Howard's Heart Change

THE PRESS

Future historians may well show special curiosity about one phenomenon of U. S. journalism in the last few years of crisis --the fact that U. S. newspaper publishers have shifted their positions more frequently and more drastically than have U. S. politicians. And one of the more interesting case histories may well be Publisher Roy Wilson Howard, of the traditionally "liberal" Scripps-Howard chain.

Willing New Dealer in Roosevelt's first term, he cooled noticeably following the Court-packing plan and Reorganization bill, sealed his change of heart with a studied rebuff of the President's invitation to go to South America as an "observer." Ardently pro-Willkie in 1940, he rapidly disowned him for supporting the Lend-Lease Bill. Then, so successfully did he plug isolation that in no time he was ranked among the top half-dozen chief U. S. "appeasers." Not even the Hearst chain, Robert Rutherford McCormick's Chicago Tribune or Joseph Medill Patterson's New York News outdid Roy Howard's isolationist tour de force: a screaming "expose" purporting to show that the Army had already ordered 4,500,000 identification tags for America's war corpses to come.

But last week it looked as though Roy Howard might have come to the verge of another change of heart. In a front-page editorial called "WHERE WE STAND on the Lend-Lease Bill, H. R. 1776, Aid to Britain, National Defense, Isolation, Appeasement," he 1) declared categorically against any and all appeasers; 2) underscored his support of the Lend-Lease Bill and all aid to Britain; 3) declared his belief that the President will not use any grant of power "recklessly or foolishly." In pointed conclusion he stressed the fact that Scripps-Howard papers had supported the League of Nations--implying that he has believed in non-isolation a lot longer than he has believed in isolation.

Simultaneously Scripps-Howard news coverage of Senator Burton Kendall Wheeler's isolationist crusade fell into more normal perspective. Senator Wheeler's attack on Wendell Willkie as "the intrepid Trojan horse of the Republican Party"--a likely candidate for the front page a few days earlier--appeared quietly on page 17 of the New York World-Telegram. And word was reputed to have gone down to Publisher Howard's editors to lay off hereafter such features as the identification-tag melodrama.

All this pointed to a major defection in isolationist ranks. There was one further item which old Scripps-Howard readers added to the evidence. No more than an intangible, something in the spirit of Publisher Howard's editorial suggested more spontaneity than any that he had heretofore been able to summon up as an all-out isolationist.

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