Covering the Convention

If all the words filed from the Philadelphia convention last week were laid end to end, they would equal (in quantity, if not in information) about four volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Never before had a Republican convention been described by so many newsmen (1,600) in so many words (5,098,372).* Press, radio, newsreels and television not only outnumbered but outranked the delegates.

Sometimes it seemed as if the delegates, who after all were supposed to make the decisions, were in fact like a studio audience at a radio broadcast: expected to register, by their applause and their switched-on demonstrations, their approval of a dramatic show on stage that was frankly being played to a larger audience. Every smirk, gesture, posture, cliche and evasion was repeated for one medium after another. The final absurdity was achieved when Chairman Joe Martin solemnly announced Governor Warren's nomination for the vice presidency twice--once for the audience, once for the newsreels (they missed it the first time).

No Bread. Most newsmen, sitting at planked tables beside and behind the rostrum, shared the disadvantage point that made Rebecca West "more familiar with the contours which members of the Republican Party present to the world behind them than in front" (the New York Herald Tribune headlined her piece: BRITISH OBSERVER Is IMPRESSED MOST BY STASSEN'S FOLLOWING).

Miss West, her face hidden behind dark glasses to protect herself from the glare, stood on a table to watch the Dewey demonstration. Her convention reports read a little like an eyewitness account by a visitor from Mars who had read a guidebook before coming. Pink-faced, bushy-browed Westbrook Pegler, stoutly filling a grey suit, chatted amiably with his dandiacal little ex-boss, publisher Roy Howard, who wore his familiar matching shirt, bow tie and breast-pocket handkerchief. Cartoonist David Low, looking just like his self-caricatures, but larger, made quick reminders of the shape of a jowl, the outline of a room, for later use, and was convinced that a U.S. convention provided too much circus and too little bread.

Legmen had to face competition from their bosses. The Louisville Courier-Journal's Publisher Mark Ethridge doubled in brass as bureau chief for his nine-man news staff. Blimp-shaped Publisher Roy Roberts took intelligence reports from his Kansas City Star staff then retired to Suite 1206 at the Bellevue-Stratford to dictate his own stories. On the fringes were a few on-the-fringe journalists. Columnist Earl Wilson, Debutante Virginia Leigh and Socialist Candidate Norman Thomas (reporting for the Denver Post).

No Privacy. Correspondents worth their salt generally stayed away from Convention Hall the first two days, at least--leaving the press boxes to the wire association men (who had to be there), publishers and their wives, and some journalistic trained seals. Even when the balloting started, many newsmen preferred to watch from the press lounge on the second floor, where three television sets, air conditioning and gallons of free beer (courtesy of the Pennsylvania Railroad) made the proceedings easier to swallow--and to follow (see TELEVISION).

Most of the real convention news was to be found in the hotels, a mile and a half from Convention Hall. Reporters with initiative, and those with the stamina and sense to follow the ones with initiative, dogged the candidates at their hotel headquarters--or trailed them from secret meeting to secret meeting all over Philadelphia. The stop-Dewey coalition didn't find the privacy they hoped for at 2031 Locust Street (see cut).

The wise old news hands found that some hoary old tricks still worked. The Chicago Tribune's Tom Morrow, studying the situation before a crowded Stassen press conference, discovered that there were only three pay phones near by, and clamped an OUT OF ORDER sign over one. He emerged from the conference to find a gang of reporters squabbling over the other two phones, calmly took down the sign, and made his call.

No Electricity. Newsmen swirled up & down Philadelphia like dust in a tornado. Some of their stories--like Meyer Berger's interview with Taft's elephant (in the New York Times) and John O'Reilly's account of Stassen meeting the people (in the Herald Tribune)--caught the genuine convention color; many more accounts were as cliche-ridden and unrevealing as wartime stories about U.S. troops "storming the beaches." (Despite the engineered "spontaneity" of the slow-starting demonstrations, one reporter described delegates as letting "their pent-up political emotion explode like a mighty bomb.") Yet how honest, enterprising and accurate the general coverage was could be measured by the fact that the U.S. public knew what was going on, frequently before the delegates. Pulitzer Prize Winner Edward A. Harris wired the St. Louis Past-Dispatch on the second day that Warren was Dewey's vice presidential choice.

There was one big exception to all this: the anachronistic Hearstpapers, which had given their readers to understand all along that MacArthur was sweeping the country (headline in the New York Journal-American: M'ARTHUR AIDES SPURN 'TRADES'). They clung to their broom to the last. Novelist Louis Bromfield (for I.N.S.) described Wisconsin's nomination of MacArthur as a convention "miracle" that had an "electric" effect on the delegates--which was hardly an accurate description of what happened at the tag-end, 3:30 a.m. nomination of MacArthur in a tired, nearly empty hall.

First radio and then television had made that kind of distortion obsolete: even if Hearst didn't know it yet, working newspapermen were learning the lesson. When one legman reported that some perspiring delegates had shed their coats, and an overenthusiastic rewrite man thereupon dubbed the session "the shirtsleeve convention," they got a prompt kickback from the irate publisher. Said he: "I was watching the convention on television. Most of the delegates kept their coats on."

* It took reporters 9,576,000 words to cover the 1924 Democratic convention, when John W. Davis was nominated after 103 ballots and 16 days.

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