Journalist's Luck

There is such a thing as journalistic luck. When President Harding died suddenly and unexpectedly, a representative of the Associated Press was waiting outside the Presi- dent's door in the hallway-- almost deserted because it was thought that the President's health was improving. Regardless of this fact an Associated Press man had been on hand continuously. As soon as the President collapsed, the reporter was away with the news. Telegraph operators had been ordered not to leave their instruments. Only a few minutes later the news was in newspaper offices throughout the country. That was journalistic preparedness, not journalistic luck. But what befell Samuel George Blythe and The Saturday Evening Post was decidedly luck. Only a few days before the President died the Post published an article, A Calm Review of a Calm Man, by Mr. Blythe. It was a review of Mr. Harding's career as President, a favorable estimate of his character and achievements. At the time he wrote the article, or even at the time it was sent to press, Mr. Blythe could not possibly have had knowledge of even the President's illness. Nevertheless, by a fortunate accident he "beat" all the other accounts of the President's life and personality which have since appeared.

Mr. Blythe said in part: "The real defect of the Harding Administration, as it reacts on the people, is that it doesn't make noise enough. It isn't showy enough. It is too calm. . . . This man Harding is neither noisy nor brilliant, in the showy acceptance of that term. He is not loud and declamatory. He is a modest man--too modest, no doubt --and a calm man, and a man with a philosophy that has not worked out so badly, as will be shown. . . . "How much work does the President do? ... Rudolph Forster has been executive clerk at the White House since McKinley was President. . . . Forster says that the burden of work the President has to do now is five times greater than the Presidential work was in McKinley's days in the White House, and three times greater than during the time Roosevelt was President. And greater now than ever before, even during the War days. . . ."

The chance by which Mr. Blythe printed these things just when the public was eager to read them, did not end there, however. Just before the President died Mrs. Harding was reading to him, and she was reading from Mr. Blythe's article. There are various accounts of the President's last utterance, disagreeing as to the exact words, but agreeing in substance. One account had it that he said: "That's good, go on;" another that he said: "It was fine of Sam to say that; go on."

This man, of whom the President was thinking kindly at the moment of death, was born in 1868 at Geneseo, N. Y. (also the birthplace of Senator Wadsworth of that state). His father was owner of two country weeklies. At 19 Samuel Blythe and another boy bought a newspaper in a western town. It was a fiasco and went to pieces quickly. For several years he " free-lanced " around the country. At one time he was a re- porter, at another a proofreader, at still another an editorial writer. Once he was run out of a southern town and almost shot for harassing a local politician in the press. He ended his wanderings on becoming an editor in Buffalo (1893-98). Later he went to New York as editor of The Cosmopolitan, then to Washington as political correspondent of The New York World. Since 1907 Mr. Blythe has been a staff writer for The Saturday Evening Post.