harbor, Maine, Pulitzer was increasingly shocked to return to a Mississippi River industrial town so clogged with pollution. For decades clean-up plans had been ineffective. The Post-Dispatch supported some well-meaning proposals, but these invariably dissolved amid finger pointing by city leaders.
In 1939 a statistic appeared in the paper that shocked St. Louisans: for the first time since 1764, St. Louis’s population was falling. Some experts blamed it on the city’s abysmal air quality. The paper assigned reporter Sam J. Shelton to study the problem, assemble information, and make a recommendation. He worked closely with Reese, Crowley, editorial page editor Ralph Coghlan, and cartoonist Fitzpatrick—who excelled in using his charcoal to depict the smoke-plagued city. The research approach “followed the traditional Post-Dispatch method of thorough preparation, clear exposition, [and] aggressive and intelligent advocacy.”
On Sunday, November 26, 1939, a long editorial appeared, tamely headlined “An Approach to the Smoke Problem.” It began: “St. Louis has been talking about smoke for 50 years. Now let’s do something about it.” The accompanying Fitzpatrick cartoon showed the city literally in the grip of smokestack emissions. It was captioned “Can’t Go On Forever.” The
Post-Dispatch plan called for the city to ask producers of smokeless fuels to bid for St. Louis’s business. The city would acquire clean fuel and sell it to individuals and licensed dealers.
16There was nothing tame about the outflow of reporting work that followed, much of it directed by Shelton. The stories were read with urgency because of particularly bad atmospheric conditions that winter. On some days St. Louisans looking out their windows saw only soot and darkness.
On Monday a page-one headline proclaimed: “St. Louis Chokes in Smoke.” A photograph of City Hall, taken at nine-thirty in the morning, appeared all black, except for the barely discernible outline of a statue of Ulysses S. Grant—looking like he was leading troops into some awful smoky battle. Stories focused on a phenomenon called “midnight at noon.” At one point, a picture was published of Carl Milles’s then-new “Meeting of the Waters” fountain, which had been criticized by prudish St. Louisans for a lack of drapery over its nude figures. The forms were no threat to decency in the thick smoke. The caption was “No Veil Needed.”
The newspaper’s coverage effectively combined the visceral and the visionary. But it also had to explain what smokeless fuels were; St. Louis was a slave to the cheap high-sulfur soft coal mined across the Mississippi in southern Illinois. St. Louisans who thought about energy at all considered cleaner gas, oil, coke, and new technology products an impossible luxury. Shelton scoped out the problem from numerous technological and financial angles, often disregarding conventional wisdom—and ignoring the city’s many hopeless hand-wringers.
The city and its smoke regulation commissioner, Washington University mechanical engineer Raymond R. Tucker, welcomed the
Post-Dispatch’s plan to buy and sell smokeless fuels and used it to launch a campaign of cooperation with industry. Authorities named a new seven-member committee, and the paper kept it focused by continually publishing news stories, editorials, and cartoons. All the while, Shelton and other reporters added information about smokeless fuel research. Articles paid special attention to technologies for making Illinois coal cleaner, recognizing the threat that alternative fuels posed to a major regional industry.
An ordinance was enacted to “rid the city of the smoke nuisance” in three years by phasing in clean fuel requirements. It met with vehement objections, first from coal-fired railroads. But the barrage of newspaper stories made the public impatient with industry delays. A Fitzpatrick cartoon showed the city “Going Down in Smoke.” The Post-Dispatch also let industry play good guy for a change, creating an “Anti-Smoke Roll of Honor” that listed companies agreeing to comply. When victory was finally declared toward the end of 1940, 841 companies were listed.
In something of a one-year test in the winter of 1940, the paper used before-and-after pictures to help tell the story. Days with similar weather conditions a year apart were chosen. Pictures taken through the same lens showed a remarkably improved air quality that readers could see for themselves. In December, Fitzpatrick drew eerie ghost-shaped clouds hovering over other cities across the river and asking of the clear St. Louis skyline: “How Did You Manage to Quit Smoking?”
The city remembered Raymond Tucker’s role in the cleanup. After becoming Washington University’s engineering school dean, Tucker was elected mayor in 1953 and served twelve years, being twice reelected. The Post-Dispatch offices, formerly on Main, became located on the renamed Tucker Boulevard.
At Columbia, the choice of a 1941 gold medal winner was not easy. With both Pulitzer and the New York Times representative Arthur Krock out of the room, the board chose the Post-Dispatch’s smoke campaigns over finalists that included the New York Times’s “comprehensive coverage of news of the war and world events.” Once again the board passed over an international story for public service, picking the paper that had helped clean a city’s air.
1941—The
St. Louis Post-Dispatch for its successful campaign against the city smoke nuisance.
17
Twenty reporters returned to St. Louis from World War II still hankering for a fight. Ben Reese soon gave them some domestic enemies to attack. Across the river, the Illinois administration of Republican Governor Dwight H. Green was rife with graft and cronyism. On a March day in 1947 in a remote southern Illinois town, a catastrophe occurred that at first seemed unrelated to the governmental corruption. It wasn’t.
Selwyn Pepper and Roy J. Harris (the author’s father) had both served in the Pacific—Pepper on General Douglas MacArthur’s staff and Harris as an Army major who had been through the kamikaze attacks of the Okinawa campaign. On the evening of March 25 both got urgent calls at home from city editor Ray Crowley. Pepper remembered:
He said there’d been an explosion in a coal mine in Centralia, Illinois. Get over there as quickly as possible. At the time I wasn’t feeling very well. I was coming down with a cold or something. But a word from the city editor was a word from God, and you didn’t dare say, “I don’t feel well, I don’t think I ought to go.” You went. It was [first] a matter of finding out where Centralia was…. And finding the mine. But once I got there, there was the whole tableau sitting right in front of me: All the wives of miners under the lights, trying to find out what was happening. And it quickly became apparent that the miners were trapped down below, and might not get out alive.
18
By late in the day, the tableau also contained a half-dozen Post-Dispatch staffers, with Harry Wilensky as leader. Six days earlier Wilensky had written a front-page story out of the state capital, Springfield, about a “shakedown” of Illinois coal mine operators for political contributions. The state department of mines and minerals was raising funds for the Chicago Republican mayoral campaign, and mine inspectors were threatening to enforce safety regulations—unless operators contributed.
The
Post-Dispatch, then, saw in the wrenching disaster an additional element of graft—an element that other journalists hardly touched.
19 On that first day, a Wilensky-bylined story started this way:
CENTRALIA, Ill., March 26—The Centralia Coal Co., operators of the mine in which 104 miners are trapped 540 feet below the surface near here … had been warned repeatedly by the Illinois State Mine Inspector to improve conditions which constituted an “explosion hazard.” Warnings of the danger due to an excessive amount of dust in the mine were posted in inconspicuous corners of the mine washrooms.
Pepper wrote in his sidebar:
A closely grouped, strangely silent crowd stood in the sunshine near the mine entrance today. They were first-aid workers, mine officials, and relatives of the trapped miners, waiting for the appearance of any possible survivors of the disaster, and of the bodies known to be below ground. Wives of some of the miners standing behind the first row of men, were weeping after an earlier showing of restraint.
It set the stage. The next day Wilensky dropped a bombshell, although his story inexplicably carried no byline:
CENTRALIA, Ill., March 27—Workers in the Centralia Coal Co. mine from which bodies are now being removed begged Gov. Dwight H. Green of Illinois more than a year ago to “please save our lives” by making the State Department of Mines and Minerals enforce safety regulations in the mine…. The four signers of [the letter to the governor] all were in the mine when the explosion occurred. [One] was brought out alive a few minutes after the blast. [Another] was killed, his body having been brought out last night. The other two signers … are unaccounted for.
Pepper remembered that Wilensky had found the save-our-lives memo in the dark, under glass on a bulletin board near the entrance to the mine. The day that the story ran, a Fitzpatrick cartoon starkly depicted a giant skeleton with a mining helmet on his skull, somberly addressing a mine inspector and a coal company official: “You Gambled But I Paid.”
This doubled-edged coverage—with compassion for the grieving and outrage over the corruption—captured the key elements of this tragedy. Pulitzer wanted the reporting to say more, though. He saw a moral obligation for the paper. One yellow memo to Reese said:
The Post-Dispatch having so often had to damn the miners and their leader, John L. Lewis, I somehow feel it is our peculiar duty to turn ourselves inside out to get to the bottom of what clearly appears to have been faulty inspection of the Centralia mine, to the end that safe conditions can be assured for the future, those responsible … be brought to justice … and that we undertake to do whatever we can do to help the prospects of the bereaved families.
20
Pulitzer proposed tying the whole story together with words and pictures in one section. “This may take a full page or for all I know a dozen full pages. It may take a staff of a dozen men,” he wrote. Reese began making the assignments.
As the rescue workers finished their grim task—111 miners in all were eventually confirmed dead—the Post-Dispatch did some of its best work capturing the emotion. It located letters that dying miners had left in a corner of the pit: “Dear Wife and Sons: Well, hon, it looks like this is the end. Please tell mom and dad I still love them. Please get the baby baptized and send [name] to the Catholic school…. Love to all of you.” Another said simply, “Dear Wife: Goodbye. Forgive me. Take care of all the children.”
Stories from the scene by Wilensky and Pepper, Harris, Evarts Graham, and Robert Dunlap, and from George Hall in Washington and Spencer McCullough in Chicago, also took aim at the political conniving. In a midnight interview at his home, mine inspector Driscoll Scanlan, who had refused to participate in that earlier shakedown of mine operations, told Wilensky that the mine department had “played politics with the lives of the miners.” Scanlan had begged the department’s director, Robert M. Medill, to close the mine because of the explosion danger—drawing from Medill the callous rejoinder: “We’ll have to take that chance.” Scanlan’s problem, said Medill, was that he was “too damned honest.”
FIGURE 13.3 A Daniel Fitzpatrick cartoon for the Post-Dispatch, “You Gambled But I Paid,” illustrates the role of the mining company and state inspectors in the 1947 Centralia mine disaster. Source: Reprinted by permission.
On April 30 the paper ran Pulitzer’s special section, edited by pictures editor Julius Klyman, and distributed sixty thousand copies free through the Illinois coal country and to Illinois legislators and state and federal agencies.
The nomination letter for the Pulitzer Prize described “a long and hard-fought campaign to change existing conditions in mine fields with the view of saving the lives of other miners in the future.” The campaign had sought “four necessary changes: 1) Take mine inspectors out of politics; 2) Outlaw political contributions by Illinois coal companies and all other corporations; 3) Make failure to comply with state safety laws a felony; 4) Bring the guilty to justice.” There was little jury debate over its 1941 recommendation of the St. Louis paper and the board agreed, giving the Post-Dispatch its third gold medal.
1948—The
St. Louis Post-Dispatch for the coverage of the Centralia, Illinois, mine disaster and the follow-up which resulted in impressive reforms in mine safety laws and regulations.
21
“Gravy Train” Editors
In August 1948, Ben Reese assigned Roy Harris to become the Springfield, Illinois, correspondent. It was a critical time for the state just to Missouri’s east, across the Mississippi River. Republican governor Green was coming up for reelection in November, and the paper felt a duty to keep exposing the corruption that it knew pervaded his administration. For Harris it was his first out-of-town duty station since returning from the Pacific.
Springfield was a busy state capital for reporters interested in administration scandals. Harris’s stories were about how prison wardens got luxury furnishings in their quarters and thousands of Green cronies were rewarded with “special investigator” badges. As the reporter made a routine check of state payroll data at one point, he became suspicious as names of some Illinois editors cropped up, seemingly as state employees. A small story appeared in October. The number of such minor scandals multiplied by the November election. Green was trounced by Democrat Adlai Stevenson, although President Harry Truman’s margin over Republican Thomas E. Dewey was extremely narrow. Even without Green, much of the wrongdoing from his administration lingered in Illinois government.
George Thiem, a reporter for the
Chicago Daily News, also took an interest in the editors-on-the-payroll story. As representatives of one-person bureaus for papers that did not directly compete against each other, Harris and Thiem decided that they would be able to get more accomplished if they pooled their resources on the story.
22“About the end of March, a Statehouse employe [
sic], chatting with Thiem and me, recalled the mention of newspapermen in the October [
Post-Dispatch story] and suggested that further investigation might be productive,” Harris later told
Editor and Publisher magazine. “The job would be a tedious one, as I had learned last fall, but we decided to make a stab at it.”
23 Tedious indeed. The state tracked its thirty-five thousand employees by county, listing them in numerous volumes. It took the two men more than two weeks to root through them all, with one reporter handling card files that listed Illinois newspaper staffers and reading off names while the other checked the payroll.
Because they had other state house coverage responsibilities as well, the two found collaboration on the project a godsend. “I seriously doubt that either of us would have dug up the payroll story, working alone, because of the grueling detail and extra hours involved,” said Thiem. “We knew we were handling delicate if not libelous information and we had to be accurate. By the time we discovered ten names, we realized we were on the way to a good story.” Harris added, “Each of those names represented a million-dollar lawsuit”—if for some reason the information was incorrect.
While it was perhaps a rare reporting arrangement, Thiem saw the teaming of journalists from different papers with similar interests as a natural arrangement if it was done carefully. “I’ve been impressed by the need for newspapermen to work together more closely to accomplish something for good government and the welfare of the taxpayers generally,” he told
Editor and Publisher, “rather than to struggle for individualist scoops.”
24For a time, the two were pulled away by a tragic hospital fire in the town of Effingham, in which scores of people died. When they returned, their list of editors who were possibly on the payroll began to grow—and then shrank, as the double-checking of names, through legislators and others, reduced the count.
When they finally had the story, the two men sat together at separate typewriters in Harris’s room at the Leland Hotel, writing late into the evening of April 13. It was nearly midnight when they filed their dictated stories by phone for their afternoon newspapers. Harris’s April 14 story began:
SPRINGFIELD, Ill.—Editors and publishers of at least 32 downstate Illinois newspapers were carried on the state payroll during the administration of Gov. Dwight H. Green, collecting more than $300,000 in salaries, inquiry by the Post-Dispatch revealed today. Most of them held “gravy train” jobs like “field investigators” and “messenger clerk.”
Some actually did work at their state jobs, but the chief function of many editors “was to print canned editorials and news stories lauding accomplishments of the Republican state administration.”
Harris and Thiem built up the list of editors confirmed on the payroll to fifty-one, with the total of payments to them reaching $480,000. A strong editorial ran a day after the first story in the Post-Dispatch, along with a Fitzpatrick cartoon showing editors tracking sludge across the good name of the press.
At first, few other newspapers around the country paid much attention to the Illinois stories. Then a Washington Post editorial took the press to task:
At best, this looks like crass indifference to a particularly juicy bit of news. At worst it looks like a cover-up of scandal within the family. The newspaper press claims special status as a pillar of free and honest government. By the same token it has special obligations. Among these is the duty not to keep its own dirty linen from public view.
25
Uncharacteristically, Pulitzer personally nominated the work in both the reporting and public service categories. (It was perhaps easier for him because a second newspaper was involved in the project as well.) The public service jury picked six of the seventy entries, listing the
Daily News/Post-Dispatch stories first. The board kept them first, awarding each paper a gold medal and citing Harris and Thiem for the work, only the second time individuals had been noted in a public service citation.
1950—The
Chicago Daily News and
St. Louis Post-Dispatch for the work of George Thiem and Roy J. Harris, respectively, in exposing the presence of 37 Illinois newspapermen on an Illinois State payroll.
26
The Tax Man Taketh
Theodore C. Link returned to the Post-Dispatch in 1945 with a wound received as a Marine sergeant at Bougainville and threw himself back into the job with war-like fervor. Long known for his shadowy underworld sources, Link began writing stories about Illinois gangs as well as abuses in the Green administration. Sometimes he toted a gun for his own protection.
In early 1951 Link was tipped about federal tax cases in Missouri being fixed at high levels of the federal Internal Revenue. Federal agents were open to letting companies and individuals off the hook by reaching under-the-table deals. After pitching the story to managing editor Ray Crowley, who took over when Reese retired, Link quickly expanded the story beyond his home state. Selwyn Pepper worked rewrite for Link, who rarely wrote his own stories throughout his career. Sam Armstrong, the new city editor, directed the campaign.
27The resulting articles disclosed that case fixing had become almost routine among influential lawyers with friendly ties to public officials in Washington, D.C., St. Louis, and elsewhere. In one year, 63 percent of the tax cases approved for federal prosecution had been killed by internal revenue regional counsels or by people inside President Truman’s Justice Department.
A federal grand jury in St. Louis at one point received a U.S. report saying there was no evidence of tax fixing, although the judge did not believe it and told the grand jury so. Link was able to learn that the report to the grand jury had been written at the suggestion of Truman’s attorney general, J. Howard McGrath. A national scandal erupted over how Washington had withheld evidence.
One major case involved American Lithofold Corporation, a St. Louis printer with government contracts. The Post-Dispatch reported that the company’s federal tax collector was on the American Lithofold payroll. Further, William M. Boyle, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, served on the company’s board. Boyle had been instrumental in helping American Lithofold win government loans.
The paper’s editorial page, under its editor, Irving Dilliard, backed the developing stories. One Fitzpatrick cartoon pictured bureaucrats falling like grains of salt from a dollhouse-like Internal Revenue building. The caption was “Shake ’Em All Out.” The new Internal Revenue Service almost did just that. By year’s end, eight revenue collectors were fired or forced to resign, and two ended up behind bars. In all, there were 380 discharges or resignations and more than a dozen employees were indicted. Truman also fired his attorney general.
28When the Public Service Prize was announced, the Post-Dispatch installed its fifth gold medal with the four others on the wall of the publisher’s private office.
1952—The
St. Louis Post-Dispatch for its investigation and disclosures of wide spread corruption in the Internal Revenue Bureau and other departments of the government.
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